Work Post
8:17am - Well good morning everyone. I had a nice sleep last night, though some strange dreams. Not easy to ride a bicycle with a wiimote to control your breaking.
Anyways today is an interesting day. Robby has the day off, and so when he gets up he'll be around all day, unless he has other plans. That means I'll probably have to go out to work for most of the day. If I want to work that is. I'm a bit conflicted.
Well, part of it probably stems from the fact that I'm doing very game-designy, conceptual stuff. I'm enjoying it a lot less than I thought I would. Apparently my favorite part of game development is the coding. Well, there'll be a LOT of coding to implement all the special moves and things I'll be testing.
I also feel like playing today, but my sense of self discipline says to work work work.
Playing. I'm doing too much and too little again. Poor Just Cause 3 and Dragon's Dogma have gotten shunted aside for Fantasy Life and Diablo III. Then yesterday I started playing Stellaris again, twice. One single player game and one multiplayer game. The multiplayer game went surprisingly fast. My friend is playing a wormhole travel civ and got to me pretty fast, then we shared our starmaps. I tend to explore with my science ships first, but he split up his navy and sent them around to check stars first with just one ship each. So he had revealed a goodly portion of the map to share.
Between us is an empire that doesn't like him. They almost like me, except for border friction. I built a colony near the border and they were like "Don't build a colony there." and I was like, "Fuck you I do what I want! Also it's right next to my homeworld, you can't fault me that." So they're pissed at me now and closed their borders. I have a surfeit of energy credits though so maybe I'll buy back their friendship or something.
Anyways now that I've said all that I really wanna play Stellaris. Though, I wanna play my multiplayer game with Alfador more than my private game. Hah. XD
I guess even writing about all of this I'm procrastinating. And with reason, too. I've got a lot of knots of anxiety tied up in reading the Numenera ruleset and converting the rules to my own system. When I tried to just read the book to remind myself how it worked, I choked and couldn't do it. Not literally choked mind you, I've had that happen before with anxiety, but I hit the breaks hard.
Numenera's character creation system is really cool, but also really weird. How it works is, you pick one of three base classes. The names are different but they're basically Warrior, Rogue and Mage. Then you modify those classes (sometimes called your Noun) with an Adjective and a Verb.
For an example, the first Numenera character I created was a Learned Glaive who Controls Gravity. That is to say, I was a Warrior (Glaive) with extra knowledge skills and possession of some books (Learned) and I had some gravity control abilities in addition to my normal ability set (Who Controls Gravity). It's kind of a weird setup for a Glaive (Warrior) but I thought it would be cool to be really knowledgeable about the world, and fight wire-fu style with gravity control.
I'm not going to use the adjective noun who verbs system for my game. That would be too transparently Numenera. Instead I'm going to take some of Numenera's builds and turn them into classes.
That's going to be a lot of work! ^.^;;
8:41am - While I was writing about Numenera stuff I started thinking about starting gold, which got me thinking about RPG hyperinflation. It's a real problem with RPGs, that you basically have an infinite gold supply from hunting monsters/baddies. In JRPGs in particular, prices go up constantly for inns and weapons, and comparing your basic equipment at the start with equipment at the end its ridiculous. I'm going to try to combat that, but I'm worried it'll ruin the fun of it.
See, I'm going to try to implement a soft a-life system with the monsters etc. There'll always be more adventure to be had, but you'll only get a small, reasonable amount of treasure from taking them out. More from taking out their 'nest'. But gradually the overworld monsters will dry up as you kill them, leaving you forced to either wait for new ones to arrive, a gold sink for food and inn fare, or move onto other territory.
I plan to keep the weapons pretty moderate. A normal sword at the start of the game will still be dangerous in the end game. It's not the weapon that gets stronger but the weilder. Well, except for the Sleeping Sword which the game's full title suggests. That one will get stronger over time. But even then, it's only going to end up the most powerful sword, it still needs a strong person to weild it.
What's really going to be interesting is if the player doesn't choose a warrior class. What if they focus on ranged attacks or magic? Well, even Gandalf carried a sword. I think having an intensely magical sword would also help in channeling magic powers. Rangers and wizards get closed in on too.
I'm a bit conflicted on how deadly weapons should be. Especially ranged weapons. A bow isn't a pistol, but it's pretty darn deadly. Usually only takes one shot to kill or wound somebody pretty bad. A magic missile might be a pistol, depending on how its tuned. If you can't kill your opponents before they close in on you, then what's the point of ranged combat? Kiting doesn't work irl, and I don't want that to be a thing in World of Thardomhainn.
I'll have to see how it pans out in the combat playtesting arena.
It's really hard to make good, fun game design line up with realistic expectations and high fantasy expectations.
9:06am - I've been writing in here for like 50 minutes straight. I'm not sure I want to actually get down to the work of translating Numenera's character generation and progression into my own system yet. But at least I thought about game design for a while.
I'm also feeling bizzarely tired for someone who just got up an hour ago. I'm not sure what I'm going to do for now but it won't be work, at least for a while. So, work post over I guess.
Anyways today is an interesting day. Robby has the day off, and so when he gets up he'll be around all day, unless he has other plans. That means I'll probably have to go out to work for most of the day. If I want to work that is. I'm a bit conflicted.
Well, part of it probably stems from the fact that I'm doing very game-designy, conceptual stuff. I'm enjoying it a lot less than I thought I would. Apparently my favorite part of game development is the coding. Well, there'll be a LOT of coding to implement all the special moves and things I'll be testing.
I also feel like playing today, but my sense of self discipline says to work work work.
Playing. I'm doing too much and too little again. Poor Just Cause 3 and Dragon's Dogma have gotten shunted aside for Fantasy Life and Diablo III. Then yesterday I started playing Stellaris again, twice. One single player game and one multiplayer game. The multiplayer game went surprisingly fast. My friend is playing a wormhole travel civ and got to me pretty fast, then we shared our starmaps. I tend to explore with my science ships first, but he split up his navy and sent them around to check stars first with just one ship each. So he had revealed a goodly portion of the map to share.
Between us is an empire that doesn't like him. They almost like me, except for border friction. I built a colony near the border and they were like "Don't build a colony there." and I was like, "Fuck you I do what I want! Also it's right next to my homeworld, you can't fault me that." So they're pissed at me now and closed their borders. I have a surfeit of energy credits though so maybe I'll buy back their friendship or something.
Anyways now that I've said all that I really wanna play Stellaris. Though, I wanna play my multiplayer game with Alfador more than my private game. Hah. XD
I guess even writing about all of this I'm procrastinating. And with reason, too. I've got a lot of knots of anxiety tied up in reading the Numenera ruleset and converting the rules to my own system. When I tried to just read the book to remind myself how it worked, I choked and couldn't do it. Not literally choked mind you, I've had that happen before with anxiety, but I hit the breaks hard.
Numenera's character creation system is really cool, but also really weird. How it works is, you pick one of three base classes. The names are different but they're basically Warrior, Rogue and Mage. Then you modify those classes (sometimes called your Noun) with an Adjective and a Verb.
For an example, the first Numenera character I created was a Learned Glaive who Controls Gravity. That is to say, I was a Warrior (Glaive) with extra knowledge skills and possession of some books (Learned) and I had some gravity control abilities in addition to my normal ability set (Who Controls Gravity). It's kind of a weird setup for a Glaive (Warrior) but I thought it would be cool to be really knowledgeable about the world, and fight wire-fu style with gravity control.
I'm not going to use the adjective noun who verbs system for my game. That would be too transparently Numenera. Instead I'm going to take some of Numenera's builds and turn them into classes.
That's going to be a lot of work! ^.^;;
8:41am - While I was writing about Numenera stuff I started thinking about starting gold, which got me thinking about RPG hyperinflation. It's a real problem with RPGs, that you basically have an infinite gold supply from hunting monsters/baddies. In JRPGs in particular, prices go up constantly for inns and weapons, and comparing your basic equipment at the start with equipment at the end its ridiculous. I'm going to try to combat that, but I'm worried it'll ruin the fun of it.
See, I'm going to try to implement a soft a-life system with the monsters etc. There'll always be more adventure to be had, but you'll only get a small, reasonable amount of treasure from taking them out. More from taking out their 'nest'. But gradually the overworld monsters will dry up as you kill them, leaving you forced to either wait for new ones to arrive, a gold sink for food and inn fare, or move onto other territory.
I plan to keep the weapons pretty moderate. A normal sword at the start of the game will still be dangerous in the end game. It's not the weapon that gets stronger but the weilder. Well, except for the Sleeping Sword which the game's full title suggests. That one will get stronger over time. But even then, it's only going to end up the most powerful sword, it still needs a strong person to weild it.
What's really going to be interesting is if the player doesn't choose a warrior class. What if they focus on ranged attacks or magic? Well, even Gandalf carried a sword. I think having an intensely magical sword would also help in channeling magic powers. Rangers and wizards get closed in on too.
I'm a bit conflicted on how deadly weapons should be. Especially ranged weapons. A bow isn't a pistol, but it's pretty darn deadly. Usually only takes one shot to kill or wound somebody pretty bad. A magic missile might be a pistol, depending on how its tuned. If you can't kill your opponents before they close in on you, then what's the point of ranged combat? Kiting doesn't work irl, and I don't want that to be a thing in World of Thardomhainn.
I'll have to see how it pans out in the combat playtesting arena.
It's really hard to make good, fun game design line up with realistic expectations and high fantasy expectations.
9:06am - I've been writing in here for like 50 minutes straight. I'm not sure I want to actually get down to the work of translating Numenera's character generation and progression into my own system yet. But at least I thought about game design for a while.
I'm also feeling bizzarely tired for someone who just got up an hour ago. I'm not sure what I'm going to do for now but it won't be work, at least for a while. So, work post over I guess.