Up is Out — a Solo Co-op TTRPG and when to constraint an idea.

Game Design Log #15

Hope everyone is enjoying this season, being winter or summer.

For my part, I still experience a strong dissonance in these times because of having summer in July-August, with the end of the work-year in the midst of the year, totally disconnected from the last day of the year (and new year's eve). A little anticlimactic, I would say (someone must have already written or thought about this; how these two very different experiences of “end of the year” produce a different mentality about the passage of time and the meaning of “ends”, but I digress).

In any case, I had a couple of weeks for disconnecting, and now I’m slowly returning to my routine.

One would think that after a couple of weeks of rest I don’t have much to write about, but rest is a very fertile ground. In rest, these ideas that were always pushed to the back of the mind by routine, by “goals”, and by all the day-to-day juggling, well, they began to resurface and connect in unexpected ways.

One of these ideas was to create a game with an innovative combat system using a standard deck of 52 cards. That allowed players to create combat moves, and that used the same cards to make the battle arena a place of improvisation and mechanical significance. And that incorporated an exploration system, inspired by metroidvania games (I blame Blasphemous and Hollow Knight). In which players could explore the world by themselves, in a solo TTRPG mode, using the books they already own. To later join with other players to create a unifying lore/tale of what they have discovered in their solo adventure. And where boss fight was an interesting, challenging part of it and…

But time is finite, and I was already working on two games: “No Peace for the Heathen”, that started as a small side project to have something finished before my big project “The Promised Ones” (so naive). And also I have another secret project that may take most of my time from October onwards. So yes, another big game was out of question.

And then I realized that the One-page TTRPG jam was on, a perfect opportunity to find what I needed, a deadline and a hard constraint on size.

So the big game, metroidvania inspired, with exciting combo-creation combat, with exploration using the books players own, that supported solo and co-op gaming, and that had souls-like boss fights, well, it was a little too much for a one-pager.

But here it’s where the blessing and beauty of constraint came to save the day. It helped me recognize what parts of this idea were the ones I was more excited about, and which were also the ones that I haven’t found in other games (because for me that is a crucial part of creation, I want to create things I wish to experience but that I haven't found in other places).

So I looked around, at the TTRPGs that I have on queue, waiting to be played, and the things that have caught my eyes. I have Rune and Runecairn, which are solo souls-like, and then there is Firelights, which is inspired by Hollow Knight and seems an interesting approach to scratch that itch. And then for interesting combat I have many skirmish waiting to be played (Forbidden Psalm, Turnip28, Grim Dark Future, Frostgrave, etc..), and hopefully, I will persuade some friends to do so.

But for all the games I was aware of, none of them had the solo+co-op option baked into them. And this was something I really wanted to try. Because having friends spread on the world, with up to six hours of difference, makes the schedule of traditional TTRPGs a very difficult beast to tame.

So that was my core and foundation for the game, making a solo TTRPG that allowed co-op play.

But that was not enough, It was only an idea of modes of play, and not a game by itself. So I kept the next feature that I really wanted for the game; the possibility to use all the books on my bookshelves, these books that I love to open in random pages, just to read some paragraph, for inspiration and contemplation.

This is how the “exploration using the books players own” was the next feature to survive from the original idea.

But what is this game about?

For that, I selected some of the sentences I wrote in holidays, things that, I thought, were more meaningful to the game I wanted to write:

Never alone… At the lost halls of the forgotten city.

Where are you? You don't know where. But above you there's a hole that you suppose goes all the way out, cutting through the floors of this multilevel subterranean remnant of a city.

Asymmetrical player’s class as key to modes of play.

Books you select define the lore of the world and the vibe of the game you will play.

So keeping this stream of ideas (and keeping on a side for later the ideas that made more sense with the “exciting combo-creation combat” part of the game), I had a more focused vision for the game. And I realized that for this game I needed the sense of unknown to be paramount, as exploration and lore will be generated in the game.

That’s why the “where are you? You don't know where…” became central, and extended this unknown to all the knowledge of the characters. They couldn’t know who they were and where they were, because the important part of the game is what they will discover while playing. Who they were before the game started didn’t really matter for that experience to happen.

Then I simplified the idea to: characters awake together at the bottom of a ruin, and they know they have to climb all the way up to find the exit. This defined a simple setting and clear objective to which I could construct around all the other parts of the game.

Then I had to separate the two phases of the game, the solo phase and the co-op phase, and make them coexist.

Solo phase

For the solo phase, I wanted to make it easy: explore the room using a simple mechanics and the books you own as sparks for your imagination, and in some rooms you could find hazards. Simple, clear, and easy.

Co-op phase

For the co-op phase, I wanted to make it a necessity for players to communicate, so the co-op part of the game wasn’t only an option, but an important source of emergent storytelling and gameplay. And here the line from my notebook “Asymmetrical player’s class as key to modes of play” came to me. The role of each player in the group is what will push them to communicate.

So I created eight roles, things the players could do to help other players and to progress the game:

Also, behind these roles, is the idea that they allow players to interact in different ways with the elements of the game, at different levels between a role-playing game-mode and control over the narrative game-mode.

For example, the Cartographer is the one putting together the map of the rooms explored by all the players, and the Scribner is the one unifying the findings of all the players into one unified lore. While the Medical engineer is the healer of the group, and the Builder is the one that can use the materials found in the exploration to create tools.

So the Cartographer and Scribner influence the lore outside their characters, and make their game in the co-op phase more of a “power over the narrative” game. On the other side, the Medical engineer and Builder roles influence the resources in-game in a way that makes sense through the lenses of the characters, making their game style in the co-op phase more of a role-playing game (regarding “mechanical focus in role-playing as a character VS mechanical focus on controlling the narrative” I recommend reading this Alexandrian’s post → roleplaying-games-vs-storytelling-games , all this I’m writing here is informed by it).

Bridging the “solo phase” and “co-op phase”

As I said before, in the Asymmetrical player’s roles is hidden the necessity to change from the solo phase to the co-op phase. I did this in two ways.

1. I write the solo phase as a phase in which resources are expended.

   So each time that a player explores a room they lose a resource, and if they encounter any hazard, they may need to expend more resources.

2. I wrote the co-op phase as a phase in which resources are replenished.

   So each time a co-op phase is started, by two or more players meeting or talking through they preferred means of communication, the characters can replenish their resources.

Maybe is better if you read the game

I wrote this as a log so you could read about my thoughts when creating the game, but I think that the game speaks better by itself, and if I was able to communicate and facilitate all these ideas I have through the game, well, this is something that you will have to be the judge of when playing it.

Finally, here is the link for the game: UP IS OUT