Re: Renfield
I'm aiming for a mash-up of Mount & Blade + Crusader Kings.
Imagine M&B's realtime combat but with the complex politics of Crusader Kings 2 or one of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games.
This worries me. Sprawling underground dungeon-maps and simulated political systems don't really tie into your original pitch, nor does it contribute to the engagement of an HRPG. Dungeons (and random combat encounters) are usually
filler. They
surround the actual content (character development, narrative, sex scenes) and help to modulate pacing, but they shouldn't be your focus.
Complex political systems can provide core engagement if the player character has a clear motive to participate in them (e.g. White Wolf vampire games), or if political machinations drive most of the story (e.g. The Witcher). Such systems might be
included in other genres, as a minor "minigame" which the player can mostly ignore if they don't like it (e.g. Civilization, Dwarf Fortress, Mount and Blade).
If your game is all about
personal experiences, then the only way to present a complex political narrative is to divide it into dozens of personally-meaningful scenes/missions/conversations, and have each faction be represented by a memorable character (e.g. Dragon Commander, or King of Dragon Pass if you're looking for a low-tech example).
You can't do that. You don't have a writing team, nevermind artists and animators and voice actors. What you're likely to deliver is a halfassed politics sim that the player can't understand or relate to, because they can't actually see any of the "loyalty" numbers. Do you remember "Radiant AI"? It was a cool feature in Oblivion which would allow NPCs to interact with the world in complex ways.
They stripped a lot of it out prior to launch because it made the NPCs
too interesting. NPCs would often steal from (or kill!) each other in private for inscrutable reasons - which removed content from the world and often blocked important quests.
Focus on the things that make your game interesting, instead of trying to cram in every feature that you like. Your pitch can be
"Skyrim plus sex" - that doesn't mean that you're required to implement every feature that was botched in Skyrim.
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Mechanics Trump Content
As an indie, you can get away with a game that's short. What your game absolutely must not be is 25 hours of "...meh, it's alright." Polish and scale are the weapons of the AAA world. Indies can't really compete with that, so unless you already have something spectacular or novel to offer, your focus shouldn't be about building more of it. Instead, concentrate your efforts on making that play really stand out.
Too often, I see new indie companies cobble together some baseline functional mechanics and then just start building levels and creating new content - because doing that feels like a game's getting made. It feels like tangible progress. That is the wrong way to go about things.
If you
really want to include politics in your game, then you should at least tie it into sex. You're working with similar themes: power, trust, suspicion, betrayal, dominance. If you want to get really fancy then weave magic in as well (e.g. A Song of Ice and Fire, The Witcher).
