This is my first post here on the blog. I’ll try to be semi-interesting.

Just got off the phone with Ryan, and I’m not sure where the concepts came from but we had some interesting ideas.

Ryan and I have been getting a kick out of reading the super-harsh reviews over at www.actionbutton.net, particularly the ones by Tim Rogers. Ryan brought up the idea of how Secret of Evermore is a game built around the format of a JRPG, but without a JRPG template. And that pretty much fits. I remember playing SoE when I was a kid, and thinking about how cool it was that you combined different items to create some kind of magic (alchemic) effect. It was a pretty unique system, albeit the rest of it was pretty much a Secret of Mana clone.

But SoE doesn’t follow the normal tropes of a JRPG, you’re not some kid who has a destiny to save the world. You’re just trying to get home with your shapechanging dog from a corrupt virtual reality environment based on the imaginations of four creepy scientists.

Anyway, Ryan and I have been talking about simplifying our design ideas. We’ve been asking the question of “What elements are essential to an RPG and what aren’t?” and using that to come up with a basic list.

So far we have menu based combat and some kind of leveling system.

So I posed this question: If we’re going to throw away the small story we’ve written so far, and just go as basic as possible then we might as well just dial the simplicity up to eleven and make the game as elemental as can be. Specifically… lets make a story about something everyday or common. No save-the-world, no related-to-the-antagonist protagonist, no peppy female sidekick.

But lets avoid going into the artsy. Lets make a legitimate rpg, something playable. Something Cloverfield-esque, with a story that takes place that doesn’t involve the characters except by proxy. Where the events of the story are a background to the objectives of the characters themselves.

And this may be crazy-talk, but lets do it without text.

Seriously, can it be done? An RPG with no text? Maybe with a menu-based combat system with icons, emotional scenes communicated through simple music, antagonists and protagonists that have clear objectives without needing the hand-holding of a tutorial, level-design that directs the characters from point A to B clearly?

I think its achievable. The human brain processes a vast amount of visual data. The portion of the brain devoted to smell on a dog is enormous compared to a human’s because smell is a canine’s primary means of detecting stimulus. On humans it is eyesight. We’re not eagles, but our eyes are the best sensory organ we have. And from childhood we’ve been trained in basic pattern recognition (stoves are hot, stop at red lights, door knobs twist). It’s not inconceivable to make an RPG where clear animation and music communicate a story, and the combat can be represented through iconography.

Ryan also wanted to make the main-characters squirrels.