What is "Tales - Told & Untold"

A World of Plenty

The 2.5D game world of Tales - Told & Untold
is hand-painted, non-repetitive and full of details.

Many games provide a big game world. In GTA you can freely move through a whole city or even a whole state. In Skyrim a whole continent is freely accessible. In Doom & Destiny, the worldmap is huge. But often a huge game world means an empty game world. In the older parts of the GTA series, you couldn't access most houses. In Doom & Destiny (which is - by the way - a great game), only a few cities and dungeons are spread across a huge world map.

Skyrim does a good job at populating the world, but sometimes you will encounter the same interchangeable event at different places or you will enter a dungeon that looks almost like the one you explored before. The reason for this is simple: content, especially good content, is expensive.

But the real world is different. There are no vast areas that are almost empty. The world is full of people, each of which is different. The wonders of nature are many and at every corner there is a story to discover, if you have time to explore it. That is what I want my game "Tales - Told  Untold" to be like.

I will hand-paint the graphics for my game and avoid copy-pasting as much as possible. But painting takes time, which is why I can not paint an endless amount of maps to cover huge areas. Instead, I will use story telling to bring the world to live and to make the world full of things to discover.

Every player's costume experience

In MMORPGs, usually every player has to play through the same campaign; costume experience mostly comes from different character builds and from interaction. And that is fine. But when I played the first 5 minutes of World of Warcraft at a friend's computer (I never played more), I was wondering why every player had to collect wolf's pelts and if the NPC who gave this quest never had enough of them. Path of Exile is similar: Every player has to face the same campaign 3 times at different difficulty levels, but the huge skill-tree allows every player to have a costume experience.
For Tales - Told & Untold, I want to go a different way. Every NPC that will give quests to players has more quests available than any single player has to complete. When the player interacts with the NPC, he will receive a quest at random. This means that players, who are at the same stage at the game and at a similar level, have different jobs to accomplish in the game world. This leads to a whole new type of interaction.
Of course, this seems to be a wasteful approach, as content is expensive. I will mitigate this by using mostly text-based quests, which are faster to create then only graphics. Still, it takes time to write good quests. I hope that the effect on the gameplay, and the possibility that players can talk about the different quests they had to complete, will make it worth the effort.

Story-telling and world building

Quests and random occurrences tell
the story of the game world and make
 it come to life.

As I said, Tales - Told & Untold, will contain beautiful hand-drawn graphics,
but a huge part of the game will be mostly text-based. And I will do my best to make the texts good. I want to use text to make the world come alive, show details of the world and to create the atmosphere of the world.
This way I intent to create a world with plentiful details, quests and random occurrences. And I will create a world that is very often funny.

Tales untold...

Untold tales from the title of the game, has two meaning. On the one hand you will experience many small problems of ordinary people and discover many details that no historian would ever bother to write down and no bard would ever bother to sing about. But they make the world come alive and they can make you smile.
On the other hand, untold stories also refers to the fact that you can never discover everything in the whole game world. Every player only sees a part of all quests, stories and encounters that I create for this game.

...and told.

But not all stories are small and unimportant problems of ordinary people in the world of Tales - Told and Untold. You will also have the opportunity to change parts of the history of the game world. In a way that will effect other players. You can become a hero - or at least a figure - in tales, told by bards in every pub around the game world.
How I want to tackle the challenge to allow many players to shape the history of a game world in this multiplayer game, and not only power players, will be the topic of one of my next posts.