The Littlest Gruedorf

A busy week, so a meager offering this week of having written, like, 4 text boxes. That's it. There was some beta testing / advertising but that's not REAL work. Next week the gloves come off for seriouse.

Whoops

I actually did make progress (In fact I did it on like Sunday of last week), just gruedorf slipped my mind. In short I finished hooking up the first area so encounters and relevant NPCs are in there and working. I even had a little beta test on it and I'm up to about 30mins of gameplay so far. Busy week so I haven't touched it since, but we'll see where this goes.

Plot a portal to progress

-Added first area's boss.
-Created crafting items/menus (still need to place 'em though)
-Finished obstruction exporter. Also did a foemap exporter.

Snaketrap

-Drew a new map
-Created the 3ish basic enemies (drawn/in-game)
-Did half of the obstruction editor (python script reads/writes OHR obstruction format, now I just need to make the sphere map editor output collision data and have it read that format and put it into ohr format- I have to do this since the OHR doesn't natively support image based maps, but Sphere's editor does.)

Not fast enough.

You can't just win a gruedorf

Grue pointed out that he is currently winning the gruedorf and we all know that no one can win the gruedorf.



The heck is that? I don't even know how to explain it since it involves several layers of community that no one who reads this blogs knows anything about (hence why I wasn't gruedorfing it to begin with!).

In short I'm making a game for the OHRRPGCE (it's a terrible engine, but you know sentimental community value), there's a fangame contest, and I'm making a fangame of a game the author deleted because he didn't think it was good enough.

You can see the original game here:



He's kind of a lot better of an artist than me!

Of note I'm trying to draw all of the maps, enemies, and even sprites by hand with a tablet. I'm a really, really bad artist. But for some reason drawing doodles doesn't infuriate me like drawing pixel art so I'm making a lot more headway with my awful art here!

Right now I'm really just drawing crap and outlining the plot since I have to wait on an engine feature to make it POSSIBLE to do image-based maps in the engine (now THAT'S customer service). You'll probably get some more awful doodles next week!

Let's talk about MMO's

I'll be breaking off from gruedorf tradition in that I probably won't even be talking about Actual Game Progress. Probably. I'm here again because I want to talk. I've decided to set out upon the greatest of foolish hobbyist ideas: an mmorpg.

Fortunately I'll be bored of it in a month and we can all forget about what a bad idea it was.

So I'm here to talk about the genre and why I feel like wasting my time working on an entry for it that won't be completed. Mostly it's a way for me to sort my thoughts on how to design this thing.

I find the current manifestations of the genre to be truly terrifying. By and large companies have homed in on isolating ways to short circuit the human mind's desire for progress in order to be paid money on a regular basis. This is clearly a pretty good business model. But I'm not much of a business man, and I don't find it very interesting.

Let's look at the social aspects of MMOs for a moment. I think we can divide current examples of the genre into two pools: Social and gamey. Social mmos like, say, Second Life mostly focus on sharing crap with other users and talking about stuff.

Gamey mmos I would compare to the pvp and raid/instance content of World of Warcraft (and basically every "gamer" mmo out there). Here you get to enjoy users talking primarily about the game itself, whether that be strategies or bitching about altered mechanics (in addition to general random talk).

Then there's stuff like world of warcraft's world content which essentially may as well be a single player game where a bunch of other random people pass by occasionally or you can drag in your friends so you can do the same thing individually but faster. The only other time other players have any meaningful interactions here are with sporadic pvp or if it's new content, long waiting lines. So essentially the social aspect in this type of game is basically nothing.


Let me contrast this with a little story. Some years ago there was a player-run Ultima Online server that was focused on roleplaying. Part of what they used to enforce this is that there were no NPC stores whatsoever. There also wasn't an auction house for automating player interactions. Crafting classes were also essentially separate from combat. What this meant is if you wanted better equipment you had to set out and talk to another player and ask for it. Sometimes you'd need to pay, sometimes you'd need to fetch the materials, sometimes they were busy. Sometimes you'd talk about something else while you were at it. I think that's interesting. Somewhat casual player interaction about the game without being about the mechanics and how to exploit them in minute numerical detail.

Obviously this is somewhat contrived in that roleplaying was enforced (you had a write a short background biography to get on in the first place, so literacy was a requirement) and the scale of the community was small. Still, it's interesting. It's something I'd like to shoot for: encouraging social interactions that are about the game.

Next time I'll talk about balance in mmos (which is to say something that cannot be achieved and is the reason why there are no worldwide consequences in any current mmo).

Contrary to what the Gruedorf may imply...

I have been making games. Starting as a 24hr contest game this sort of ballooned massively. I've actually been kind of avoiding Gruedorf because it seemed to make me less productive having to pump out a post every week and well... yeah. But every now and then it's nice to just sit down and talk about your game.


The name of the game is Hydration 2: Oasis. Long story short, while discussing a contest game to make with one Hachi-Roku of the OHRRPGCE community we came up with an idea that enamored Hachi so much that he made it himself. Flash forward to years later and Hawk wakes up in a sweat with regret. The idea of the game is pretty simple: You're in a desert with limited water. Find some water.



In H2O the desert is randomly generated with a few treasures scattered around and the ultimate goal always lying in the north. Every step consumes some of your water, so deciding whether to risk wandering off for better equipment or to rush ahead is vital. Additionally, using your skills in battle consumes hydration in combat as well so you have to make further conservation decisions there.



You actually pick 3 out of 25 or so skills at the beginning of the game. These are your skills for the entire game. The battle system is a fairly simple affair: At the top of the screen is a bar indicating when you and your enemy's turns are coming up. It's continually moving to the left. Once it arrives, it is your turn. From there you can choose what to do, but everything has a delay on it. If an enemy attacks you during this delay they deal more damage or potentially break your attack. This rule applies to the enemies as well. You can also just guard for a period, blocking any damage or effect. Even attacking and guarding still consume a little hydration, though.

How far along are we? The battle system is essentially complete minus enemy data/AI, but all skills and status effects are done outside of statistically balancing them. Equipment and item systems are also done and completely functional. The amount ikaDB helped with this project is stunning. I just wrapped up a large chunk of the random map generation (see the image at the top for an example of it), it's probably the hardest thing of the entire game and it's still not entirely done.

Graphically Giz, my new artist, has most of the art done as well aside from last minute pieces to be added as we go, though the music production hasn't really started yet. So basically, really close. I'm hoping to begin beta testing this month if not outright releasing it.