Below is a portfolio of concept documents I’ve written to focus on specific features I would want to see in future games, whether I am working on them, or if they inspire a developer to try them out for their own project. At the top are eight documents that I wrote in 2013 while waiting for the EverQuest Next / Landmark alpha to begin. More recent designs are provided below them, most of which I did in one evening to communicate the basics of a feature, and were not created with any existing project in mind.
The Eight Megadocs (2013)
While awaiting the first playable content for the highly-anticipated successor to the EverQuest brand back in 2013, and the quirky sandbox Landmark that it became later, I spent a week apiece generating documents for features or content that I would hope to see in the final game. These became known colloquially as the “eight design megadocs” that I’ve featured in my design portfolios ever since. I removed a lot of the references to EQN/Landmark from them, but some vestiges still remain. These are largely untouched from their original 2013 appearances.
1 – Advanced Gear System – Item Composition and History
This explores the ability for items to evolve and be improved over time through repair and utilizing the essence gathered in items from their use. Instead of chasing the next most powerful gear and tossing the one you used to use, this aims to help make specific gear the player enjoys able to upgrade and evolve along with the character’s progression. This is done by exploring how the composition and history of the gear can be features of continued advancement.
Click here to read Advanced Gear System – Item Composition and History
This idea is meant to counter the conventional loot grind seen in many games, instead replacing it with gear that improves with the character, and resulting in something truly magnificent when it has reached its fullest potential. This doesn’t mean the player can’t seek out better equipment with a different specificity, especially if the discovered gear starts powerful and has the potential to become leaps and bounds more powerful than currently owned gear.
1a – The Fighter from Cityplace
This explores the interplay between a swordfighter and a crafter who pair up to advance swordsmithing technology through use, analysis, and enhancement. The fighter keeps getting their same old sword reforged with slightly better metal and adjustments, while the crafter who takes interest in the sword researches it and offers a replacement, and both weapons continue to grow in power over time.
Click here to read The Fighter from Cityplace
This is a light narrative piece to demonstrate one way by which the feature concept could be utilized, where fighters and crafters synergize together to make two amazing swords.
1b – Taetham’s Slayer
This is the story of a talented crafter with a jealous mentor, and the betrayal that leads to a fortunate turn of luck. While their mentor Hargaan thought he was making the best swords around, Taetham was able to work harder, faster, and with better results, understanding swordsmithing to a level that Hargaan could not even fathom.
Click here to read Taetham’s Slayer
This is a narrative-driven document demonstrating how a player can learn to develop and express skills as a crafter through experimentation and becoming a master of both design and material. Taetham represents a lifelong blacksmith who has developed their talents in a wide range of metal-crafted goods before ever being allowed to touch swordsmithing, and who uses that prodigious skill to greatly advance their understanding of swordsmithing technology.
2 – Multiple Organizations
This explores the ability to break away from the factionalism of player guilds by having systems where player-run group organizations for the different aspects of life with which they interface. Instead of joining one guild, players are free to join a variety of groups for a variety of purposes, each with their own special interests and objectives.
Click here to read Multiple Organizations
This was written as a means to break away from the very conventional guild format, and to instead have a variety of group organizations that the player can join. A player’s raid group, crafting group, and the religion they practice for buffs and benefits, should all be available to join and participate in to the amount by which the player wants to be involved. An adventurer who also does gardening, attends a reading group, and practices an obscure faith, should have the agency to join and be members of all their relevant groups without one being the dominating group that dictates everything else.
3 – Ancestral Lineage in Character Creation or Gameplay
This explores ways to utilize a character’s ancestral lineage, for both character creation and for events that can result from it in gameplay. Covering the methods of implementation, the effects on the character, and effects on the gameplay experience with that character, this is meant to add immersion and intrigue to every player character, so the character itself is more than a class with a stat block and gear in the world.
Click here to read Ancestral Lineage in Character Creation or Gameplay
This is meant to add more unique features to each character, or at least a variety of features from a variety of different lists that makes the character different enough from other characters to be noticeable. This also gives more opportunities to make the character part of the game world by instilling them with a history and lore that unfolds or otherwise gets accessed as the player goes about their adventures. This can be used for single or multiplayer games, and both tabletop and digital games.
4 – Battle Based Looting
This system explores methods to reward players with loot based on how they fought, so maximizing the gathering of a type of loot requires players to fight carefully and win decisively to obtain what they seek. This means getting sentient wood from a tree monster by withholding the use of fire magic, or using toxic vapors to defeat an adversary so their equipment is left undamaged.
Click here to read Battle Based Looting
This allows players to use tactics and technique to get what they need out of enemies or even prey animals. Instead of fighting enemies to get a certain item or body part intact by random chance, this document details with different ways to approach the task of defeating an opponent for certain resources. This also works to add difficulty modifiers, where the player may have to fight a creature in a way that is less optimal and doesn’t leverage enemy weaknesses in order to get the most pristine and intact version of material needed.
5 – Legendary Brewing
This explores brewing systems for potions, spirits, and other substances, to make brewing-related practices more meaningful and engaging. Based on some real-world brewing techniques, this document details the many ways potions and spirits can be made so they can be designed with different effects and outcomes, along with some examples of successes and failures in applying this system.
Click here to read Legendary Brewing
This document covers the formulaic steps for making a brew, how to design the wort and ferment it for the intended effects, and a few different ways brewing can be utilized beyond just making a potion. These methods can be made as simple or complex as needed to fit the scope of brewing for a game where this is implemented, as well as acting as the foundation for the use of more complex techniques and methods that can be accessed as the player’s numeric brewing skill increases over time.
6 – Flesh Corruptor
This describes a new class archetype, which focuses on a scientific approach to preventing death and turning trophies from creatures into living weapons and armor. Covering the arsenal, abilities available to different armament loadouts, and corrupting magics, and unique movement abilities, this class is greatly different than any conventional class, and is completely separated from the conventional equipment system a player would otherwise use.
Click here to read Flesh Corruptor
This class design is designed for high fantasy environments, and is likely to have the same appreciation and apprehension as one would expect for a necromancer in a given game world. This can also be used for a variety of archetypes, such as a healer or a melee fighter, and is not limited to fulfilling one role. About a third of this document also comes with a narrative write-up for how a character class like this could be included, where a pioneering and prodigious medical expert who took up a grisly new method of obtaining and controlling parts from other creatures until being powerful enough to fight toe-to-toe against an elder dragon.
7 – Biomes & Biodiversity
This details systems for setting up realistic biomes that act and behave like real-world ones, to make a more immersive world, or one where resources and preparedness may matter. Covering the design and features of an environment, transition from one environment to the next, and the flora and fauna that that populate it, this document helps with designing a world that feels more natural and doesn’t suffer from hard borders between the gameplay regions.
Click here to read Biomes & Biodiversity
This comes from a long-time frustration with games that draw a line in the ground, and on either side is a completely different area with dynamically different features and seemingly no explanation to the hard transition. I understand where older games might not have the fidelity to represent these changes over time, modern large-scale games can certainly benefit from implementing gradual transitions and utilizing transitional areas to help players prepare for what’s next, or depict the change in population of flora and fauna through the transitional areas.
8 – Language as a Key Gameplay Element
This explores the use of lore languages to act as critical gameplay elements, such as bonuses for working a task while speaking a language that describes the parts of the task in a specific and precision manner, or even knowing the language of a mighty race of giants well enough to tell jokes they enjoy. This also covers acquisition and possible degradation of language skills during learning and periods of non-use.
Click here to read Language as a Key Gameplay Element
This document covers a variety of features and approaches to using lore languages to enhance or enable gameplay in various ways. Whether reviving an ancient and cryptic language to speak in secrecy to fellow cult members, or teaching fellow musicians the language used to describe musical techniques and cues on their sheet music, this can be applied in many different ways to give a gameplay-affecting element to the use of gameplay languages.
Recent Features
In 2019 I started recording a variety of ideas and suggestions to an ever-growing piece known as the Random Design Ideas and Suggestions document, which includes game mechanics, gameplay ideas, and whatever else I’m ever inspired to write. A few of the writings I’m really happy with are available to preview and read below.
Reclamation By Nature / Ruins of Societies
This writeup was inspired by considering how every element of nature can work together over time to reduce even the sturdiest of structures to rubble and ruins. From rust and mold to windstorms and earthquakes, this explores different forms and mechanisms for weathering effects, and how long it would take them to destroy structures and infrastructure.
Click here to read Reclamation By Nature
This writeup covers a variety of different micro to macro level destructive effects from various different sources, and explores how they can be applied. One application is for simulation, whether to weather an area to simulate a place that has been left to rot and ruin, or a game where the player controls the application of weather effects to efficiently destroy a structure in a systematic way. This is the 39th entry in the Random Design Ideas and Suggestions document, and though I had the idea for this by February 2021, but didn’t write it out until May 2021.
Hypersleep Disrupted
This writeup explores features for a space travel game where the crew is in suspended sleep while the ship is navigating towards the destination, but when trouble comes up, members of the crew are awakened to deal with the situation. This is a short narrative and gameplay writeup, including four suggestions for how the core idea could be applied.
Click here to read Hypersleep Disrupted
I got the idea of this from the thought that a crew would mostly be in “hypersleep” unless something came along that the ship’s computer and automated systems could not handle by itself. While I provided a few examples of how it could be applied, there’s no limit to the application of this, and can just as easily work for a terrestrial facility or submarine with similar automation that needs a helping hand now and then. This is the 38th entry in the Random Design Ideas and Suggestions document. I had the idea for this by February 2021, but didn’t end up writing it until May 2021.
Play and Train Your Party’s Behaviors
This is a short writeup focused on having the player choose the member of the party they want to play, and the rest of the party keeps to their default or trained behaviors. Every mission, the player chooses a different party member who they want to reteach how to perform better with the group, or can stay with a preferred character if they’ve already taught the team an effective set of behaviors.
Click here to read Play and Train Your Party’s Behaviors
This was written with examples for dungeons crawlers, space exploration, and puzzle games, but could easily be adapted to any sort of setting. Without being an AI expert, it doesn’t seem like it should be too difficult to train an AI based on how the player uses each character in a given context, but it may rely on the player not always being the leader of each group since taking point will use different tactics than a character who stays at the back behind friendly protection. This is the 27th entry in the Random Design Ideas and Suggestions document, and was written July 2020.
Lost Lands of Rogueria
Instead of having finite proportions to each region, Lost Lands of Rogueria explores the design of a space where a player can go deeper into unknown depths, with the content ever-changing as players leave and revisit areas where they had gone. As players find the right tools and means forward, they can start to understand how to navigate the regions and get around the gameplay area.
Click here to read Lost Lands of Rogueria
This goes back to an idea I had as early as 2012, but wasn’t able to execute with my skills or the tools at that time and just left the idea alone for a while, despite two small proof-of-concept attempts I make but ended up abandoning to work on other projects. This adds somewhat of an active procedural spin to roguelike/lite or metroidvania style games. This writeup was written April 2019, and is the 9th entry into my Random Design Ideas and Suggestions document.