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.
Shizotypal and Addicted to Urban Planning
I just thought the title sounded funny, if you must know. In reality I am procrastinating from writing control methods for the "book" module in Project WOTAN. I should be doing it, but I am having issues that, strangely, are not preventing relatively clear and lucid writing.
Also, I think I finally groked Xemerys, the web game billed as a "Hardcore Old-School Online Economic Strategy Game."
Xemerys is fairly hard-core in the sense that it holds no hands for the beginning player. More like slaps them down with a ruler like a frustrated nun. Which is why after having stuck with it now for nearly two weeks, I think I am finally understanding it.
The game is not difficult to learn - anyone familiar with strategy games and especially strategy PBBGs can get started with no trouble and it uses the familiar city-building and empire-managing tropes. But to really get into the flow of how the game works requires some tenacity and a lot of patience. I believe the game's "hard-core" label comes into play here.
Between the industries to produce 20 raw and refined goods, the (somewhat Ikariam-like) transportation system that you actually pay upkeep for while it is active, the multiple levels of Quality of Life that directly affects your ability to tax citizens, to the ability cast offensive and buffing effects on your own city and others, to ... well there are a lot and this isn't a laundry list - you get the picture.
The numerous game mechanics all work together in a sort of mad dance to generate the sort of complexity that I welcome in a web game. It is packaged with the rather unforgiving ratios and durations that stave off instant gratification. It even provides and example of the disassociated PVP that spices up web games without turning them into bullying-grounds.
When I say "disassociated PVP" I mean that players can hurt and hinder each other, but it occurs through an indirect mechanism. As an example, in Nile Online players can attack each others' monument sites but not each others' cities. The capture of a monument has a directly negative effect on the player, but it is not devastating by any means and is really more of a minor hindrance.
As a contrast, in a game like Travian players are expected to conduct PVP directly against each others' establishment and this is supported by an elaborate social heirarchy. In Travian, if you are alone and a new player, your settlement is invariably "farmed" to death. More advanced players and their alliances will conintually attack your settlement to get any resources you have accumulated and aren't protected. This makes advancing your settlement difficult at best; your only recourse is to join an alliance that is strong enough to defend you and, more importantly, is actually willing or motivated to do so.
Xemerys offers an interesting take on the former style of PVP in that it lets you spread offensive effects (hex spells) which cause percentage decreases in various aspects of a player city, be it production, pollution levels or the degree to which your citizens are happy about life, among others. "Propaganda," which is similar to spells but costs in-game money and lasts longer, provides a second means to carry out this activity.
I view these as being more indirect because, while in Xemerys you are only able to have one city and thus the actions are carried out directly on you, they ultimately only serve to reduce the rate at which you are able to be successful - not annihilate your ability to do practically anything in the game. Your city still has the wine or aphrodisiacs or what-have-you that you already produced and so there is no real incentive to habitually cast hexes on new (and therefore insignificant) players. And at the end of the day, Xemerys even provides spells and propaganda to lessen the effects of hexes cast by cantankerous fellow players.
Getting into the flow of the game can be rather difficult for many, though. So while I would recommend giving Xemerys a try, I also recommend to be ready to be patient and read the FAQ and Beginner's Guide. But mostly with the patience, which will be rewarded in the end.
The Wizard’s Tower
Work on Project WOTAN (a web-based gamebook framework) has been proceeding at a fairly solid pace over the past month. I have been hammering down not only the conceptual ideas, but also the actual code. It has really evolved since last year, mainly code-wise and this is entirely due to my increasing familiarity with general programming concepts as well as php itself.
Speaking of which, I have now just a few days ago embarked on my journey into the wild, wooly world of Javascript. "Fuckin shit sucks," I'm tempted to say, but I shall not. I'm merely suffering from a lack of patience and want to be a jQuery AJAX master now, not later. Give me another week and I'll have those user forms completely AJAX-ified, I swear. Really.
I suppose I am feeling the pinch a bit because I have yet again set a date for the initial release of WOTAN: August of this year. I am too lazy at the moment (actually I am tweaking on that sweet, sweet, $("id").click(function(){...}); lovin), but I believe that is actually about one year past the initial release date. I suppose I could search back through the archives but that would be precious minutes away from the jQuery crack-pipe and we simply can not have that, now can we? That also seems rather far away, but with all that is left to do three-four months is not far away at all. I should probably extend it to October ...
So, ahem, yes, August 2010 I will be releasing WOTAN in the form of the web game "The Wizard's Tower."
Like all potential future WOTAN sites, The Wizard's Tower will essentially be a web-based gamebook along the lines of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series or Joe Dever's Lone Wolf saga (a great favorite of mine as a young nerd). The main differences between a gamebook and WOTAN site lie in the technical possibilities and limitations between the two media. In spirit, I hope WOTAN plays much more like a traditional gamebook than what we might now think of as an "RPG."
And what story will The Wizard's Tower feature? I have actually been deeply considering this very question, and while I do not want to reveal too much, I am basing a great deal of it on Plato's Timaeus. And, of course, it will be set in the sort of generic dragons'n'warriors universe we have all come to know and love as it has evolved over the past couple-hundred years or so. While I'm not sure it could be considered high fantasy, as I am not sure I am capable of writing anything other than moral ambiguity, that is what I am going for.
And my plans for the story are also considering that I am running on schedule. I will be testing the site with a random dungeon generator and if I am too constrained for time I may have to launch with that in place and relegate the fleshing-out and writing of actual plot lines to post-launch site updates.
So that sums up WOTAN as of May 2010:
- php code and html markup coming along nicely and on-schedule
- UI in the form of AJAX components just barely started and I am worried this will fall behind schedule due to my inadequate skill level with javascript
- making me say things like "fuckin shit sucks" and refer to concepts like "stress head-aches"
Of course, I love it. And that reminds me, I need to find an artist whose willing to basically work for free out of an abiding love for interactive fantasy novels with neo-platonic/gnostic cosmological symbolism. Peace of cake, right?
Blogs I Read
- Brian Psychochild Green
- Combat Archaeology
- Elder Game
- Hardcore Casual
- Kill Ten Rats
- Killed In A Smiling Accident
- LOTRO Combo Blog
- OSG1 – Online Strategy Games
- Pumping Irony
- Ralph Koster
- Stylish Corpse
- The Core Mechanic
- Tish Tosh Tesh
- Troll in the Corner
Browser Games I Play
Fortuente Pages
Game Sites I Like
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