Caz's Project Blog

*dusts off the blog*

Just a note to say that I haven't given up on this project, but I've been working on this other game with a group of friends and don't want to split my (procrastination-infused) time doing more projects. Once it's finished, I'll come back to this. It should be 1-2 months at most. When I come back I'll hopefully have more knowledge on how to do this rpg properly.

Thanks for reading, Caz out! 

Nothing interesting to report, just continuing with tilesets, titles, stats and getting the preview done...

The game is coming steadily along. I've been working on the title screen and character generation, which means I've had to finish off the ideas for stats and skills, they're looking adequate for now. I'm going to try and make the stats less of a "strength is for warriors, intelligence is for mages" kind of thing, and make all of the stats useful to most classes in different ways. There's 7 stats in the game - Strength, Endurance, Dexterity, Agility, Intelligence, Will and Charisma.

Decided what I'm going to do about the game's hugeness to make it more manageable, and I'm going to split the game world into five distinct chapters, with the next chapter being unlockable once you finish the previous one. Each chapter will feature a different player character in a different region of the world, so there'll be a lot for me to do plot-wise. Hopefully they'll all be sufficiently different so it won't feel like restarting the game 5 times.

The graphics are looking 'better'. I finished a semi-reasonable few sand tiles and the sea/sea shore, which I'll keep for testing but might redo before release. I'm also starting to wonder what I'm going to do about sound effects, music and such. Music might get irritating on a rpg if it's not varied enough, so I was thinking maybe a generic ambience track or just silence... there will be soundeffects though. Even if they have to be made by my $6 microphone clanging two pots together.

Done nothing game mechanic-y today, well, the difficulty on map regions might count.

I finished the line map for the regions of the Reinhold peninsula and Southern Enas'i. It came out to about 25 regions in Reinhold and over 40 in South Enas'i... so... this game will be huge. I'm still undecided on whether the game will just be in a few of the regions, then I could save the others for a sequel or something... it does seem that using the whole map would make the game needlessly massive.

The title graphics for the opening game window are pretty much done, but I'm still not sure about the background...

I'll be working the rest of the day on tilesets. Note to anyone expecting anything resembling eye-candy - I'm terrificly horrible at graphics. You might even want to hide all pointy objects when playing the game to avoid auto-enucleation. But theatrics aside... yeah, they're going to be crap. Compared to any game made in the last several decades, that is.

Who knows, I might suddenly become awesome at pixel art in the next few months - but don't hold your breath.

There'll probably end up being about 20 or so liquids in the game. You won't be able to pick up a liquid except in a container (an exception would be standing over a barrel of snapple and quaffing some using your hands as a cup), liquids will spread and splatter. Here is a short list of what I have so far:

• water
• blood
• acid
  
• ichor
• slime
• vomit
• vitreous humour
• mud
  
• oil
• venom
• phlegm

Containers will be able to hold different amounts of liquid. Goblets will hold one 'unit', bowls two, jugs four, and barrels about 30.

Unless you happen on a bottle or bowlful or pool of a liquid, it will probably be covering an item or tile. There are four degrees of covering - 'flecked with', 'splattered with', 'covered with' and 'drenched with'.

To put this into game context, I'll tell a story.

You're walking through a dark, underground tunnel with only a torch for light. Suddenly a horrifying creature appears, a giant, unblinking, floating eyeball. You immediately try to slash it to death with your obsidian dagger. When you are done, all that is left is a mushy floating eyeball corpse, the floors and walls and your dagger splattered with vitreous humour. (the clear, slimy fluid of the eye)

You remember that a mage back in town wanted some of the eye juice as part of her experiment. You take out a piece of cloth from your backpack, and soak it in the dripping corpse. Your cloth is now "cloth drenched with vitreous humour", and if you squeeze the cloth into a bottle, you will have "bottle of vitreous humour".

This can only be done with 'drenched' items, each degree of covering actually depicts 1/4 a unit of liquid, but you can't combine splatterings that are less than one unit. (drenched)

Other things I've been working on - solid materials, equipment slots, inventory, melee weapons and tools.

Made a new page on this site which I'll be updating as a devlist. I'm not going to list all the specifics, just the main topics and I'll highlight them when they're being worked on or (gasp) finished. It's really needed for organization or my head would explode. I've done that for most of the games I worked on so far, just doing what came to mind or what needed done... but they were all extremely small projects. Today I hope to get most of the planning done of the things I plan to do - a plan of a plan, essentially. Yes. This will take awhile.

This is Ben.  

He is a crazy old man who thinks that a better way to catch eagles would be to tie 'bird seed' (Whatever strange aberration this is, we have no idea, as eagles only eat barnacles, shrimp, mokefish and sea snails, as is proper)

Ousted by his local community and picked on by the younger generation, Ben resigns himself to living in his small dugout hut beneath the sands, painstakingly crafting kite after kite out of rough turnip canvas, as his fingers slowly stiffen with arthritis, and his eyes blur with yellowish cataracts as the days drift by.

The aim is to have every item on Nyd'Kuhl made from a certain material, which will lend attributes like hardness, durability, rigidity etc. So if you throw a bottle made of glass, it will shatter. If you throw one made of copper however, it might just get dented and lose some durability. For now the main material types are wood, glass, stone, gemstone, metal, cloth and flesh. Liquids will come under some other heading since they won't be able to act without a container. You'll be able to gather these materials from the source, and use them to craft new items as well.

Fishing for Sea Eagles - some strange thematic thing

Being a sailor is a notoriously dangerous occupation in Nyd'Kuhl, and only the most desperate or foolhardy peasants brave the corrupted waters in the tiny boats that are painstakingly crafted from gnarled and brittle murkwood. A group of 5 row out with stone axes, whittling away at any murkwood branch they can find, to gather some more wood for use as implements, weapons or new boats. If they happen across a twisted funneltube tree, they quickly gather the medicinal ooze which drips from the trumpet-like funnel, which is then siphoned into thick glass jars for use by mages and alchemists in the north.

Some sailors are madder than most however, and it is a sailor's sport to 'fish' for sea eagles using flimsy canvas nets. (for all the other inhabitants of Nyd'Kuhl consider it a far too reckless and inane activity, indeed, it is rumoured that the noxious fumes of the ocean do addle the brains of these fishermen and trick them into pursuing such an undignified and excruciating end.)

In the midst of twilight, when most birds are tending to their nests built upon branches of the murkwood tree, the fisherman readies his net while the boat is quietly rowed into range. The net is thrown, connected by a strong thread that the fisherman keeps a hold of to locate their catch in the darkness. If they are lucky, the bird will be tangled in the net and branches long enough for the fisherman to close the net tightly, so that the eagle won't start away and send the sailor tumbling overboard into the flesh-melting waters. If they are even more lucky, the eagle and net will be entwined on the tree and not fall into the luminous algae, rendering the catch inedible. It is a rare night when both of these happen at once, and even rarer still when you factor in how much of the harvested wood is traded to coins, then coins traded to Periwinkle nectar in the hands of the crazy sailors.

Such is life on the Western shores of Reinhold.

Today I worked the most on flora, getting down two types of desert plant, several ocean varieties, and started outlining the creatures on south-western Nyd'Kuhl. Also there's going to be 4 main human empires, not 3.

I'm still converting and expanding on notes, and probably will be for the next week or two.

You definitely won't be able to explore the game with one playthrough. There'll be different skills gained - still not sure if I'm going to do a levelling system or pure stats/skills - and there'll be a limit, so paths that need high search or stealth won't be able to do the paths that need the most leadership and fighting prowess. Still tinkering with that...

Might be another update today.

Today I've been converting all my notes into another book, and making a proper draft of the game map. Also made some decisions on the game's engine as well. 3d and isometric will be too difficult for the epic noobery of Caz, so I'm gonna do a top-down turn-by-turn RPG, a la Spiderweb's Exile. Though that's not a thing to worry about just now. I've also fleshed out the major three human nations of the world, and their respective territories.

Here is the map of the world I've been working on so far.

Most of the towns, settlements and some of the regions are yet to be named...

Other things that have been done are desert and ocean flora, materials, and some nation design.

That's all for now,