| « | May 2009 | » | ||||
 |
||||||
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 | ||||||
I may have forgotten to update yesterday or the day before. I haven't worked on Serinor in the past week, which would be why.
I have, however, spent quite some time tinkering with the open beta of the Mission Architect in City of Heroes. Does writing user-generated content for an MMO count for Gruedorf time? I don't know. It was fun, though.
From what I understand of Wizards of the Coast's Game System License, Serinor violates all sorts of rules and cannot, without significant and canon-destroying alterations, ever be published as a D&D 4e supplement.
That's all I've got this week. That's a depressing hour or two that I'm not getting back.
Not a whole lot of time this week for Serinor, but I moved forward in the introduction/tutorial to the point where you select one of the six available classes for your developing hero. So far, this hero has a gender, an appearance, a name, and a class. Yet to go before a complete level one hero is designed are stat point allocation and initial attack. One of those two is already coded and just needs scripted/inserted. The other requires determining how Serinor will hold ability data.
In other news, this is post number 100! Hooray!
I reinstalled Morrowind on my computer after it crashed and burned, and did some work installing all of the fancy new mods and extensions that I'd never bothered with before. The results really are stunning. But the point I'm working towards is that somewhere amidst all this focus on Morrowind, I read somewhere that Morrowind's simple, almost-hidden tutorial that I completely ignore and sprint through anymore is actually really well-designed and steps the player gently into the massive sandbox that is Vvardenfell.
I'm borrowing pieces of it, as I've done with so much else from Morrowind. The new Serinor will start with a named, story-centric character that you build, piece-by-piece, through the prologue. This hero's centrality to the story will begin to fade as the progression of events scales up to the truly epic scale of the middle to late game, but it will hopefully smooth out the horribly difficult early game significantly.
I've also detached appearance from class. It's still tied to gender, but any male human can select any male human sprite for his appearance regardless of what class he chooses.
This week, I scaled the Amin Continent onto hex paper in preparation of getting the landforms onto a map with actual scale. It really kind of reinforced for me how small Serinor is. I mean, it takes up more than a full page of hex paper assuming 10 miles to the hex. But that means, from the nose to the back of the head, Amin's about as long as the trip we just took from central Indiana to West Virginia (600ish miles). Kind of depressing.
Really, it's still a lot of land. There's a weird disconnect between seeing how big it looks on paper to knowing how small it is in reality. I placed a copy of the rough map below behind a cut, but since the thing's freaking huge, I took it out. You can see an interactive version on Serinor's wiki.
Still filling in gaps on Serinor's wiki. I don't know. It sort of feels like a cop-out because I'm not actually working on a video game. But I'm spending way more than an hour a week, it's for a game, and it's work for a world I've come to love.
My friends and players have been pushing me to try and publish Serinor as a campaign setting or a least a worldbook since we started playing. I think that's pretty presumptuous; I know I'm not the only one who's created an engaging world to play in.
But I don't know. I just don't know.
Game dev time this week was spent on Epic of Serinor 4e. The party is moving from heroic to paragon tier, so there was a lot of individual, out-of-game effort to get all of them onto a paragon path with rational storytelling, rather than just saying, "Hey, you're an Iron Vanguard now. Congratulations!"
Also started trying out Obsidian Portal, which is a wiki service for RPG's. You can find the start of a Serinor campaign wiki, which still needs lots of work, but is a productive undertaking. In that it makes me write down all this stuff for real, rather than just have it all bouncing around in my head.
Serinor is a big project, and it taught me quite a bit about putting a game together. Today specifically, I'm talking about abilities. Serinor stores all of its abilities (and it's got a lot: 360 spells plus any class abilities. I think I'm past 500 by this point) in a long list. It tracks name, description, cost, and an effect number. Any individual effect is a reference to another long list, where each unique possible effect of an ability is scripted.
I added just one number to this when making Gelardia (okay, and another string, but it's less significant.) In addition to the effect reference, the ability database tracks the strength of the ability. It's ingenious, and I wish I'd done it for Serinor. Instead of having to seperately script a healing ability for every possible amount of healing, a healing ability knows innately how much it's going to heal. So I just script a heal effect once and every healing ability can point to that, passing in its own strength.
It's kind of fun, because descriptive text can be generated dynamically rather than being stored in a .dat file. So if your magic stat goes up, the description of all your abilities takes the change into effect and automatically updates the description of your abilities to reflect your increased power. That part's coded and working, complete with text highlighting of the important words/numbers in the description.
All of the initial character's abilities are defined, which is also a trick, since the cost and power of his abiliteis varies based on current magic point totals and not just his magic statistic. So his abilities grow weaker as he uses them, but he gains magic points for each monster he kills. (He's a manifestation of the god of war; he loses his magic after resting and only regains it through battle.) I think the abilities scale properly across the levels. I've also defined a few of the second charater's starting abilities, though his are more static.
Now that I've finalized how I want the information stored in Gelardia's memory and have a few abilities to play with, I can start scripting the actual ability effects. That should finish up the basics on the battle system, because it'll mean items work also. They use the same framework.
So last week my computer was dead. Over the weekend, I spent my time getting that straightened out, including getting all my games reinstalled. Gelardia and Serinor both survived the transition to a newly-cleaned computer. That's about all I have for Gruedorf this week: I saved my projects from oblivion (which, incidentally, I did not reinstall.)
Then this week, I nearly died during the snow storms when a woman in the lane next to me decided to fishtail and swerve in front of me on the interstate. The front of my new Prius is more or less smashed completely in. If I'd been somewhat more with it at the time, I'd have snapped a picture before the wrecker towed it away. At any rate, I've stopped shaking and have returned to work. Hopefully productivity will pick back up next week.
As much as I might like to include a screenshot with this post, my computer is currently just an ugly box under my desk back home, seeing as how the built-in system restore failed to, you know, reinstall Windows after it wiped my hard disk. I'm currently waiting on OS replacement CD's since Dell didn't actually include them with the computer when I bought it. Fortunately, everything of importance on the computer is waiting patiently on CD's. So no actually loss. I hope. I always forget something when I do this.
Anyway, Gelardia. Battles end now, and new ones can start right after. Everything appears to get freed and reinitialized correctly, which is kind of a big deal. Experience is awarded correctly, and loot displays itself and is added automatically to the party's inventory. Nothing (or very few things) drop gold; it's all in various loot-class items, which can be traded in for gold or equipment. The inventory/menu system also functions, but that's not new. The entire menu system is mostly just a reskinning of a system I made for a different game. That, come to think of it, I never shared with anybody. Oh well.
