I’m at a loss here.
Should I write very basic description that are straight to the point? i.e. Shoots a fireball towards a target position.
Should I write add some story to the ability? i.e. The Sorcerer focuses his Mana into a powerful ball of fire and hurls it towards a target position.
Something else?
Write it for what? A game design doc? A help popup?
What’s the context?
You should write basic descriptions. You have limited screen space. The point of the descriptions is to help the player. If you want advanced lore on a particular spell, you can include that in other ways, like NPCs (Spells of [Insert World Here] IX: Fireball: The Movie: The Book), or having an in-game encyclopedia that gives extra, but optional, information.
In-game descriptions of objects that will be displayed to the player.
For in-game interfaces, something short and sweet would work best.
Something like the description for this TF2 weapon:
Comedy aside, it gets straight to the point. Alternatively, look at the item descriptions in Skyrim (going off memory, as it’s been a while since I played it). Each has an image, a name, a weight, and then things like damage/effects/price, laid out in a separate panel in the inventory.
It’s not like he’s making the game for the NES. I can’t imagine he’s going to have the screen and text real-estate of Dragon Quest and he just won’t have the room to put experience figures on a page.
The main question I have is do you actually intend to write decent descriptions? If you don’t want to put time into it, don’t even bother and just make it a stats page.
I’m not sure what your answer is.
I’ll rephrase: Do you intend to make descriptions that are worth reading, and will player’s be better off having read the descriptions?
There’s no wrong answer. The biggest issue is feeding the player all the information that is vital concisely. After that the only issue is when you’re going to stop adding lore.
Funny you mention that. In a way the NES was more generous; you always knew you had a 320x240 screen to work with. These days you can have any one of a plethora of resolutions. Your game has to scale to fit those aspect ratios. Thus, you’ve still got the real estate problem.
While I understand where your idea is coming from (“Hey! Screens these days have more pixels!”) it’s still wrong. You can only support so much text on screen at a given time. The OP can’t get away with dumping a bunch of lore into his descriptions. Neither can I. Nor can you. You can try, but I guarantee you will harm the user experience of your app, and most gamers will never read all of that. Thus, the optional NPC suggestion for the lore of a spell.
It worked for Dark Souls. Actually, that’s how the game delivers about 95% of the lore, and you can’t trust the NPC’s since most of them are assholes. I don’t see the concern when it’s easy to embed another button to pop up the full description. You don’t need to try to feed the player the full text all the time, but it’s not like it can’t be available at all times if need be.
I think you should have the stats displayed prominently and separately from any descriptive text, then have the text follow that. That way players who just want to get on with it will know where to stop reading, and those who enjoy the fluff (to use tabletop gaming terms) can keep on reading.
Though I don’t think anyone will ever top Planescape: Torment’s description of baby oil.
That’s exactly the question I’m asking…
It entirely depends on your choice of game style. There is no right answer.
Don’t go far enough in describing stats and players will get frustrated with the lack of infomation. Go to far and playing becomes a mathematical exercise.
Do both!
The Sorcerer utilizes the heat from the air to form a powerful fireball.
Shoot a fireball to a location with 30% chance to ignite enemies.
The Minotaur charges forward with the might of a thousand suns.
Charge forward and knockback all enemies hit.
Yeah I cant stand binding of issac where all the items dont even have a name and your supposed to just guess what each thing dos.
Yeah… that’s what the wiki is for.
And then you spend ten minutes trying to match the sprite with five other vaguely similar looking items. Not exactly one of BoI’s stronger aspects.
Yet somehow I played 300+ hours of the original and 100 + hours into Rebirth already…
Lacking in one aspect doesn’t make a game terrible and unplayable. And just because a game is incredibly fun with lots of replayability doesn’t mean it doesn’t need improvement in some areas.