Completing a video game brings me the same satisfaction as finishing a book or watching a movie. You get taken on a journey and, eventually, that journey comes to an end.
I love getting lost in the side-quests and exploration that comes with any good RPG game – the likes of Skyrim, The Witcher 3 and even Breath of the Wild are all games that I’ll jump into when time allows.
You see, unfortunately, that’s the issue – when time allows.
Between work, developing Garrison, exercising, socialising – all of these grown up things – I struggle with finding the time to sit down and properly get stuck into a really good game.
Back in the day, I’d happily spend hours running back and forth across the world to help a random NPC find his magical back scratcher or kill 7 million wolves until one of them dropped a perfectly intact eyeball.
Gaming in that way is just not possible for me anymore – and I know I’m not the only one with this particular issue.
It made me sad, honestly, to the point where I went off looking for a solution. I had this huge part of my life that’d disappeared and, for a time, I thought I could fill the void with idle RPGs. On the surface they all seem like a really great offer – a fantasy world where almost everything resolves automatically… until you actually try to play one.
It really is like watching paint dry, until the developers bottleneck your progress so you’ll (hopefully) pay money to watch the paint dry faster.
After playing more of those games than I’d like to admit and being let down every single time, I realised I wasn’t going to find the type of game I wanted to play – so I’d have to make it myself.
Garrison: A 5-minute RPG
I wrote an introduction to Garrison in September last year and I haven’t really said much about the game since then – at least not in terms of how I actually see the game working.
So, if I may be so bold, please kindly allow me to give you, esteemed reader, the elevator pitch:
Garrison is a 5-minute RPG – a narrative-driven fantasy role playing game without hours of grinding.
As I just mentioned, there’s a point where most mobile games (especially – but not limited to – idle RPGs) present you with two options: you either pay money to progress fast, or you can grind for hours and hours and crawl deeper into the game, inch by painful inch.
Garrison offers an alternative.
We’ve taken all the best elements of RPG games – epic storylines, complex characters, meaningful decisions and horrifying monsters, all set in an immersive, sprawling world – and turned the questing process into short puzzles for players to solve.
Instead of endless grinding, you prepare your chosen characters as best you can for the mission – giving them items, provisions (like potions) and buffs – and then send them off to fight monsters and retrieve loot on their own.
After a couple of hours you can see how they got on, upgrade your characters (without nonsense currencies like credits, gems, shards or whatever else), give them some new gear and send them out again!
Narrative-driven gameplay
It’s a hard thing to balance because, on the one hand, slow levelling gives a true sense of earned progression – which we still have through the time you have to wait for missions to resolve. Even so, in a game like this, the story has to carry a lot of extra weight.
In the same September introduction I mentioned above, I gave the briefest of overviews about the foundational story which drives Garrison forward – you are the commander of a garrison and have to get it back to full working order. That’s the basic plot, if you will – which you can imagine as a trellis (a wooden framework structure).
Still with me so far? Okay, great – now imagine all of the sub-plots, character arcs and hidden secrets I’m building in and around that basic plot (the trellis) are like plants growing all over it.
Ivy, wisteria and honeysuckle – perhaps even a bird’s nest and somehow also a frisbee – are tangling and looping as they grow into a world players can genuinely get lost in.
My point is that we haven’t sacrificed anything. Garrison still has all the depth and complexity that you’d expect from an RPG, we’ve just structured it differently.
Community Q & A
I was catching up with a fellow indie developer a couple of weeks ago and, now that the website is looking a hell of a lot better, I felt far more comfortable sending across a link so he could check out how Garrison is going. Shout out to Frankie from Crafty Pickle Games!
We chatted for a while and then he hit me with this:
Is the game going on Steam, too?
This is something I’ve weighed up for a long time. The prevailing wisdom – and advice I keep getting – is that you should put a game on steam because of wishlists. It’s a good way to gauge interest, build a community and show potential investors that there’s a demand for what you’re creating.
Unfortunately I don’t see it being the right fit for Garrison – the whole point is that you play it when you can steal a few minutes throughout the day. If you’re booting up steam then you’re already settling in for more than 5 minutes of playtime.
We might not have wishlists but we do have a newsletter, which pretty much does the same job – so if you’re not already subscribed please consider joining and, if you are, tell a friend! Everyone is welcome here.
In the next devblog I’m going to talk about death. In the world of Garrison, obviously.
Cheers, Andrew
