Idle Hands are the Demiurge’s Tools

It is really quite something, that. What? Oh, merely my lack of focus. What was that? Oh, I am writing a blog post ... I knew that.

Work proceeds apace on The Wizard's Tower. I have hammered down the basic attributes of a "Book" and I am, at this moment, deciding whether to begin laying out the database structure and model code for the "Pages" of a Book or pay off some code debt in the form of writing some decent error handling controls. What is a Book? Why a gamebook, of course ... pshhh.

In the past week or so I was struggling to understand how to order the game's heirarchy with regard to the world the player character progresses through. My first impulse is to order the game universe along the lines of the modern CRPG or MMORPG in the sense that I create a world for the character to exist in. However, what I am trying to accomplish is to create a story for the character to exist in. They may seem like the same thing, but there are subtle differences.

For instance, existing in the story implies that the character will likely be moving forward. No revisiting areas for the player and no random NPCs who hand out quests and expect you to come back for a reward. Actually there will be both of those ... drat, what am I trying to say? Let me get it down.

Rather than a zone, the site will have a book and rather than have areas within the zone, you will have pages in the book. Each Book represents a self-contained adventure for which there are beginning and an end points, complete with its own rule system. Well, a variant of a an extremely basic rule system. Though, to keep in the gamebook spirit, I have disavowed my previous stance of character and environment complexity for one of simplicity. Though, the basic system will still likely end up being vaguely GURPs-like which is something I have had in the back of my head all along.

A character will only be able to exist in a single Book, though there is a mechanism to transfer a character through books linked in a series. Each Book is essentially a self-contained universe with its own stock of monsters, items, traps and puzzles. As I said earlier, character complexity is out; character skill necessity is in. I am now generically referring to skills and attributes as "Powers" which covers the gamut from technical skill to raw talent. And because each power exists only within its Book, if there are no locks in a Book, there will not need to be a lock-picking skill (as an example). Of course if another Book requires lock-picking  then it will have it.

Some pages will be able to be revisited again and again, but these are the exceptions to the rule: cross-roads, taverns, WalMarts, et cetera. These are merely nodes from which adventure springs and beyond moving from point A to B or buying a ray gun, they do nothing else. I have completely abandoned my plans for designing a complex NPC dialogue system because I realized that the game itself serves that purpose already. There will be complex NPC dialogue trees, they just won't be anything special from a technical standpoint. (Phew.)

I don't know why I keep losing my focus, perhaps it is because I have had the devil of a cold the past few days. Oh well, I should get back to it, I suppose.