As the overall design expands and contracts, refining itself, we start thinking about replayability.
UTTER INVERSE is a little paradoxical because I’ve always wanted the story and sequences to be linear but the contents to be variable. As in, I want everyone to have the same collective experience while the individual experience varies per playthrough.
Once, I heard something like “A game should be designed in a way that allows almost every player to experience almost every part of it.”
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Someone wanting to experience every part of a game is the outlier. I can’t expect everyone to like UTTER INVERSE, let alone even get to the end. If someone wants to experience every part of the game, there are four options: Play more, look online, talk to people, or give up.
All that is to say I’m not designing the game for everyone to see every part of it the first time they play, i.e. I’m designing the game to fluctuate a little.
Informed player choice, uninformed player choice, randomness, etc. There are various ways to lock things off.
In one playthrough a sequence of dialogue might not be available. A few monsters might not appear. An item cannot be found.
Obviously, the intention for that kind of thing is to grow the gestalt scale of the game in proportion to the difference between its full literal scale and its altered single-playthrough scale.
This isn’t a special formula or anything that’s guaranteed to work with any given game, but UTTER INVERSE is a dark fantasy RPG. It’s important for the setting and space of the game to feel much larger than it really is; that’s how people get lost inside. I want people to get lost inside even when they aren’t playing.
So, what does that mean for replayability?
To be honest, I don’t really want people to play UTTER INVERSE multiple times. I think if the story is striking enough and full enough people won’t want to restart it.
But that’s naive.
So, rather than directly considering how I can make the game more replayable, I’ll keep it in mind while still considering how far to cut the full scale of the game down, and in which ways, to allow for a first-time playthrough to feel both distinct in contrast and definitive overall.
By nature of that design the game’s potential replayability will grow, but there might be some damage to it along the way, too.
Maybe a certain sequence will be so annoying that some players will think “I won’t bother doing that again,” but as long as it’s vivid enough the first time, that’s what matters to me.
– ANWN M.
