I implemented the stunt concept from last time. Here's another older post that explains the basic idea of consumable advantages and disadvantages.
This is what it looks like at the moment. Mik has a 37% chance to stunt, which is so high because the boar is surrounded. Mik has one applicable aspect, called HumansFightDirty. On a successful stunt it will apply a generic disadvantage, which is worth 2 extra damage to the boar or 2 less damage when the boar attacks.
So, over the past few days I've been looking at the history lines for the characters. I pulled up the older, longer-format lines because I think they're easier to map directly to aspects. I went through them (there are three hundred-some all together) and assigned aspects to each one. The aspects are in column C, below.
Then for each of these aspects (there are about a hundred sixty unique aspects) I am defining their effects. Column B is the in-mission effect, C is a plot hook, D is a campaign-level effect (pretty theoretical at this point), column E is what this aspect wants to be when it grows up (offering a chance for growth/redemption over time), column F is the impact the aspect has on the character's social life, and G (not shown) is what this aspect implies about the character's eventual tomb.
I can't believe how draining it's been to do this work. Building this out has really made the game come into focus for me. It feels a lot less nebulous, a lot more concrete. That's scary because I think often my sense of motivation and excitement is tied more to the idea of the project than to the actual implementation itself. But it's also really exciting to see the design taking shape.
So... once all the aspects have effects, I'll have a huge list of things to implement. The other thing I did over the last week or so was to refactor the ability system again(!) It had grown really gross, with unclear boundaries, shared state across triggers, and some really bad bad patterns. It's a good reminder to me not to become complacent. When I turned a critical eye to the system it became clear that there were some really fundamental problems. But hey those are fixed now. We have a nice clean delineation between API and kernel, and the gameplay engine code is now fairly clean and organized. I think this system can now triple in size without getting much more complex. Which is great, because boy do I have a huge list of things to implement :-)
So it looks like Character Advancement Lab will be the next deliverable.
did you say 300 characters? If so, wow that's a lot of characters.
ReplyDelete300+ history lines, each character gets 3 lines to start with. 1 origin, 1 anecdote, 1 motivation. So it works out to about 100x100x100 I guess. So we will definitely have "number of unique characters" covered. The challenge is to make the differences interesting and relevant!
ReplyDeleteso what is the purpose of each? origin, anecdote and motivation as it relates to character 0, turn 0? Or am I totally off?
DeleteRight, that's the issue exactly... We have all these history lines but up till now they haven't had any effect on gameplay. What I'm doing now is going through and figuring out exactly what each one does. The generic effect for an aspect is "increased chance of stunting under some circumstance X" where X might be, "fighting boars" or "in the forest" or "near my one true love." So the result will be that some of your dudes will be better in the forest, some will be better when fighting boars, and some will be better when paired with their soul mates. These are just the histories of the characters up to the point they join your team, so the history effects are intended to be minor/subtle. There will be a whole slew of aspects that you acquire during gameplay, and those will be much more dramatic and character-defining.
ReplyDeleteGoodness Gracious said Tweetie Pie. Makes my drive matrix look like a 5 function calculator with a couple of broken buttons. Best get one or two good guys/bad guys running and squeeze them though the tube before doing a ton of data. I find it best to give the game a chance to tell me what it should be rather than try to figure it all out on my own up front.
ReplyDeleteMy project is on hold until I get another 20,000 words on the story and a 2nd draft in the can. I have been reminded oncde again that multitasking sucks. Doing more stuff more slowly with interruptions. It's pure crap, momentum and flow are everything.