Progress Report – W O T A N

It's me checking in again to write out what I have been working on with my web-based solo RPG project W O T A N.

Well I continue to shape and modify the game and have had two new breakthroughs. First I want to list my project milestones publicly. I have to admit, while I am great about planning and conceptualizing projects, I am pretty abyssmal about actually keeping it all written down. So these posts I make actually serve me as well as anyone else who happens to be curious.

Milestone 1:  Creating the User, Character and various Actions

Milestone 2: Creating the World interface

Milestone 3: Creating a World

Now, these obviously aren't all happening in a nice, orderly fashion as I get a hankering to work between them depending on how the mood strikes me and a very large overlap occurs between MS1 and MS2 where the Actions and World Interface are heavily reliant on each other and therefore need to be created somewhat in tandem.

I am fairly far along the path of MS1. While I am still adding, subtracting and heavily modifying the existing parts, I have the User system in place and (mostly) functioning and I am nearing completion of the Character system. This past week I heavily rewrote my initial code to be more streamlined and reduced the lines of code in place. The User and Character objects are fully in place and only have tweaking left to do.

Some things I still have to write for User: a method to ban problem users, e-mail activation, player age restrictions and some admin features such as the ability to delete unused accounts. More issues may came up, but I am at the point where adding them is rather painless. I do have the ability register new accounts, log in and out and differentiate between levels of users (for admin purposes) among other things. I have gone through more than one large change already as I am defining more and more the role of the user, mostly I have actually been deleting unnecessary data fields and opting for a simpler user interface.

I have already detailed in previous posts how the basic character is shaping up. I may have overstated how similar to GURPS my system will be, but no doubt there are still valid comparisons. One of the interesting concepts I came up with recently are what I am currently calling "Action Stats."

Every action within the game is basically going to come down to a success roll (or saving throw if you will). An Action Stat is determined as the average of three existing stats and is used for more specialized success rolls. For instance, the Combat stat is derived from the average of Strength, Agility and Luck. As of right now all Action stats are actually derived from two master stats and the Luck stat.

Speaking of stats, they are shaping up to be 90% of the character. I have added more stats since I made my last post, and along with Action stats, now number 14 ... 12 Prime stats and four Action stats. And there may end up being more, though I have a good feeling we are now at a stable working point. Currently:

Prime Attributes:

• Strength: raw muscle power
• Dexterity: hand-eye coordination
• Agility: body coordination and flexibility
• Stamina: physical endurance
• Intelligence: ability to reason and remember
• Luck: the grace of the gods!
• Spirit: affinity for magic and the paranormal
• Willpower: ability to exert oneself on one's environment
• Perception: sense and wisdom
• Charisma: ability exert oneself on other beings

Action Attributes (+ luck):

• Combat: strength + agility / used for fighting skill
• Influence: charisma + perception / used for npc interaction
• Magic: spirit + willpower / used for making magic
• Handiwork: dexterity + intelligence / used for thievery/crafting

Interestingly, I have come to the conclusion that I will not be using stat bonuses at all in the game (i.e. a Strength of 18 gets you a +4 bonus). At this point I only plan on using the raw stats for the game.

Things I still need to do for Character are: refine the actual creation process, add character options to the admin interface, refine the sheet (stats, attributes, etc.) and finalize its components, create a portrait and/or paper doll system ... and that is about it - the basic foundations have been laid with two very prominent exceptions.

Those would be items and skills. I have not only not created database tables or coded any logic yet, but I am still stalling at the conceptual stage. The vision is slowly taking hold in my mind, however, so I am not overly worried about hitting a wall here. But I am a little worried I might stall here. But I have a vague though fundamental concept so I am not entirely in the dark. I think I am procrastinating these more than anything.

To make the character height and weight I have already begun on W O T A N's basic (crude will be more a propos) physics engine. As this is 100% text and not even text in the sense of being a MUD, but rather interactive fiction, physics will not play a large part in the game.

The next and final phase of Milestone 1 I will be starting soon and that is the creation of the Action class. This will hold the base Success Roll (I decided to just use the GURPS term from now on) and any variants. But it's basic logic and organization are heavily determined by the World Interface, and I am happy to say I actually made the first tentative steps toward realizing that aspect this weekend!

I already decided to use a wiki system for the World - for a few reasons but basically and largely because it will greatly simplify making adventures - creating the World in other words. So rather than attempt to re-invite the wheel I would prefer to find a very small and simple wiki script to adapt to this system.

And I believe I found it in the Wikepage project. I have already stripped out the XML/RSS and have begun work on sifting through the code and commenting it. At this point, I have decided that come what may this is likely what I will be using to create and run the adventures on any given W O T A N site. Things to do: convert from using a flat-file storage scheme to using the MySQL database and then the basic user integration into W O T A N, and add in Action methods as I create them to the wiki markup parser.

My other breakthrough this past weekend came with my inspiration for a solid plot for the originating W O T A N site. It is still too early to really go into, but essentially I am conceiving your character must collect four sacred object for some wizard or other powerful guy. The quest for each object will be rather involved and each story arch will be released separately - that is, at this point I only plan on having the quest for the first object completed when I launch the site. Of course this could all change radically between now and release. Which I am hoping for sometime either Winter 2009 or Spring 2010, there I said it. Oh god, now I have pressure! Where's the bong, I need my nerve medicine.

But in all seriousness, once MS1 is complete and MS2 is mostly complete (and therefore one would assume MS3 well underway), I plan on taking the project to Alpha stage and will be setting it up on a (semi)public server. Considering the work I put into the game before Alpha stage, I assume the transition to Beta will be rather smooth and hopefully much more swift.

A lot of that will depend on the player testers I am able to recruit. If you feel the least bit interested, make sure to bookmark this site and come back every week or two for the next few months - once I feel comfortable the game is near-Alpha-worthy, I will be taking simple requests here on a post for those who would like to help me test the game.

I'll also probably be marketing the heck out of the game on various forums and whatnot, but as of right now, this blog is the main source for the project. I already have a domain for the main game, however, and once the Alpha is live that is where the project will probably live indefinitely.