There are a lot of small details in video games that designers and programmers are often tempted to assign randomly. The items dropped by a killed enemy, the number and type of enemies in a given area, local geography and weather all assigned a random variable corresponding to some table somewhere. While assigning these features at random isn't necessarily a bad thing, for example any one of those considerations could be relatively unimportant in the larger scope of the game and handling them through chance makes them dynamic enough to be interesting without spending a lot of time on them. I would even go so far as recommending a game designer use this tried and true method if this is the case in their game, but before implementing a feature using randomized tables, designers should spend some thought as to whether these things are better off directly under their control.
All of the issues mentioned above, item drops, encounter mix, area layout and weather are all important on some level or another, there needs to be some system in place to handle these things or else the player will notice they're absence. If the weather is always sunny, the players are going to notice this and want an explanation other than "it's the easiest lighting scheme to produce in engine." Likewise if enemies only appear in groups of similarly typed monsters the player will get bored.
These considerations can also take on a deeper meaning with a little more creative control from the designer, in quite a few ways. To give one example, consistently having the low level muggers in the slums turn up paltry sums of money and cut rate equipment is a nice touch that will drive home the desperate economic situation in a fantasy kingdom in a way that spitting out the standard treasure for their level wouldn't. This line of thinking could be extended to the whole game by applying a very detailed economic scheme to the whole game and you can bet that a certain subset of players will really enjoy the thought put into the process.
The downside to this is that systems like this are going to take a lot of development time to implement and a good chunk of disk space that might better be put to use in other aspects of the game. Randomizing these sorts of things might not be ideal, but it is cheap in terms of memory usage and programming hours. If a designer wants to implement these features on a very fine scale they better be a very core component to the game play. This new ongoing series Shots at Random will take a look at when and how to implement bringing elements traditionally left to random generation can be implemented in a more controlled manner.
Let's start with the weather, obviously there needs to be some sort of weather occurring if a game has any sort of exterior environment. Weather can serve to enhance the atmosphere of an area, an ominous storm can permanently rage outside the villains hideout, the starting village can be eternally bathed in warm sunlight to let the player know that this is the happiest most peaceful square corner of the earth and boy would it be a shame if anything bad ever happened to this place. This kind of window dressing is fairly common when designers want to evoke these or other feeling in their players, but what about those generic grassy plains between cities where player characters have random encounters with wandering monsters, the player is going to fight them rain or shine, so does it really matter? What about places like the large trade hub city where very little occurs except for selling off the players loot and stocking up for dungeon runs? What kind of weather evokes a sense of crafty commerce? Sunny weather is a boon to market stands and bazaars if that's how you want to play it, but London is a commercial power house and it's weather is notoriously, (or at least stereotypically depicted as being), terrible.
Assigning weather based on what's thematically appropriate at any given time or location becomes a chore, you're adding something else to the heap of details you have to consider when fleshing out any given area. This can also create the problem of making the weather as a whole inconsistent, the starting village is perpetually sunny but the villains disc one doom fortress a few screens over is smack in the eye of the storm of the century. Weather patterns don't vary this much in a small geographical area in real life and mood weather like this does little to unify the tone of the game as a whole.
What if instead of having the tone of the game dictate the weather, the weather dictated the tone of game? If instead of varying the weather from region to region it was the same everywhere and this was a major aspect of the game world? This way art assets for the weather can be shared from area to area, (although their would obviously be some variation on the general theme, enough would carry from place to place to save considerable art development time), similar weather throughout allows for stylistic consistency from area to area and the weather itself serves as a jumping off point for ideas on how to build the game world.
Admittedly this is a lot of, "what ifs" and speculation, so a proper demonstration might be in order. Come back Wednesday for Part 2 of this article, for a sketch of Darkened Skies, and see how a little rain can go a long way to making a fantasy role playing game setting stand out.
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