The Origins of the Prophet
I started work on Nowhere Prophet almost 20 months ago. In May 2014, after spending some time driving my motorcycle through france, decompressing and realigning myself, I decided to delve back into a larger project. I've been fascinated by the idea of a conflict resolution system, that can handle both physical combat and social conflict.
The idea is that the decision between violence and debate is free from any concerns of "fun". In many games the mechanics for fighting are a lot more engaging than those for conversation, so picking a fight is generally a lot more entertaining. And I wanted a system that could be used both for fights and negotations.
So that requires a more abstract system, one that does not aim to actually represent what's happening. My first thoughts were about a timing-based gameplay. So that by timing your actions right, you could defend or attack properly, whether that'd be a punch, jumping into cover, slinging an insult or dismantling an argument.
I've had some really simple prototypes going and while the timing gameplay, seemed to work, I quickly noticed that it doesn't work if you have too many possible actions you can time. I didn't want people to think about which button to press for which action when they're already under time pressure.
Cards come into Play
So to condense the breath of actions down but to still provide some options I had the idea of a card metaphor. By only showing a small selection of all possible actions that made deciding on the fly a lot easier. Again prototypes were built and tweaked. It worked a lot better but it was still too confusing.
The fact that you had to both pay attention to your offense and your defense at the same time was too stressful. Especially since I wanted a party on both sides, to provide interesting targeting options. So to counteract that, I'd put in two phases: Attack and Defend. That way players could focus only on one type of interaction: Playing a card or discarding a card to block an attack.
Now the game started to be fun. I realy liked the real-time mechanic during the opponent's turn and the advanced skill that came into play when you let some attacks pass to block the strong ones that came afterwards. Yet when I tested it with a few friends I quickly noticed that it didn't seem to work for a lot of people.
The hybrid between turn-based and real-time wasn't intuitive. Especially since card games are generally turn-based and so I wildly diverged from the expectations of the common player.
Slowing down even more
So, what to do? Slow down even more and go fully turn-based. As the game became slower more complex cards and effects could be added and suddenly the system started to sing. There was still a lot of things to fiddle with, which changed as the game evolved. For example the armor and defense system was overhauled multiple times until we finally had something that was intuitive and remained fun.
As development progressed and I started to look more closely at the deck building part of the game, I noticed that with the 3-person party, having both a physical combat and a social conflict deck to manage would be too much of a burden on the player and would quickly become annoying. Add to that the fact that we got less funding than we were aiming for and we had to make choice. So with a heavy heart we decided to focus on the physical conflict and remove the social conflict.
And that's the story how we went from a social-physical-real-time-conflict-system to a turn-based-card-combat. :)
- Martin