Making Sense of Open World Madness

One of the things I've always liked about using established, "limited" game engines, like RAGS, is finding new and enjoyable ways to bend them, make them work outside the established uses. Text adventure games like Nuku Valente's Flexible Survival, or flash games like Xadera's Nimin Fetish Fantasy and Fenoxo's Challenge of Champions are particularly inspiring, because they're taking what looks like a linear engine, and using it to create the illusion of a sandbox.

I say "illusion" in this case because coding a true sandbox in a text game is pure madness. There are far too many variables to keep track of, and no matter what happens, there's going to be an option that you didn't include that someone will inevitably try. Taking a text game off the rails is all but impossible. You either go crazy trying to plan for every eventuality, or you plan for the eventualities you want to include, and go from there. So, sandbox in a text game, impossible. Illusion of sandbox in a text game, very possible.

But getting back to my original point, finding new and enjoyable ways to bend the RAGS engine. In the case of Cursed, that involves setting up a complex play world and populating it with interesting and, most importantly, varied events. Cursed is currently planned to last 365 in-game days, and while it's possible to get away with the majority of those days being relatively uneventful, some sort of overriding set of circumstances needs to propel the player forward, inspire them to continue playing the game.

The problem is that RAGS is very, shall we say, limited when it comes to randomness. On top of that, you have to balance the variety with the normality. So the challenge is that you have to figure out a way to keep things interesting, without making things overwhelming. Giving the player a challenge every two weeks in-game sounds fun, until you realize that each challenge takes four or five days. Overwhelming the player is as bad as boring them.

 Cursed is a game that balances the normality of life with the bizarreness of being changed from a man into a woman. So a certain about of normality is expected as the player (and the character) adjust to life. But at the same time, an expansive world in which nothing happens, especially after the incredible oddity of being changed from a man into a woman, is boring.

So, when you get right down to it, things have to happen. And they can't be player-initiated, because unfortunately, you can't trust the player to be able to find them, especially in a text game. You have to have something that shows that the player is making progress towards a goal, even if they don't know what the goal is.

Fortunately, in Cursed, the resident mystery woman Maria fulfills that role. She wants the player to learn something from the experience, and assigns tasks. But since the nature of the world is free-form, why would the player have to complete the tasks? They don't, but as with everything else, there will be consequences, which themselves will propel the game forward as clearly as if the player had chosen to complete the tasks.