Rarity

[coyotecraft]

It's nice to have something random happen to break up the mundane & ordinary. Call it luck or variance. It can be useless eye candy like finding a hologram/foil card or a unique animation every other time you do something. Or it can be something useful, manipulable, and exploitable, like a critical attack or finding money in grass or pots.

As a design exercise, think of something mundane and/or repetitive in a game. What would you do to spice it up? (you don't actually have to do it.)

 

[Xilef]

I found this quite difficult to work with. I believe that the moment you have a mundane task in a game you've failed as a designer and the game itself is flawed, mundane tasks if they were to appear should only be there for the players who enjoy the reward on the other end (players who like to 100% a game, kill all monsters, collect all items, fully customise their guns, etc).

I'll pick one thing that might piss people off; cut-scenes.

I wrote a crap load about delivering story at a good pace, I'm going to delete that and focus on one thing; optional story.

Player is walking around, they see something interesting, press the action key then suddenly they have 5 minutes of people talking about the subject of interest and you've wasted the player's time without warning, or worse yet you've made them advanced the story by accident when they weren't ready.

Design around this; if it's so interesting then make the player become curious about it. Have NPCs gathered around the object having their discussion around it, the player could sit about and listen to what they are discussion, if they are very interested they can get closer, trigger a more in-depth discussion with the player character involved.

If the player is in a hurry (speed-running) they can just run past the scene entirely.

Too many games feed information about the world via textual logs (newspaper clippings) or including them in critical scenes. If a game opens up telling me the 100 year history of the country it is set in then the game has failed, that information should be optional and delivered by making the player curious, not by forcing it on them (making them mash the continue button).

EDIT: And you have some people who think that dialogue trees and making characters move about every 8 lines is a way to make it less mundane. It's just something to slow it down. If you want a dialogue tree it should be the first thing that appears, not appearing half-way through a dialogue sequence that you've potentially been mashing through so picked up zero of what is going on.

EDIT2: Oh and the standard tactic for making these less mundane; QTEs! Here's some boring text, watch out because suddenly a rock is flying at you and you need to dodge it, good job here's more dialogue >:C

 

[coyotecraft]

Not exactly what I had in mind. We can talk about storytelling some other time. A similar issue to cutscenes though, Final Fantasy Tactics had random spell quotes. "Time's current, place me in your whirlpool! Haste2!"

It happens so rarely that you never expect it. Sort of gave the characters a mind of their own. Plus it was just neat to read the different chants - oh, I haven't seen that one before.
But this was before voice acting. It wasn't parallel to the action, the text box was just another delay in an already time consuming game. They removed this from the psp version apparently.

Imo, something like that would be cool if the game calculated a killing blow. "This is it! Hiyah!"
Actually, I think they did that in FFX, you know, with voice acting.

 

[coyotecraft]

Maybe 'mundane' was too strong of a word. I meant something you take for granted and do without thinking. Then make that action unique.
Working off the battle quotes idea and shifting it to the menu screens. Maybe the character has an opinion about the equipment they're using. The enemy drops a rare knife; it might not be useful to the player by that point but seeing what the character thinks is reason enough to equip it. Burping after drinking a potion. Yawning if you do nothing for a while.

 

[Xilef]

Hyperdimension has an unlock where you can activate character quotes in menus, so when you perform menu actions the characters will give a comment (equipping will make them say stuff like "I look awesome"). Even opening the menu itself has them say something (usually something random).

 

[ZenVirZan]

Audio.se_play("Audio/SE/slash#{rand(3)}",80,90 + rand(20))

 

[coyotecraft]

I've seen a few games that used a gachapon capsule machine that unlock extras.
I can imagine it sparking conversations between characters similar to how rpg/dating sim hybrids have talk topics. Or using a rare capsule as a key item to unlock something special.

Hey! Here's an idea. Since rm games are short anyways and the items are pretty limited. What if you replaced shops with capsule machines.

 

[coyotecraft]

Nobody here really plays or talks about fighting games. But I just remembered one that had a random encounter. Actually, I'm not sure random really fits. All the fights are selected randomly. But this one character will show up just before a match and replace the opponent. Bait and switch I guess. You thought you were about to fight this person, now it's him.

That's a nice trick. Have a rare encounter, but start off making it look like an ordinary one so it's more of a surprise.

 

[ZenVirZan]

Nobody here really plays or talks about fighting games. But I just remembered one that had a random encounter. Actually, I'm not sure random really fits. All the fights are selected randomly. But this one character will show up just before a match and replace the opponent. Bait and switch I guess. You thought you were about to fight this person, now it's him.

That's a nice trick. Have a rare encounter, but start off making it look like an ordinary one so it's more of a surprise.

That is fantastic. I will definitely keep that in mind, there could be some fantastic situations created with this idea.

 

[Ellie]

That sounds pretty cool, could easily be done in an RPG, and could be made by better by allowing escape: if you escape the Ghost 3 encounter instead of fighting an unworthy opponent you miss out on the chance of it turning out to be the ultimate easter egg under the sheets.