First of all, you may want to be acquainted with the beta form of The Mountain Witch here:
http://www.timfire.com/MountainWitch/IGC.html
For those who can't be bothered with that, I'll explain in brief:
The Mountain Witch is a unique form of an RPG. Instead of creating a world, it has a set scenario: a few ronin (samurai who have lost their masters) are hired to make an assault upon the castle of O-Yunma, the Mountain Witch who lives on Mt. Fuji. The world is a mythical medieval Japan - the themes are loyalty & betrayal, horror, dark fantasy and classic samurai-movie themes. If you will it - think of Kurosawa and Tarantino collaborating on "Reservoir Samurai", or something like that.
Character generation is minimal - almost no stats or skills, as this game is very close to freeform. However, a significant part is the Trust meter: which is the tally of how much Trust is there between the players characters. This is extremely important seeing how character relationships are the focus of the game.
The last significant feature is the Dark Fates. Each player recieves the Dark Fate of his character: a card he keeps hidden. This is something only he knows and that will unveil during the final stages and epilogue of the game. This isn't your traditional RPG, alright; no levels to be gained, and it's very close to improvisational theater.
Of course, here comes in the AGS part. Would this be even possible to translate in some way to a game engine? I've figured these few things:
There should be a high degree of randomness in the game. If not necessarily in the confilcts (the scenes that the characters go through, encounters with the Witch's minions, other hostiles, natural troubles, themselves and ultimately the Witch) then at least in the Dark Fates, and maybe even to some degree in the characters. Characterization in the original RPG is done by Zodiac signs which is somewhat of a replacement to classes. So, if the other 3 (for example) ronin are Ushi (Ox), Tori (Rooster) and Hebi (Snake) - this may be either set, or randomized, with an amount of possible characters going up to 12 (the number of Zodiac signs - for the Japanese, of course), they are randomly dealt Dark Fate cards. For example, if the card "Your True Motives Will Come To Light" is dealt to Ushi, then the storyline will unfold in a way that Ushi is more secretive about his past, and his true motives are, for example, destroying the Witch who resides in the body of his former master. Ushi could just as well recieve "You Will Fail Your Best Friend" card, resulting in different scenes; but what if Tori's "True Motive", the assassination of Ushi, will occur beforehand? Et cetera, et cetera.
Now of course this sounds ambitious as hell. But if done with the correct approach (say, that of a computerized board game of high complexity, perhaps something a bit like Tom Clancy's Politika, if anyone remembers that game - minus the strategy elements of course) it could be done.
Another problem is the problem-solving itself. Adventure games are slow-paced and allow for a great degree of exploration; this is troublesome if you want to maintain a degree of suspense and realism - seeing how the other ronin have their own agendas, a more real-time approach would be fitting, I think. But then it would deteriorate into a Choose Your Own Adventure. Which I would hate seeing. So what to do? How many times can you separate the characters? And controlling all of them, more RPG-style, would kill the suspense of wondering what the motives of the other guys are. What I'm thinking is that this game should be played more for experiencing and less for winning; not in the Interactive Movie way of course (god forbid), but rather make it very replayable - something like God's Sandbox (google it up for a sweet little freeware game).
This is all at a very early brainstorming stage (done solo for now) and of course it's possible that this game would be simply impossible to make, but hell, genre-breakers were made by insomniacs with crazy ideas. I await your input, friends.
http://www.timfire.com/MountainWitch/IGC.html
For those who can't be bothered with that, I'll explain in brief:
The Mountain Witch is a unique form of an RPG. Instead of creating a world, it has a set scenario: a few ronin (samurai who have lost their masters) are hired to make an assault upon the castle of O-Yunma, the Mountain Witch who lives on Mt. Fuji. The world is a mythical medieval Japan - the themes are loyalty & betrayal, horror, dark fantasy and classic samurai-movie themes. If you will it - think of Kurosawa and Tarantino collaborating on "Reservoir Samurai", or something like that.
Character generation is minimal - almost no stats or skills, as this game is very close to freeform. However, a significant part is the Trust meter: which is the tally of how much Trust is there between the players characters. This is extremely important seeing how character relationships are the focus of the game.
The last significant feature is the Dark Fates. Each player recieves the Dark Fate of his character: a card he keeps hidden. This is something only he knows and that will unveil during the final stages and epilogue of the game. This isn't your traditional RPG, alright; no levels to be gained, and it's very close to improvisational theater.
Of course, here comes in the AGS part. Would this be even possible to translate in some way to a game engine? I've figured these few things:
There should be a high degree of randomness in the game. If not necessarily in the confilcts (the scenes that the characters go through, encounters with the Witch's minions, other hostiles, natural troubles, themselves and ultimately the Witch) then at least in the Dark Fates, and maybe even to some degree in the characters. Characterization in the original RPG is done by Zodiac signs which is somewhat of a replacement to classes. So, if the other 3 (for example) ronin are Ushi (Ox), Tori (Rooster) and Hebi (Snake) - this may be either set, or randomized, with an amount of possible characters going up to 12 (the number of Zodiac signs - for the Japanese, of course), they are randomly dealt Dark Fate cards. For example, if the card "Your True Motives Will Come To Light" is dealt to Ushi, then the storyline will unfold in a way that Ushi is more secretive about his past, and his true motives are, for example, destroying the Witch who resides in the body of his former master. Ushi could just as well recieve "You Will Fail Your Best Friend" card, resulting in different scenes; but what if Tori's "True Motive", the assassination of Ushi, will occur beforehand? Et cetera, et cetera.
Now of course this sounds ambitious as hell. But if done with the correct approach (say, that of a computerized board game of high complexity, perhaps something a bit like Tom Clancy's Politika, if anyone remembers that game - minus the strategy elements of course) it could be done.
Another problem is the problem-solving itself. Adventure games are slow-paced and allow for a great degree of exploration; this is troublesome if you want to maintain a degree of suspense and realism - seeing how the other ronin have their own agendas, a more real-time approach would be fitting, I think. But then it would deteriorate into a Choose Your Own Adventure. Which I would hate seeing. So what to do? How many times can you separate the characters? And controlling all of them, more RPG-style, would kill the suspense of wondering what the motives of the other guys are. What I'm thinking is that this game should be played more for experiencing and less for winning; not in the Interactive Movie way of course (god forbid), but rather make it very replayable - something like God's Sandbox (google it up for a sweet little freeware game).
This is all at a very early brainstorming stage (done solo for now) and of course it's possible that this game would be simply impossible to make, but hell, genre-breakers were made by insomniacs with crazy ideas. I await your input, friends.