Radical Games: Event as Narrative in ‘A Knight’s Quest’

PatrickF
Inside the Church

A Knight’s Quest’s story is based around complicating the usual heroic narrative of an RPG. The hero arrives in a strange world and is given a sword and a goal: save the church from the evil king. In order to do this he’s supposed to kill his way through an army of mooks, level up, and eventually engage in an epic boss battle to vanquish evil from the kingdom and live happily ever after. The Hero, Levi, starts the game wanting to be this sort of stereotypical RPG hero, and so his entrance into this world is exactly what he should want. Previously I had planned for the complications to arise when he first met an enemy, but I’ve since begun implementing them as early as the church where he first arrives.

The woman in blue on the left side of the church is the nun from my paper game, but the woman in red on the right side is new. As of now, the two of them are creating conflict for the player before he’s even left the church. The nun immediately greets Levi as a sort of phrophesied hero, the answer to her prayers, and is the one who gives him the sword and tells him about the evil king whose forces are bearing down on the church as they speak. The woman in red, who doesn’t have a name yet and so will just be referred to as “Red” from here on out, takes a much different approach. She is convinced that if the rebels peacefully surrender, the evil king will spare their lives. Levi presents a danger to this plan for her, since the rebels will rally around this would-be hero and fight instead of surrendering, thus eliminating any possibility of mercy for them. As a result of this, she urges him not to take up the sword and to instead calm down and wait in the church until the rebels surrender so that mercy can be granted to them.

This sort of conflict is interesting to me, given that it seems like it would fit perfectly within a less radical game. Having a character opposing the hero’s decision to fight can serve to empower the player as they feel that they are already making their own decisions within the world and defying a cautious worrywart in their search for adventure. That being said, however, conflict still exists here, and it isn’t until the Nun helps convince Red to step aside that the player can leave this level with the sword to fight the enemies.

Altar
The Altar and its bowl

At the moment I’m trying to put something else new into the game. As Levi kills more enemies, I want it to be physically reflected on him, so I’m planning on adding blood left over from the enemies he’s killed to his sprite. This gives the player a very clear visual feedback on how much blood they have at the moment. The other thing this does is let me make it clear when it’s being reduced, by having that literally wash the blood off of his body. The nun will be the chief character in that role, as she will be using water to try and remove the blood from Levi’s body. In order to set this up early, I want to have her direct Levi to the bowl of water on the altar after he falls through the portal. It will help clear his mind after the disorienting passage through dimensions and time, and set up the water as having a mentally cleansing effect which the nun will be associated with. In order to do this, I’m working on putting a hitbox on top of the bowl which will trigger an animation of Levi splashing some of the water on his face, but that is proving more difficult than I expected. Apparently rotating a character’s head anything other than ninety degrees isn’t supported by Piskel, so I have to do it manually, and I must say it is significantly more difficult than I would have guessed.

BigSword
The Sword

The other hitbox I’m trying to add is one on this sword. It will be placed on the altar on the other side of the bowl, as shown in the first image of this post. One of the first things the nun will say to Levi after he’s regained his footing is that he should pick up the sword and go fight the evil king’s henchmen. Naturally, after she says this, people will want to pick up the sword, which is why a hitbox that triggers an animation of Levi picking up the sword would be of a great deal of use when he collides with it. This hitbox is interesting, because it will also need to change his sprite to have the sword on it, and his sprite will need to remain that way for the rest of the time he has the sword equipped, this means the hitbox needs to change that somehow. In all honesty, I have yet to figure out how exactly to make that happen. While I know how to have the hitbox change his animations to something else (I tested that by having one turn him blue) I haven’t figured out how to make that carry between scenes. It has occurred to me recently that I could just make it so the player is unable to leave this scene unless they have the sword and then change him in all of the other scenes so that he has the sword normally.




This sort of thing does raise an issue with my plans to increase the amount of blood on him, however. I think it is unavoidable that I will need to have some carry over of effects on Levi between scenes, unless I want to overload every scene transition with “if” statements to send him to different scenes based on the state he is in when he leaves.

Author: Patrick Fox