Why I think Rockstar is avoiding RPG elements in GTA

What is being addressed here

Ever since San Andreas teased us with a little bit of RPG, fans of the franchise had a taste for it, and asked for Rockstar to make it a more permanent and a bigger part of the franchise.

Rockstar only emphasised with the fans recently on the appearance part. Commenting that the current resolution of the characters makes appearance changes (fat / slim) a difficult task and it was more easy to get away with it on PS2.

What about levelling up your weapons as you use them, XP and even sex appeal that SA had.

OK, so what is your take on it

I feel RPG elements puts a very strict creative shackle on Rockstar's story and character creation. If we look at where Rockstar is taking GTA this gen, they are going for a very precise and tailored experience. The characters are laser focused and so much detail is put into each one that putting in RPG elements would throw all that work out the window. As putting in RPG elements is to hand the DNA of the character to the player, effectively throwing out the work Rockstar has done.

GTAV's three characters is a clever way to give key characteristics of the franchise to three different characters so the immersion never breaks.

They are giving you the variety you crave, without giving you control.

But we are the players, we want control of our characters!

This is where it gets tricky. To give control is to take away immersion. Imagine if Niko did most of the stuff in GTAIV as some fat guy. Or even when he was talking about morality in one cutscene, and then soon as gameplay starts, the player rockets someone in the face. That doesn't work for Rockstar's current vision.

They want us to respect their characters on the level of "well, Trevor would never do that". This creates a stronger character through believability and thus we are drawn into the world much more like any well written TV show.

Rockstar, WHY SO SERIOUS?!

Even though many like to see GTA as some silly game where you go around blowing up cops, Rockstar as the creator, I suspect has much more respect for it. Rockstar has a reputation of raising the bar and pushing boundaries. And they can't do that when they give you the PS2-era GTA over and over again for 10 years.

They clearly felt the next level of GTA lies in more immersion, more believable characters that sell you emotion.

It's simply Rockstar going from being top of the class in Adult Swim to trying to go to the top of the class in HBO.

And knowing Rockstar, they won't rest until they get there. And once they do, who knows what challenge they will take on next. Maybe it will be to create a GTA-RPG. That is what is so exciting about Rockstar.

For now though, you are going to have to trust them to give you characters that best fit the world.

Variety may be the spice of life

But it sure as hell doesn't get you anywhere when it comes to a project.

What am I talking about? Well, since that last post I have 'put on hold' the POTUS game, started a top-down-zombie-shooter-tower-defense game on XNA and now, I have gone a little Hollywood.

That's right, 3D. I have also gone into Unity, which has made quite the impression on me in these super early stages.

In two hours, with great help from this dude, I have made a 3D 'cube floor' with a 3D 'evil cube' chasing me on it:

The red line is a debug line showing what the evil cube is targeting (which is poor old me!).

I wanted to go 3D and I wanted to work on writing AI, as I had little to no idea on how to do it. And voilà, two birds with one stone. Of course this is all basic stuff but any step is a good step.

The great thing about Unity is, all that took literally about five lines of code. The controls, graphics, even the targeting was all handled by Unity. All I had to say was in basic code "move evil cube to where player is" and done. As Mr Burns would say, that is simply, eeexceeleeent.

I could write more about how great Unity is but is there any need. And anyway this is not a Unity advertisement but it just goes to show as someone who is new to all this, how a widely accepted game engine like Unity, even to a newbie, immediately shows why it is widely accepted.


So, the big question - What is next? Well, I would like to actually finish one project but I can't seem to help venturing off to new exciting places. After all, this is a hobby but there is no harm in a hobby turning into a portfolio of sort I guess. Which means the plan is to finish the top-down-zombie-shooter-tower-defense game on XNA.

Speaking of which, here it is in all it's early-stage glory (programmers never were good at art):

Credit for tutorials/help to this dude

It is worth noting the back end of the top-down-zombie-shooter-tower-defense game is super tidy. It is definitely the tidiest project I have made and I am very proud of it in that aspect.

The game side of it, I will try a couple of small detail things that won't blow anyone away but hopefully will make for somewhat an intriguing experience. They might not even work well, I just want to experiment with some game design.

Anyway, I'll make a separate post for that in a while when it advances a bit more. Today's post was all about variety (or ADHD), Unity, 3D and...EVIL CUBES!

The State of things

Having a menu system built was one of my top priorities, because well, that's the first thing the game has. When I started as a complete clueless game programmer, I thought that would be one of the simplest things. After having a few mini-projects built, none of which having a menu system, showed me that it was in fact one of the harder things.

It's because the creation of menus is tied to a key component of the code and that is the key to managing the state of the game. Once I read about it and understood it (or I thought I understood it), I just couldn't apply it, there was something missing. I tried understanding Microsoft's game state management project, and even though I could do simple things within it, if someone asked me to reverse engineer that, I simply couldn't. As I didn't know the thinking behind it when building it.
And I think reverse engineering any given code is important because if you can't, it means you don't know what it's doing and most of your coding later on will be based on luck or hours of frustration until you fumble into the solution.

So I did more and more reading and finally came across this amazing tutorial. There is not much to say about it other than it walks you through the process which is amazing. And it is a process that leads to an amazingly built clean and powerful library. It still took me some time to understand his explanation but the fact I now have a state management system that I can reverse-engineer is a great boost.

This is what you end up with after following the tutorial. As simple as it looks, it has a powerful code backing it.

It does lack one thing though, it doesn't set exercises for you to make sure you understood what he is doing.  So it is worth doing few exercises on your own. Like adding a screen from scratch that he doesn't have. Having menus go into other menus, or having a Exit game showing you a "are you sure?" pop-up. By end of Part 4 I could do all that confidently which is a testament to the strength of his "show code, explain code" method.

That is another thing done. Now I really need to figure out, as mentioned in the last post, what kind of project I actually want. Otherwise it's hard to code when I don't know what I should be coding. If nothing comes to mind it'll be a collection of mini-games that are different genres, or I might emulate an existing game in full somewhere down the line.

For now though, learning continues.

Jack of all trades, master of none

I have been messing around with XNA a lot more now. Got my head around *basic* game development in general and it is nice to know when I try another engine like Unity, I am not completely clueless. Add my experience to millions of developers out there when they say, if you learn one, you can use them all.

This blog has served its purpose, it pushed me through the harsh beginnings but now I feel whenever I want to post here it's going to be a tutorial you can find 100s of out there (lots of great XNA help on the web) or it's going to be half-baked ideas/demos like the ones below.

I have done side scroller, top down mechanics [seen below] and am now working on point and click but I never get too far because I have no vision. So I need to sit down and do the pre-development phase, and get a full vision for a game before I sit down to code it. That is what I have learnt from all this. Seems obvious in hindsight but after all this started as strictly programming exercise.

I will open another blog [or post here] when I have a game in mind and it'll be much more interesting to blog a game progress instead of random programming ramblings. 

Hope to see you then.