I’ve always wanted to try my hand making an RPG but always assumed it would take too much time.
However, I didn’t want to give up before trying so I started to think of ways I could still make something compelling in 1-2 months.
Looking Into Prior Art
To help me come up with something, I decided to look into older RPGs as I had a hunch they could teach me a lot about scoping because back in the 80s, games were small because of technical limitations. A game that particularly caught my attention was the first Dragon Quest.
Dragon Quest
This game was very important because it popularized the RPG genre in Japan by simplifying the formula therefore, making it more accessible. It can be considered the father of the JRPG sub-genre.
What caught my attention was the simplicity of the game. There were no party members, the battle system was turn based and simple and you were free to just explore around.
I was particularly surprised by how the game could give a sense of exploration while the map was technically very small. This was achieved by making the player move on an overworld map with a different scale proportion compared to when navigating towns and points of interest. In the overworld section, the player appeared bigger while the geography was smaller, allowing players to cover large amounts of territory relatively quickly.
The advantage of this was that you could switch between biomes quickly without it feeling jarring. You still had the impression of traversing a large world despite being small in reality. This idea of using an overworld map was common in older games but somehow died off as devs had less and less technical limitations and more budget to work with.
Seeing its potential, I decided that I would include one in my project even if I didn’t have a clear vision at this point.
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