Making Solo Play Interesting

[Chaos Avian]

So lets say you're playing a game, you only play as one character throughout the entire game (or rather only control one character during battles). How would you and/or what things can you do to keep it interesting?

I had thought about a wide variety of weapons and armour interchangeable during battle as well changing classes, but I began thinking that it may be too tedious or cumbersome to do all the time.

What are you suggestions? 

 

[Scythuz]

What I've done is have a lot of out of battle related gameplay to mix things up.  In battle I use different weapon types to represent different classes and elemental properties, just make sure your battles aren't too drawn out and it'll still make for good gameplay.

 

[Vox Novus]

Make it highly customizable, the player should be able to take the character in many focused directions. Emphasize strategy more so than normal the player should be able to utilize their skills appropriately to overcome odds rather than simply having a high enough atk or whatever to power through enemies. Consider adding familiars or pets/summons on auto atk.

You could have it that class is interchangeable or the character can do something to augment their attacks resulting in different effects. A good example of a one character party that I recently played was Red Syndrome for the 2015 IGMC; try checking it out.

 

[cabfe]

As long as this solo character can assume the role of other team members in classics RPGs (at least, can heal himself), there shouldn't be a problem.

Is your game combat heavy to be worrying about this aspect only? There are many other ways to make a solo game interesting (or not) outside of combat.

 

[Milennin]

Give him a summon ability.

 

[Rhaeami]

Some examples of RPGs that have used only a single playable character to decent effect, for your reference, would be Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns and, to an extent, Pokemon.  The prior handled it by focusing on the 'dueling' elements; battles would largely consist of dodging/deflecting enemy attacks, opening them up to a counterattack, and then striking, with healing playing a very minor role unless you gamed the system.  It also let you swap between customized 'classes' of sorts, similar to your idea of changing classes mid-battle, but ultimately this was more along the lines of switching stances to match the flow of battle.  Pokemon, for its part, had other team members, but only let you fight with them one at a time.  Individual battles were kept short and sweet, at heart being similar to a rock-paper-scissors match.

The common threads, as far as I'm reading it, are:

1.) Keep battles shorter and more direct, rather than being the drawn out hurt-heal-hurt-heal that you see in party-based RPGs.  Consider limited or even *no* in-battle healing, to drive home the point.

2.) Focus on single enemies with unique gimmicks, rather than large parties of enemies.  One-VS-many can limit your design options when balancing.

3.) Give the player access to different tactics that are specifically useful against certain foes.  One character, but many options for what to actually *do* in a fight.

4.) Customization and personalization is key.  A single character is much easier to become an 'avatar' for the player than a large group is - leverage that.  It will help to avoid monotony from just the one character, and make things interesting before the fight even starts.

These are just ideas that I got from looking at a few examples of other games, and seeing how they handled it.  Obviously, what matters most is what kind of game you want to make, and what makes the most sense for it.  Take these ideas with a grain of salt, and try to find inspiration for your own twists.

 

[TherainED]

You should take a look at other games that do that same thing. EG: the Souls saga + Bloodborne.

Spoiler

But since yall are fkin casul scrubadubs, unable to git gud, I'll go into what they do (right) extensively.

One of the things they do is giving you the chance of having a lot of playstyles available. You can pick a lot of methods to take on the game, even inside a certain set of builds.

For example, the dexterity builds, while they feel a bit more restrictive, the amount of combinations you can get from weapons, armors and items is ridiculosuly massive. For example, the most popular dex builds involve katanas, since they are fast and inflict LOTS of bleeding damage. However, I've seen people dual wielding knives buffed with poison, using armors and rings with high poison resistance whose whole tactic revolved around poisoning both fighters and then profiting off their high resistance to wear the enemy out and take them down "easily".

However, DS is a fricking complex game, so...while making a game as complex in an engine as RPGM is hardly possible, you can truly extract some good ideas out of it.

For example, adding skills and items that had a knockback effect. Bleedout damage, poisoning, etc... Then, you give armors and items that can counteract those knockbacks or weaken their effect. Then, having a wide variety of weapons that grow with the player and each have a different effect would also add a lot of depth.

Then again, preparing a database with all that information is going to be a massive ***** to make. So you probably shouldn't take this approach unless you're willing to put a lot of work into your game.

 

[hiromu656]

Well the thing about having a one man party is it changes the value of a turn. Since there's no primary buff character or magic or healer, you'll be doing all the work. Along with customization of your character, you need to balance the player's turns with the enemy's. My first thought was giving the player more than one turn, or simply the ability to perform multiple actions in one turn. If thats not something you want to do, you should have skills always have two or more effects. If you take one turn to attack and the next to heal, that feels like a waste. So an ideal attack would be one that has more than one effect, such as deal damage and debuff enemy, or heal self and grant a defense buff etc.

 

[Wavelength]

If you're limiting yourself to a single party member and you want a battle-heavy game, you definitely want to focus on making the enemies unique.  Give them their own gimmicks and interesting patterns, like Raemyi said.

No amount of general customization is going to prevent it from feeling like a grind, because the player is too likely to find one thing they like and stick with it.  If you can figure out some way to force the player to mix things up, however, like transforming into different animals or personas as the game goes on, however...

 

[Scythuz]

Chaos, are you going for a primarily battle focused game or a mixture of elements?  

It might help people come up with more specific ideas if you can tell us that

 

[Chaos Avian]

It's a mixture of elements, but although battles aren't the main focus I don't want it to feel "tacked on" or a chore. Plus I was only thinking of having 3 enemies as an absolute max to fight at once. It's more geared to exploration and most battles are mandatory but not frequent.

 

[Scythuz]

Then it sounds like you'll be wanting to make that exploration as compelling as possible.  You're probably gonna need puzzles and challenges for the player to solve if you're keeping most of the gameplay non-battle related.  Just try and make sure to do something more interesting than puzzles such as: pushing blocks, switch puzzles and the like.  

If you're only going for one character and aren't aiming for much battle depth then, unless you're going very far out there with your other gameplay, you'll probably want to also keep the length of the game relatively short too.  If you're having multiple player characters (maybe with different on map abilities) then you'll probably not need to worry about length so much as long as your pacing is good.