I made a spreadsheet

I like to keep track of my progress as I work on a project. I usually work in a text file with one line per goal or task, and I move that line up above a separator when it's done. Feels good. Helps keep me focused. Today as I was working on Legacy though it was just too confusing. There were a bunch of items that were unclear, or blocked, or in the wrong order. So I separated them out into separate backlogs, based on category, and then I prioritized them inside those categories. Then I put em in a spreadsheet so that you can see the backlogs side by side. The nice thing about the spreadsheet also, is that I can make little notes next to each one, mostly about whether I'm blocked on something. So I could see that even though we keep saying fun combat is the most important, it's super blocked. And I guess that's why I keep working on other stuff, like map generation, mission rendering, site generation, campaign screens, etc..

According to this backlog, which should be shared with y'all, the next thing I'll be doing is working on mission rendering and site generation. The goal is to be able to generate good looking mission maps that will create interesting combat situations. By then hopefully we can figure out how to move forward with combat, which is currently blocked on a nexus of game design and art concerns, things like "what does it look like when I attack?" and "how should line of sight work?" which will feed into "monster AI."

Let me know what you think of the backlog, especially if you think things are out of order!

Possible First View

Very rough, I want to do another pass on this and play with the style.

I remember talking (with Nate?) about what we wanted the player's very first experience to be. Like you hit "campaign button" or whatever, and what happens next? A possible scenario is: you're thrown into an introductory battle (I don't want to use the word "tutorial," but it could serve that purpose).

Oh shit! Your village is being attacked by these weird beasts!

They've probably busted some walls and knocked over a lantern and started a fire somewhere because atmosphere, am I right?

All of the villagers except for your bravest three or four heroes have fled, and these guys & gals are left to defeat (or at least drive off) the beasts. You do this, learn the basics of combat with your pitchforks and magical spoons, and when you win, then...

Well then I guess you either go set up a base or go to some more towns or who knows what.

I know we had mentioned another possible starting scenario to be busting out of a wizard's tower and claiming it as your base. Thoughts?

A more representative map

Here's the latest from the map generator. New art, and scaled down to fit the aspect ratio that Legacy uses. Play around with it! We also have grasslands and lakes in the pipe. But I think this is starting to fell pretty compelling.

The Vendor

If you make it through the forest, past the river, past that giant tree, past the Things With Spikes (oh, you've never been that far? Well, you'll know them when you see them), and through a stretch of ash-colored trees that seem to go on forever, you may end up quite suddenly in a field. There's a village in the middle of that field. The cows there are shaggy and the people are quiet.

You may notice a house there with what looks like a stall out front, though it hasn't been used in years. Grigory Crosswing used to sell all sorts of rare materials and trinkets there. Best ingredients in the land for those potions you'd never tell your mother about. Supposedly he swore it off after some odd tentacles he sold ended up making people...

"...ill."

We'll go with "ill."

He doesn't like to talk about it, but it sounds like it may have something to do with those beasts you encountered. Assuming you make it to the village, and assuming he's even still alive, he may be able to tell you how he came across those cursed tentacles.

Hope your scouts are up for it.

Multiple Bases for the One-Base Man

So, thinking about it some, I do like the idea of expansions, but find that the ways in which they're often executed lead to boredom/frustration for me, as a player, becoming bogged down in clerical work!? In a viyograme?! Unacceptable.

Let's start with some examples of games that I think are in a similar genre to Legacy, or at least have a similar perspective (a strategy-layer/overland map with a combat-map/-gameboard):

Master of Magic/Master of Orion 2 (and 1, to a lesser extent)/CivNet/Civilization (Etc. [I'm not gonna list, like, all the f***ing games in the world, people {yeah, people!}])

So, in these games, you begin with your town, and you name it something appealing to you, with maybe an ethnic flair depending on the storyline you're deciding to write for this particular playthrough. That's good. At your town, you build structures that enable you in multiple ways, from unlocking new units and structures to providing resources, rewards, or abilities, to also just making your town look more badass. This is all also good. So let's see. I think that's about all that I think is really good about town/expansion philosophy in these games.

After becoming familiar through multiple playthroughs at increasing difficulties, what you notice is that the computer player is ruthlessly expanding, and so should you, because that's how you optimize your in-game power. What this sort of expansion requires, however, is a meticulous slowing down of your turns as you manage troops, ensure that the appropriate queues are in progress, and that resource rates are all optimized as well, since frequently, ideally, you're stretching your resources to their absolute limit. The more you expand, the more these management responsibilities mount up, and the slower and slower your turns become. The game becomes about maintaining build orders, essentially, and then the AI attacks and stomps half of your towns because they haven't been properly defended, updated, you were spread too thin, etc. 

While this is beginning to sound like an apt metaphor for our lives as human beings... as a game... this. Just sucks. It takes most of the awesome out of building legions of ships, or even just bands of barbarians.

What I like about Oldschool XCOM Bases/Expansions

- Different staffs of soldiers among which leaders can rise, or be brought in. 

- Didn't punish you for expanding or not expanding. Simply offered you some game-features and story-options (for the story that you're constantly telling in your head while you play the game.... .... ...) 

- I beat the game with three bases. I also could have beat it with one or eight, if I really wanted to.

- There wasn't a complex build-order to be followed or too many particular required structures. Merely options and conveniences.

- Base-building was in depth enough to give each base its own character (layout was customizable, and what buildings you chose to build there, and the location and name)

- Bases were attacked, but you could almost always defend them, since being staffed with soldiers. It wasn't low-stakes, because the soldiers themselves would not all make it through the mission, and heroes would be born, and heroes would fall, fighting for the base. 

How do we do it right?

It sounds like I'm saying, let's make XCOM. And I don't want to lie, that game is one of the best I've played. It also has some two really annoying features that sometimes really sour me on the game (OP mind control, OP blaster bombs).

I want our game to be different, I want it to be its own. I also want to improve on games like XCOM, not be different for the sake of being different, and at the cost of fun/playability. Anyway I think we should aim close to the XCOM model on bases/expansion. I have one fortress in the beginning. At some point, I choose to build a new fortress up by those mountains over there, to be more in range of some new embattled territories. At another point I'm like, yeah, I'll probably win soon, but it would be cool to have a fortress over there, and maybe explore some more that foresty area that's kind of out of the way. Maybe I'll find some interesting sites there. Etc. 

Thoughts?

Interface Study - World Map

None of this is functional yet, but this is the basic layout I'm thinking of.

• Similar to the in-mission view, the top bar will be administrative (actually 'Heroes' should be replaced with things like save,load,menu, options or whatever). 
• The bar on the left lets you select bases, and the action bar at the bottom lets you take action with those bases. 
• The panels on the right show you global stuff, and will have a few buttons for advancing time or activating missions (or deep-diving into lore?)

Does this more or less match what you have in mind? Is there any missing functionality? Functionality we don't need?

Oh hi

I made this blog for us to share thoughts about the game we're building.

I'm seeding it with some of the stuff I wrote over the last few weeks to get my juices flowing. It's unlisted so it should be just us. Game development is fun and interesting!

A Story Driven Map

Well, I made the map generator. I made it in actionscript, and I made it render with Stage3D. It uses what I'm going to call a "story driven algorithm," which is to say a loose collection of heuristics that each aim to capture my ideas of what a good hand drawn map should look like. Things like how mountains fit together, how towns should be distributed, and how forests are seeded and grow over time. Things you may note, that are unrelated to plate tectonics, erosion, and such, and that don't rely on techniques like perlin noise.

  I think the story-driven metaphor might work for me. It might help me break out from a lot of the completionist and simulationist traps that I so easily fall into, while still providing the flexibility I'm after in the long run. Which is to say, I don't need to spend a few years carefully tuning an advanced perlin noise algorithm to give me an endless scalable fictional world, and I don't need to even start with that at all. I can start with the result I'm after: a hand drawn map. And as long as that map looks reasonable, I can stop there. The flexibility though.. that comes next.

Because when you have an algorithmically generated map, and algorithmically generated ancestors, well then you can get up to all sorts of algorithmically generated fun, can't you? Towns, Cities, Wars, Tombs, Catacombs, Villains, all the good stuff. All baked into the map before the game begins. As rich a fabric as you care to automatically weave.

But next, not that. Next, some kind of iteration on the first mission, the base, and the second mission.

Unspecified motivation wells within

Still restless. I keep going over Tiny Game, Legacy, and other ideas in my head, trying to get an angle, a piece I can bite off and chew. One angle I really kindof like is the super-rich story generation we had going on earlier. I think if we added some metadata to that stuff that made it more meaningful (stats, historical figures, connections, questlines), then it could be a really interesting sort of sandbox, a funny mix of auto-generation and careful hand-crafting. It might be quite pleasing.

One thing that keeps, keeps tripping me up is the world map. I see stuff like Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft and it's ridiculously intimidating. I don't have 2-3 years to tune my world generator. And it seems like a waste to chase that particular train anyway. It's already left the station.

So what about a flat, abstract map, with "hand drawn" features like mountains, forests, the kind of world map that a FF 2-6 game might boast? A collection of biomes, globbed together? That seems like a reasonable canvas, right?

If that level of fidelity is our baseline, then there's a 'town' tile that you zoom into, where ---NO!

nope. There are characters, who have interesting backstories, who move between abstract towns. Towns have stats and citizens even but not maps. Over time we'll build up either a site map generator or a collection of hand drawn site maps. But it doesn't matter much, because that's just for the combat, and should serve the needs of the combat.

The balance between farmers and bandits is something that no game I've ever played has gotten right. Between rabbits and wolves. But if towns are abstract, why not simulate 100 peasants for every bandit? What the hell. It's not like it's that expensive. Then just let people die and be buried, let random encounters create nameless graves that dot the landscape, a network of named sites with rich histories built by the real people of the land. On THAT canvas have a series of missions. Over time improve the fidelity of the auto-generated terrain, histories, and monsters.

Wow how do I always go here? I always end up back at simulating the effing world.

Remember that Crystalis game Isaac was talking about? It could also live in this sort of world. Well. Someday. Not at first.

It seems like all sign point towards "Nate wants to do some world generation." So here goes. It will be exposed as a service in the legacy server, legacy.debug.world.generate.

I want to play this game.

I am really excited about it. But, I don't feel like I have a clear path from where I am to what I want. Why is that? Part of it is that I can't decide what I'm targetting, single player or multi player experience. Except that, the game I am most immediately excited by is the single player game. The multi player game is only... theoretically exciting to me. I keep imagining trying to get a group of friends together to play it and it seems a little silly. Probably because I'm also the guy who can't invite people to play LoL with him. but whatever this isn't about trying to solve my character flaws. This is about making a game I'm excited about.

So if I were in a planning session and my PO was all, "crap how are we gonna ever do this you guys," what would I say?

Aha, that reveals an interesting idea, what I do all day at work, is surrender my product ownership. It's an intentional tactical choice in that environment, but for legacy, I NEEED to be owning the decisions. I mean no one else will, and that's not a knock on them, it's just that I have the passion and the power, and I should drive it. I want and need other people to own their contributions, but I should probably just drive the overall project vision.

So. I seem to think having a client/server model is crucially important. I've spent a bunch of time on this java server and it doesn't feel wrong to me. I like a lot of things about it. But the game I want to play is the single player campaign. So how can I get to a compelling campaign experience quickly, so that I may iterate upon it?

Thinking, client connects to server, new campaign, generate a roster of heroes and a (flat!) map. There is 1 mission which is some gorgons attacking your town. Small hand drawn map. The AI literally does nothing.

You get some rewards from the first mission in the form of research options, a base, and some gold and monsterparts or whatever. You can research things, which takes time, and go on missions, which takes time. From here, pick the worst feeling part and make it feel more awesome, and keep doing that.