Designing a Quest System for our Cat-Game
Table of Content:
Summary of Key Points
• Game Overview: I am working in a team to design a game where you play as a grandma catching cats. We were lacking clear goals behind actions within our game, therefore I pitched and designed a quest system.
• Process: I started by fleshing out the progression across the level and how the quests would allow the player to navigate through the game and ultimately guide them to the endgame. I broke this down into Onboarding, Mid-game and Endgame phases for clarity.
• Game Cohesion: Our game takes inspiration from Japanese architecture and culture, so I researched appropriate iconography and cultural rites to create a more cohesive narrative and vision for the quest system and our game.
• Visual Diagrams: I produced flowcharts and diagrams to visually represent the flow of the quest system and the overall criteria needed to create the system in engine.
• Reflection: The process had its challenges and the system isn’t perfect, but it was a really fun learning opportunity that I will continue to develop and share updates about in another devlog!
Introduction
Currently, I am in my third year at Breda University of Applied Sciences, where I have grown quite happy in the role of a level designer. This year, I am working together with a team of students to create a game about a grandma catching cats in a mystical Cat-world, after losing her own cat somewhere in the world, and needing help to get it back. And now, I am stepping out of my comfort zone to learn how to be a Quest designer!
The ‘Cat Game’, as I’ll be calling it while we still try to choose a proper name, started out in a very different direction. We knew a couple things for certain, that we wanted to have a grandma as our main player character, that you would play in a magical Cat-world with special ability cats roaming around, and that you ran a little cat cafe within this world. Those things were certain, and we started by trying to create a simple core loop, relating to the idea of catching cats for some sort of ‘quests’. This is where we started running into problems.
We wanted to give the player a purpose within our core loop to catch these cats, a clear goal that lets you feel rewarded once you completed it. I decided to try my hand at designing a quest system that would give our games these goals, so that we could create something more grounded and more engaging for players to play in.
Why Quests?
Quest design has always intrigued me since starting game development. I love the way it combines level, narrative and gameplay design in a unique way, allowing me to branch out from my level design bubble.
I took the time to look into some GDC talks before starting the development of my system to get the context of what these systems needed, what works and what ends up being a hindrance to players. And of course, I wanted to look at this through the context of what our game actually needed.
What our game was lacking was progression. We did not have a reason for the player to be catching these cats, any motivation or even an end-goal. We were also lacking clear progression within the level. With the level sections being fully accessible, how do we make the player feel like the game has a forward momentum when they perform actions in the level? We pivoted towards quests. These would be clear missions that a player could focus on completing, resulting in a rewarding feeling of unlocking parts of the level and ultimately reaching all corners of our ‘Cat-world’. And it was a great opportunity to step into the shoes of a Quest Designer!
Designing the Quest System
Let’s start with defining what a quest in this system represents:
A quest in our ‘Cat Game’ is a task that guides players and by completing them, unlocks new gameplay spaces and potential abilities.
This is done in order to give purpose to the tasks the players can complete within the context of the game. Roaming cats and their specific level placement now become important factors in leading the player into the next parts of the game, and creating a continuous flow of engagement through discovery of these new level areas.
So what does the current level look like in terms of discovering these new areas? Well, our initial level design principal was focused on utilising a Hub and Spoke design, with the players central quest givers located within this Hub. The spokes, in this case, are levels containing the cats, themed differently and therefore referred to as ‘Biomes’. In the Hub, the player would receive an initial quest to onboard them into the gameplay, after which they can progress to unlocking one of the two ‘Biomes’.
Progression would further be locked within a Biome, each new area containing new cats would be blocked by a ‘progression marker’ which requires a sort of ‘key’ to unlock it, which are the rewards from aforementioned quests. This is done so that there is a sense of progression for the player, a clear goal forward even while playing through a more linear level sequence. The goal of each Biome is to progress far enough to reach the top of the given landmark, and receive half of a key allowing you to enter the final end-game area.
Let’s talk about our end goal motivation for a second. Why does the player have to reach these two landmarks? Well right now, we want to create two distinct areas (the ‘Biomes’ we mentioned) and we want them both to be equally important. Creating a sense of exploration within the player, and allowing them to go through Cat-world at their own pace was an important pillar for us. Therefore, we opted to make the player be able to gain rewards that they could use to progress any of the two level areas and make the level structure non-linear between the two levels.
So, to summarise:
The quests are clearly split into advancing 3 clear parts of the game.
The start of the game is completed after opening the Biome level areas.
The middle of the game, and main gameplay loop, is done through progression within the Biomes.
The end of the game is completed after the two 'keys' have been collected, and are progressed through opening the last Biome.
Theming and Worldbuilding
Now let’s talk a little bit about theming and how we will be presenting these quests to players. Our game takes inspiration from Japan in its thematic worldbuilding for Cat-world itself. It has a mixture of its architectural style together with cat-themed elements. Going into worldbuilding is a whole new can of worms, so I’ll only keep it to some context here. For the quest system, I wanted to take the same approach to really connect our game to its artistic elements.
I started with some research into what thematically could work for these quests and landed on the concept of Komainu, guardian statues that take the appearance of lion-dogs, usually at the entrances of shrines. I found out that there are a few shrines, for example the Kotohira Shrine or the Inuneko Shrine, that actually have cat-like Komainu statues instead of the usual lion-dog appearance, which was a fun and playful way of tying the concept cat guardians into the game. Taking inspiration from these statues, I looked into rituals that could take place at the shrines, settling on the tradition of giving food offerings also known as Shinsen.
These two ideas inspired the decision to create guardian ‘cat statues’ that would be placed around the level as the progression locks. Giving them offerings (that could be cat themed) would be the ‘key’ of the progression lock, received as rewards for completing the quests. In this way, the player could choose what statues of the correct type (progression locks) they want to give their offerings to, again reinforcing this non-linear progression within the level. This also allowed for specific quests to be tied to specific progression statues, as the offerings could relate to specific statues, while keeping it open enough that multiple statues with the same reward could be unlocked in any order.
Similarly, the quest board would take inspiration from the same place. Early on we decided that we would have a quest board to display quests since we were unsure if we had the feasibility to add in extra NPCs as quest givers. To this regard, the quest board needed similar themes, and I took inspiration from the Japanese concept of Emas, wooden plaques hung at shrines to share one’s wish or grievances. Not only did this give me a way of representing the board visually, but would also allow quests to be written in a certain tone, as everyday inhabitants of Cat-world looking for help with catching or interacting with the cats in the world.
The Core Loop
With all this in mind, we can simplify the game’s current gameplay progression into a very simple core loop. Namely, that of catching cats, completing quests and clearing statues to progress into new areas.
So let’s get a clear overview of how the player can activate a quest and how the progression of one quest could look like in game. In the flowchart below, I mapped out the progression of accepting a quest and what kind of checks should happen in game relating to this action. Additionally, I mapped out what the flow of a quest would look like once it was accepted, keeping things in a higher macro overview for simplicity and modularity, this was something that would be happening again and again, and getting into specifics would not be helpful to me or the programmers I was working with to build this system.
Then I needed to define what a quest could look like in this game. Since the main core loop revolved around catching cats and we collectively decided this would be the foundation of our game, I wanted most quests to revolve around this mechanic. I tried to come up with different variations of quests that still centered this mechanic, trying to make an overview list of all the ideas so that we had a more modular system to work with. This ultimately was quite challenging, but I had found some ideas that could provide interesting gameplay opportunities.
Below are some examples of different quest types. They represent the overarching ‘category’ of what a quest could fall under in terms of tasks that the player is asked to do. Again, the main focus is on catching cats, but with some variety, and these were given as starting examples for us to build and use in our quest system.
Now all that was left was to write some examples to get a feel of what we wanted. I tried to create really simple and short quest examples that could be used as placeholders and give an idea of what flavour of quests could work in our game.
Learnings & Next Step
I must admit that the game’s narrative and therefore the quests and quest system have since developed a lot. But so has my understanding of quests, the things that work for our game, and the things that don’t!
I think as a starting point, I really enjoyed the process and the learnings that came with this task so far. I had to learn how to not only think modularly while designing the entire system for implementation, but also to think about how to communicate to the player, what the player enjoys doing in our game and how I can work with the cores strengths of what was already present without adding too much extra architecture on top to avoid overscoping this system in the first place. Of course, there were plenty of challenges along the way too, and it is far from done.
Something that was challenging was stepping out of my comfort zone as a level designer. I think in some regards, it was helpful as I was able to directly combine how the system and the quests could function together with the structure of the level that we were working with, ensuring that everything was working together in one cohesive manner. The challenge came from the knowledge gap in this area. I knew level design, and I knew a few things about narrative design, but I had never designed quests before, and bridging that gap with extra research took me a few tries before I felt like the Quest system I was making was going in the right direction.
Now, the system has had an overhaul as we have developed the project further, alongside the narrative, the quests themselves and the flow and placement of the level has been streamlined to be linear and more intentional. I hopefully want to give an update as soon as possible in between the development to share more of how the system has evolved and share how I have implemented the quests from prototype into the final game version! I hope to see you again then, and thank you for reading!
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