Today was spent on two different tasks: Tinkering with Pyro in an effort to understand it fully and to get it to a state where the things I want to do are even possible, and characterization of quests as employed in other games.

Pyro is currently rather primitive. For one thing, despite the existence of wizard-type character archetypes and mana points, there is no spellcasting system—until today, that is. A simple system has been implemented, now. The rationale for this is that Pyro must be elevated to a certain level of technical sophistication before any work of a more interesting nature can be done. An absence of magic, for instance, would severely limit the kind of stories we could create and thus hamper our results. The same could be said for certain other features, such as the existence of races/species, occupations, and on the more technical side, support for things like static maps and world travel. While I should really draft a more comprehensive list of requirements to be fulfilled, this one was a no-brainer and it kept the work from turning soul-crushingly dull for a little while.

More importantly is the second part of today's work, which is part of an analysis of how other games implement quests. So far I've looked at the purely mechanical parts, and derived a number of atomic components for what a quest usually contains. The following are examples of such “mission objective atoms”, to give a hint of what's been done (the complete notes are in a text document that is rather poorly formatted for putting on this log):

• Kill enemy or enemies
• Recover item
• Transport item (“FedEx” quest)
• Sabotage/destroy object or structure
• Escort NPC

These then come together to form individual “quests”. I've further noted the existence of what I call “quest archetypes”; combinations of objectives that recur. Examples are things like “cleanup quests”, which involve several instances of the Kill enemy objective, such as rooting out a den of monsters, for instance. These are interesting, because they are a more high-level abstract idea of an objective; instead of divided into mechanistic components themselves devoid of any narrative “glue”, these archetypes are thematically connected in a way the player can understand, as opposed to simply being checklists of things for the computer to tick off as the player proceeds.

Tomorrow, I intend to look at a few more games, and see how they can be connected to a greater narrative whole.