The Path Less Travelled - An Inverse RPG
My Final Year Project and White Whale for a Long Time
The Path Less Travelled was an idea I’d been trying to create a few times but this form is the Final Year Project that I submitted.
The concept was a mishmash of other fantasy tropes and ideas I’d been working on in other guises but the core idea for the gameplay was to pose a unique experiment in RPG design. Ben ‘Yatzee’ Crowshaw, best known for his Zero Punctuation and now Fully Ramblomatic review shows, as well as his own body of developed games, once posited a possible fix for MMORPGs where a player would level backwards. They would begin the game at maximum level, have all the advantages and abilities that were possible for their character but would then have to lose and remove those elements as they levelled over time. The appeal, according to Crowshaw, was that a new player would be powerful and able to take care of themselves. Even a veteran would have difficulty griefing a new player due to the disparity in ability. A new player would enjoy the high of being super strong but give that up slowly, keeping only what was important to them. That character would become specialised over time, until they were relatively less capable but good at what abilities the character has retained for their role. This would mean that a veteran player would need to band together with others to achieve greater goals than they could alone, but also would know their character extremely well.
Curious about this paradigm, I decided to remake it in microcosm. A RPG game set in a strange town under attack, I quickly realised that instead of gaining experience, a player would likely be gaining Fatigue. An inexorable process that would require players being mindful and careful of what they’re characters are capable of as they work to achieve goals but must whittle their characters down further and further in exchange. Management of such would be ideal but potentially impossible to avoid. That said, equipment could fill gaps and players could use combinations of equipment to achieve workarounds at the cost of something more reasonable to give up. Perhaps extra attack power but it costs mana points. Or an extra attack each turn but low damage.
Achieving such a thing was tricky to accomplish. The game is based in Unity but using the Ork Framework, an RPG framework that’s designed to take a lot of the gruntwork out of building a game like this. It was chosen because the timeframe was small and it would be a huge leg up in getting the project done on time. The only matter left was to hack the libraries it used so that the Framework could allow player characters to level backwards effectively. Its an imperfect method but by removing or retooling the usual checks and balances applied to player experience, it did eventually work as intended. It was very entertaining to be in contact with the Ork Framework devs asking about how to achieve this project and getting confused replies at the bizarre actions I was attempting. After all, why would you ever want to remove Experience Points from a player?
The result in that GitHub is a vertical slice, presented and gave a very good mark at the time. There’s only a few places to explore and some fights to deal with. Not to mention art work mainly made by myself and a friend. But it represents an attempted experiment in an idea that could have some unique benefits if applied to the right idea.