Weekly Schlep
First, I have to get this off my chest:
I think the move by Turbine to make LOTRO f2p is a bad idea. Based on its core design of heavily-instanced PVE encounters, I thought f2p was great idea applied to DDO ... but I have a bad feeling it is going to prove difficult to implement in the open world of LOTRO. However, I do think it is possible to pull off, so we'll see. The main thing I am worried about is a drastic increase in the already problematic issue of inappropriate names. Somehow I don't think there were any elves running around Lindon named "Drzztforchris" or dwarves mining the Iron Mountains named "Iwillchopu." Unfortunately for me, it breaks the game. Oh well - I am sure this fall I will be logging in for at least a bit to see what it's like.
WOTAN
Now that I have dealt with that bit of unpleasantness, I will move on to what I am really here to write about, and that is my weekly report on my non-epic schlep trek called Project WOTAN, the online single-player RPG/gamebook/pbbg/pcp/nwa/insert-cliche-or-acronym-here.
I am actually a bit ahead of schedule at this point, having finished the basics of the Treasure and Power modules. August is still looking good, though I wonder if I will be able to launch The Wizard's Tower as I had planned, or rather focus more on launching the code for WOTAN as FOSS. I am still undecided, and am leaving that decision for July so I can better gauge what is left to be done.
If, by early-July, I do not feel like I can pull off at least one decently-written gamebook to start TWT, then I will likely focus more on the generic engine. I realized that a demo site for WOTAN could function just as well as a game site in its own right. And rather than attempt to launch TWT prematurely with a randomized gamebook generator, I could make a site devoted entirely to randomized adventures with less relative effort than writing something I want to actually be taken seriously. Besides, OSS or not, I need to have a site that is diverse enough to show off what WOTAN can do, right?
The basic WOTAN site would eventually come to comprise many gamebooks mostly having no relation to each other. Whereas TWT or a site like it is meant to be taken itself as a series of books, there could be several concurrent series in wildly different genres with wildly different gameplay running on the "official" WOTAN site.
This morning I took a couple screenshots of my progress. Below is the basic User Control Panel. The same page virtually ever site in the world has. You'll notice that I have included a user avatar, which is actually a Gravatar. I am also strongly considering implementing an OpenID option for logins.
The basic User Control Panel
I know, it's hella rough looking, but obviously this is still an alpha work-in-progress. Below is an example of one of the things I did this past week, the Book Admin interface for the Treasure module.
Adding Treasure types to a Book.
I purposely left a custom tag, {book_name}, open so you can see how I am populating my static pages with data. So, in the pertinent view class for the Treasure module (in this case the auxiliary class treasure_widget) I merely use preg_replace to insert data from the database onto the page. (I am a big fan of preg_replace, lol.)
I probably should have used a pre-existing template engine, like Smarty for instance, but I chose not to. While not using one has been a learning experience, I have a feeling that in the future I will probably turn to an existing system.
This week I will be finishing up the core modules and their respective admin interfaces. I am expecting to create the admin panels for the Book-Page submodule to be something of a pain. I also have to create a whole other subsystem for the basic Character object. My goal is to have all these things done within the next 11 days, Friday June 18.
After I have all the core modules and their adminstration views (panels, interfaces, whatever you want to call them) essentially finished, probably 75% of the site will be complete as it will have all its basically functionality. Then I will be moving on to creating the views for the end user, the whole point for the site existing in the first place. And so during this time I will also be doing the bulk of the graphic design and it is looking like I am going to have to brush off my far-too-dusty pencils and actually create some artwork as well.
I am planning for July to consist mainly of polishing the site and adding non-core modules to the game. The most important of these modules will consist of character tracking and statistics, and possibly also a mechanism to cache data. I have also chosen mid-July as my final deadline for deciding on whether or not to put the WOTAN svn code repository on Google or GIThub and releasing it as GNU.
Either way, we should be seeing an August release of something interesting.
Frame Work
I am still working on Project WOTAN. I am gradually cleaning up what is already there code-wise while managing to (albeit slowly) implement features. Last week I managed to add in the basic functionality for administering pages of a gamebook. A lot of the page's functionality is not yet written, however.
The main reason is that last week the greater part of my time was spent, aside from cleaning-up code debt and some unfortunate back-tracking, on creating a simple way to catch user errors. The sad thing about that is that I likely spent too much time on it considering it will have to be heavily modified for the live game and is largely for my own benefit at this point. Oh well!
The good news is that I am preparing to work on the other core Book modules and I hope to burn through those in a relatively quick manner. What are the modules that will all work together to make a Book a gamebook? The heirarchy is something like this:
Book
The Book is the main module that ties together all the others. A book is a self-contained adventure that, while using all the basic concepts of a WOTAN game, will allow for a wide variety of customization. In other words and for example, a character can have skills in one book that may not be present in another. Or a character may have an item only available from a certain book.
Care has been taken to ensure, however, that a character will be able to keep certain items, powers, money, et al and move them between books. It is conceivable that some books in a series may require it, as in a case where an item picked up in book 2 of the series may be needed to complete an objective in book 5 (this is just an example).
Page
Page is the main module (sub-module, I suppose) for the Book. After all, what is a book without pages?
These will be what is thought of when you as an end user think about the game. Like Book ahead of it, Page ties directly into the other Book modules, and is rather bland without them. Though one could create a WOTAN website without the benefit of the other modules, though one would end up with something that is more interactive fiction than gamebook. More like Choose Your Own Adventure and less like Lone Wolf.
Power
Power is the module that controls and defines what powers a character has in a book. These can be anything the book author likes, essentially. You can have three powers in a book or 30. These will form the basis for the extremely basic conflict resolution system that is still quite close to what I envisioned last year. The most notable difference, however, is that the book's author will be able to control what type of die is used in the book: currently including d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20 and d100. But as of now dice pools are still in.
Powers will also be only loosely coupled to the book, as with all the Book's modules aside from Page. Meaning if your character plays book X and acquires the lock-picking skill, he will carry that into subsequent books (even if they have no use for that power). As with the example above about carrying items through books in order to solve extended puzzles or unlock special content, the same can be said of powers. Perhaps in a given series only Book 2 makes use of lock-picking, but book 5 has a special locked door that can be picked with the skill - if you happen to have it.
Background
Backgrounds are a little pieces of character information that one earns in the course of adventuring. They could almost be thought of as "achievements" in the gaming sense, but hopefully not asinine. Getting a background will earn your character a bit of flavor text (i.e. "Couch Potato" or "Savior of Planet Lesbos") as well as a power modification (from previous example, -3 Stamina or +2 Sexiness). These will also be carried from one book to the next.
Item
Items are what they sound like, and if you have even a passing familiarity with RPGs then I need say no more. One thing, however, I am very much considering is disallowing the creation of "magical" items in the game entirely. That is to say, there won't be any amulets of +1 intelligence or swords of +1 damage.
The reasoning for such a decision is twofold: 1) I would like to encourage deep customization of the actual character itself rather than character equipment in a sense for personal philosophical reasons, and 2) (the main reason) it will make creating the Item module that much faster. However, me being me and not wholly different from your typical RPG nerd, power-modifying items will more than likely have a home in WOTAN.
Treasure
Treasure is anything that can be used as currency. Basically, I just like the way the word treasure sounds as opposed to money or currency. Wealth will be important both as a gauge for "success" at the game, but also to use at npc merchants. Typical RPG fare.
A notable thing about both Treasure and Items: they will have physical weight. Rather than use a common gamebook convention (also shared by video games like Diablo and Torchlight) and limit carried items by an arbitrary number of spaces in the virtual backpack, I plan on using the more PnP-like convention of limiting items carried by their weight.
While this also makes for a bit more coding, another trade-off is that I will have to have at least one character power created by default for all gamebooks. However, considering hit points will also likely be needed in 99% of the books written with WOTAN, I think combining weight-possible and hit points into one mandatory power will not be terribly limiting to authors. It also introduces more strategy in the sense that the more damage you take the less you can carry.
Movement
I also have planned at least one other super-power (so to speak), that will be mandatory in all books: Movement. Movement points are spent to move between pages of the book, and will be a fixed number to all players that regenerate over time as they are spent. Why do this?
This will limit players from spending all their time on the site in one big burst. I certainly hope that the site will interesting enough for people to want to crack out on it for hours at a time. That would be worth more than anything else, I think, but I also do not think it is a likely eventuality though I hope for the best. However, if a WOTAN site were to get some sort of Slashdot effect and everyone thought it was Web Christ and couldn't get enough - then having movement points in place could play a significant part in keep site traffic reasonable.
Another reason is purely as a money-maker. While I don't aim to try and "get rich" from any WOTAN site, sites do cost money to run and right now this is pretty much all I do, work-wise. So every little bit counts. But rather than merely troll for donations, offering increased Movement points or regeneration rates will offer those who would probably donate otherwise something in return for their kindness. Of course, this also begs the question of whether or not I will be able to actually produce something people will want to pay for. I also plan on offering free movement bonuses in the usual fashion, i.e. in exchange for referrals or by converting in-game currency into points.
But again, I stay hopeful since I will be using my own desire to play the game as gauge for quality control. If I think it sucks, then it will either need to change or die. If I love it, then there are bound to be others out their on the tubes who will love it also.
Plato, Plotinus and Planescape
Plato, Plotinus and Planescape ... what do these things have in common? While I wish this post was going to be a thoughtful and thorough examination of how these two men relate to and have influenced the famed TSR game world, sadly it is not. Rather, they are all playing roles in influencing how I will be writing the books for my upcoming PBBGB (Persistent, Browser-Based GameBook -- clumsy I know, but eventually I will hit on a decent acronym), The Wizard's Tower.
Spoiler Alert!
I am writing about the general story concepts now because I have yet to even begin writing the actual story, as I am still doing research and also still hammering down the actual game code, but I thought I would post a SPOILER ALERT warning for those in the future who may look for information about the game. Because while I have my doubts anyone in the future will care, I am positive nobody at this time does, otherwise I would not publish my thoughts at all. But at least I hope what I am writing is interesting.
A peculiar thing about me is that whenever I come up with an idea for a story I almost invariably come up with the ending first and generally write backward. So I can say without hesitation what the ultimate ending of The Wizard's Tower will be: the realization that your character is dead and has been dead the whole time. But I am getting waaaayyy ahead of myself.
The Wizard's Tower will be comprised of several "books," or they could be thought of as major sections or chapters. This is largely to keep me motivated in writing them and allow me to (hopefully!) make my August deadline. It will be much, much easier to launch in August with one book and another on the way then try to push a year or two worth of writing into the next couple months (and at the same time write the code for a functioning gamebook web site to host the work).
First, let's examine how the story will relate to Planescape ... not that deep, I am afraid. It just sounded good in the title of this post. The main way that the two would be similar is in the type of "world" they present to the player.
If you already aren't familiar, the Planescape game-world is divided into many planes of reality that are all connected to a central plane of reality called the city of Sigil. This is best imagined as a wheel, with the spokes representing the connections of the diverse realities to the central hub. The Wizard's Tower will have an almost identical concept, though the imagery will be quite different.
In the Wizard's Tower, the central hub is the tower itself and it is the central connection to various realities (i.e. planes of existence). These realities are represented as sections of a large garden and each section will be its own book. Which means, while I do have an over-arching plot I am working out, this allows me to accomplish it in three books or 300. It all depends on how much time I have and my motivation for producing new books.
OK, so we have the rather superficial way that TWT is related to the Planescape universe, but I am certain you are scratching your head about the references to two philosphical heavyweights of the ancient world I referenced.
In rather feckless terms, Plato was the founder, and Plotinus the re-founder of the Platonic school of thought (which I will refer to as Neoplatonism). My real goal with TWT is to explore some of the important themes and concepts of Platonic and Neoplatonic thought as read in Plato's Dialogues and Plotinus' Enneads. I also plan to use them to compare related and unrelated schools of thought like Gnosticism, Heathenism, Buddhism and Taoism, just to rattle off the ones immediately important to me (and therefore likely to find their way in).
Here, however, is where we really get into spoiler territory. I want to talk about my overall vision for the story, so stop reading if you care. If not, go ahead.
The story begins with the protagonist (is you! ala Choose Your Own Adventure) waking up in an immense and wild forest. Visually I would model it after the immense redwood forests of my adopted home, the American Pacific Northwest. Big-ass trees, ferns and thick fog everywhere -- you half-expect to see a dinosaur come lumbering by. But I digress.
You wander for days in the forest, which is so deep and dark you aren't able to tell the difference between day and night. You are forever in fear from the constant din of threatening animal sounds. You stumble along in complete disorientation and lose all track of time. Then, after an unknowable time of wandering aimlessly, you stumble into a bright clearing and as your eyes adjust to the bright light of the sun you see that there is a large tower set smack dab in the middle of the glade.
The tower looks immense, perhaps big enough to house 10-15 people and I am imagining the glade to look about perhaps 5-10 acres in size. The glade is completely covered with an ornate and well-tended garden. Think Victorian England. The garden extends to the edge of the forest and its ordered appearance contrasts starkly with the tangled, dark mess of the forest. The whole place reeks of strange energy ... that feeling you get when you know something is not quite right.
As soon as you step into the garden you realize that the garden and tower are not what they appear. I am currently undecided about how to portray the dimensions here.
- On one side I want for the garden to be as large as a small world and the tower resides at its center. The books involve you traveling through the world-garden to reach the tower.
- On the other side, the tower and garden are as they appear on the outside, but the sections of the garden represent a plane of reality in which you travel to from a mechanism in the tower to retrieve clues to unlock the mystery of the tower. I am currently leaning in this direction.
So what does this have to do so far with my eloi-like pseudo-intellectual nonsense? The sections of the garden will represent parts of a person's life as exemplified by a concept from Plato or Plotinus. Within each, you will be forced to make decisions about some basic reality-constructs that we as members of Western civilization take for granted. Also there will be plenty of monsters and obstacles to overcome and death-defying exploits to perpetrate as well the usual villains, rogues and swooning maidens. What's the point if you leave out all the cool stuff?
While I have yet to finalize how I will treat what will be the final book, the goal of collecting the clues in alternate realities or of the journey across a garden-world, there will be an ultimate goal that connects everything. As of now, I envision that the tower is inhabited by a (male) wizard and a female character whom I have not decided how to represent yet. She will either be trapped by the wizard at the top of the tower and freeing her will be the object of your overall quest, or she will be an equal countervailing force to the wizard as you are manipulated through the garden. In either sense, your ultimate goal after X books will be to encounter the pair in the tower.
A bit cliched, perhaps, but the wizard represents the Demiurgos and the woman represents Sophia. It was this bare concept that initially choose Neoplatonism as what I wanted to explore with The Wizard's Tower. I also plan on using a lot of dichotomies (most straight from Plato but not all) to explore relationships between materialism (Demiurge) and spiritualism (Sophia). It will also make for a dramatic ending that is sure to be hella sweet.
So here is where my internal monologue gets especially spoilery for those of you listening in. You have been forewarned.
So if the eventual confrontation between the Wizard and the Lady (as I have taken to calling her, but I am leaning toward calling her Isis) is the dramatic conclusion of TWT's over-arching story, then what is the denouement? What is the purpose for all of this? Phat Lewtz?
No, my friend, no phat lewtz. I plan on inserting easter eggs from the beginning that will hopefully allow the player to see what I revealed above in the hidden text. I plan on pulling an Owl Creek Bridge and having the entire story relate to someone coming to terms with their own death.
The forest is akin to limbo, the chaos where the eternal meets the temporal: the outlands of the universe. It is to here where your (meaning protaganist) spirit travels to after your body dies. The time spent wandering in the forest is your incorporeal self coming to terms with no longer being a material being and subject to the whims of the material. Something like a scab on an old wound, "you" (and here we can pull in some Freud and Jung for kicks - I need to remember to read up on them) do not actually realize that you are dead. And so you create your dream-like pseudo-world where "you" can live on. But it is not real, and you have to move on and leave that artifact of your material existence, that which makes you "you," behind you.
So the clues that you pick up in the books ... while you think you will be picking them up to solve the riddle of the tower, they will actually be letting you know that you are really dead and that you are in a dream world your misguided spirit has created. The trick is in being as subtle as possible so that most people in the audience will have no idea, but at the end slap their head and say "I KNEW IT ALL ALONG!"
I also find an excellent mirror in various Platonic writings to give me both a direction and something of a blueprint, but also give the story real depth and meaning beyond being a mere diversion from work or school for the bored malaisiatics of this dream world we call the Interwebz.
The end will have your character realize that he or she is a ghost and ascend the tower to the next level and thus the story will be over. This will either be accomplished by "rescuing the maiden" (i.e. gaining wisdom) or by navigating the channel between reason (Demiurge) and intuition (Sophia) who are both guardians of the tower and have been testing you. Not sure which route to take yet, though I like the fairy-tale aspects of the former.
Blogs I Read
- Brian Psychochild Green
- Combat Archaeology
- Elder Game
- Hardcore Casual
- Kill Ten Rats
- Killed In A Smiling Accident
- LOTRO Combo Blog
- Open Bracket
- 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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