The Problem With RPGs
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One of the first thing people always talk about when it comes to this topic is the amount of technical expertise you have to come in with. This one should seem obvious. When you talk about the inner workings of a role playing game, you're looking at a lot of data that has to be organized, computed, crunched, what have you--constantly. You'll be handling inventories, character statistics, battle calculations, and so on. It can be hard to keep track of, especially when your development team consists of one person. You need to be adept with things like arrays and data structures and all that fun stuff--this should go without saying, but I programmed my first RPGs without these, and it sucked. Hard. Projects like RPGs don't exactly go by quickly, either. The code you write needs to be functional, annotated, and organized enough so that you can come back to it even a year later and still know exactly what it does. When new game makers start off by saying they want to make their dream RPG, as I did, this is usually the reason why they're told that they can't.And should you succeed in your endeavor after years of stress-induced evenings fortified by Ramen noodles, you'll most likely find that your game isn't nearly as successful as the guy who cranked out a million-selling puzzle game in three weeks. Makes you respect the indie RPG developers even more, doesn't it?
RPGs aren't just difficult to build technically, but also--if I may--artistically. Unlike games in other genres, the expectation in a legitimate, fully realized RPG is a pretty high playtime. Most independent games can be beaten within an hour, easily, if not 15 minutes or so. To account for that huge difference in playtime, you need to come into RPGs with a truckload of gameplay mechanics and ideas to keep things varied and interesting. The problem I find with a lot of RPGs is that they become too comfortable falling into boring patterns... explore dungeon, griiiiiind, fight boss, move to next dungeon. Nowadays games move very quickly, and game designers have a lot more responsibility to battle to keep the player's attention. Don't let your game grow stale! "RPG" should not be synonymous with "boring," and if you actually put some thought into how your game is paced and feels it's still entirely possible to put together a very fun, engaging RPG.
Thanks, Tales of the Rampant Coyote.
