World of Neurosiscraft

Work proceeds apace on my php WebRPG project, codenamed W O T A N. To recap, this is a browser game which will feature a full character, combat  and loot system driven by a pluggable single-player text adventure games. Pluggable meaning whole adventures and series can be (relatively) easily written and added to the game with little to no hassle ... or even generated randomly and dynamically upon entry.

As I have been writing the engine I keep thinking "Fan Fiction 2.0" though I myself have no desire to base any adventures in existing IPs. But the way this is coming out, it seems like something a fan fiction person would like, if not go ape-shit over.

The bulk of the adventure screen will be descriptive text and actions the player can take are represented by hyperlinks. So, if you walk into a tavern within the description scene actors will be linked to a conversation/action page for them (basically another scene) where you can choose to trade, fight, use social engineering, et cetera. The point of structuring the game in this way is to create a very strongly story-driven experience but take advantage of the interactivity that computing provides. If we reach back a couple decades, we find the perfect genre name for this type of game: Interactive Fiction.

To be more clear about taking advantage of being books and stories on a computer rather than the printed page, this game doesn't simply have just "Alignment" for meta-gaming, so far I have added Morality (Good, Neutral, Evil), Personality (Chaotic, Detached, Lawful), Sexuality (Chaste, Lusty, Perverse), Politics (Libertarian, Statist, Autocratic) and Religiosity (Atheist, Agnostic, Believer). And I will probably add more as I think of them.

These exist both to define your character as well as open and close options within adventures. Each of these attributes have a value from 000-1000, where (to use Sexuality as an example) 000 is someone profoundly devoted to chastity, 500 is the height of virility/fertility and 1000 might represent utterly reprobate perversion.

So if you wander into a tavern and speak with Fang the Delectable, who turns out to be rather on the unsubtle and kinky side - the author can write his dialogue this way then set his mechanics to to respond to both male and female characters with sexuality scores between 550-700.

Imagined another way, suppose your character must negotiate a deal for a trade monopoly with a tyrannical and controlling queen but is scored at a soap-box-screaming 050 Politics - making him an outspoken and zealous libertarian. That's one negotiation that could go south very quickly ... unless their sexuality scores are a perfect match, that is.

And so each of these attributes will have bonuses and negatives depending on the adventure and what the author decides to put into it. Of course these values will be changeable according to decisions made within the adventure, and like loot and experience will be tied to to the character and so carry over between adventures. I'm also considering giving them the ability to affect stats, i.e. if you manage to rack up a donkey-show-participating score of 900 on Sexuality your Charisma could lose a couple points - possibly disastrous to a character with a Charisma-based class. Or a similar mechanism to something like that, I'm dealing with stuff as I come to it.

I also plan on putting languages into the game. While the game will have localization for non-English speakers (though I will not be able to actually provide translations myself), when I say language I mean like Elvish or Orc or what-have-you. So in other words, some dialogue will be conditional in that if you speak Dragon you will see "My, you look delicious!" and if you do not speak dragon you will see "Shhhdral yszzophaxiziz!"

Stuff like this is the true strength of text-based games and is a mechanic no graphic-based game can begin to touch (in my opinion, of course). Another common situation you may find in the game are text entries based on skills or stats. Of course there are the obvious situations like a conditional text  about a hidden door (with hyperlink to "open" said door) that is only shown if the character passes a saving throw on their search skill, but what about that dragon? Let's say the character saw the gibberish text, but had a high enough Intelligence to pass a saving throw allowing her to see text describing the dragon as looking extremely hungry and drooling a bit when looking at her plump flesh.

Something else I added in today was height and weight. Idecided to go with a base racial height and weight - the most normal of averaged normals for that particular species - and then allow character customization by choosing "fat" or "skinny" etc. - I actually think each has a five-value range. And each option will just be a name for a modifier number. In the case of the fattest value, Obese, the character will be 1.75 times the normal weight for their species.

So height and weight will also play into the game in a similar way to the characteristic attributes mentioned above. If you are Obese then getting across that rickety bridge is not going to be easy. If you are small and thin then intimidating that bugbear into running away is not going to happen.

I have also been looking for technologies, if not actual third-party scripts to add in to this to expand player social interactions. I have been thinking about WordPress and may attempt a WordPress edition (probably pluginized) after I have a solid beta version 2 or 3 on a live server. However today I had the idea perhaps to integrate or attempt to write simple wiki functionality into the game.

The reason for this is to deal with the wheres and hows of actually building an easy web interface to write adventures in for both myself and (hopefully) others. I may be able to code in multiple if/then/else dialogue trees and pull variables from the database, but I do not really want someone else I have only met on the Internet to have that level of control of the site. A converted templating system might also work for this and I am considering that option as well.

That part of the game is a bit down the road, however. I do expect to get the character system along with the framework for basic classes, races, skills, spells and items (+inventory) into a functioning state by the end of the week if not sooner. Taken as a whole probably not sooner, but hey, the insomnia prevents me from dreaming in my sleep, I might was well do it while I'm awake.