KK, so what I've been doing in recent months for my projects:
- Since summer, we've been recoding the X Caeli from the scratch. Well, it's been a bit less than that - the design was made in the summer, but we've only found a coder at the end of the october. For 3 months of work, the progress is rather steady - we've done 5/5 ships, 5/5 shields, 5/12 weapons, 1/4 specials and 2/10 traits. The groundworks is also set up as well as some work on the visual novel element. We've decided to ditch the gamepad this time - that thing is a fucking waste of time, tbh. Takes too much effort (because you can't just add it - you need to design the entire GUI around it and it makes the GUI shitty as a result, duh) and the payoff is not likely to be there. The game logic is flowing steadily and the toughest part that remains are the effects. We plan to return at the stage of our previous demo by the april (or so).
- I'm kinda growing retarded with years. Or more retarded, I dunno. Anyhow, now that I have to check the implemented features in terms of how they're working, I have to consult our wiki relentlessly. Even when that's my design and writing - I'm like "so who's done this shit?" Don't recognize a thing. Design is awesome, though. First, I've made it much more top-down, flavor-wise. Our gear is called many arcane names and, previously, that was kinda glued on for no reason. Now, if a ship is called "Testament" then it gives you extra reward if you follow the rules it sets. If a weapon is called "Parable" (our protagonist is an evil deity) then it requires some thinking and calculation. If a weapon is called "Genesis" then it creates stuff. This time, I'm trying to make esoteric stuff reasonable. Same goes for the name, btw - X Caeli shall become a suffix and I'll invent something more reasonable than that. So people can clearly see what the plot is about.
- The game is still pretty difficult to get in - the forgetfulness part really helps to understand it. Still, the good and complex design of the weaponry sorta makes it mandatory. I have two solutions - first is color-coding it all for player's convenience so more things can be understood at a glance, requiring less reading. Color-coding is great tool to assist memorization so I'm not sure why it's not utilized as much - if you want to craft complex RPG systems, make them easy to learn, dammit. Second is the plan to give the player a healthy dose of presets so, if he feels lazy or unsure, he can just load up whatever the game offers him. That's not hardcore, but that's what people want. And I'm not even talking about mainstream folks - a ton of Underrail & AoD's audience wants that - believe me, I know.
- I've been able to rid myself of some stupid RPG pre-dispositions. The easiest to talk about is the context oversensitivity. You see (this'll sounds offensive on the RPGcodex, but who gives a fuck), the problem with many RPG systems and their admirers is that they care not about the function, but the formality. Like, you may have two different character builds and, in terms of the gameplay, they're both about clicking foes to the death or just spamming some bland AoE nuke, but no-no, they're totally different, you see, one is build from attribute A and the other - from attribute B! Fucking shit, don't you understand, you have to take an entirely different arrays of feats and multiclassing for that to work, that's so awesome!!! No, it's not, it's bullshit. It may "work" in niche stuff like Dungeon Rats (its fans really want to believe that that works), but overall that's a dead end. If it's a different class/build/archetype (in our case - different ship setup), it has different gameplay. Period and no exceptions. Even in the game as simplistic as Space Invaders, there's still enough mechanical space to implement that. Not to speak of the bigger genres. Honestly, the reason why most of the world doesn't give a fuck about hardcore RPGs is that the gameplay is just shit once you look past the numbers. Sure, the numbers may be part of the gameplay, but they're the bones, not the actual meat.
- Since the design work on X Caeli is done, I'm moving to our next project - the bio-postapoc roguelike. I've already mentioned it, but that was long time ago - we were not sure what to do. Now we are. I've kinda done the design already, lol, now I just need to remember it all (I'm undisciplined so I don't write the stuff down) and add more versimilitude to it. The core principles are the 100% deterministic system (the world is randomly generated, but combat is all about smarts), rich combat system (our graphics will be minimalistic, like, really, but we'll use the upside of that - our game will be one of the very few where you will be able to use some nice moves on the foes; push them, throw them, choke them, use the surroundings to your advantage, etc.), wasteland-style search of the quest answers and stat boosts on the global map. Our protagonist is a sentient alien/tyranid-like mutant so RPG system will be quite natural - you don't level up, you evolve and adapt. With all the logical strings attached. We're only starting, but at the very least all the channel work begins to bring its fruits, bringing us a volunteer coder to boost our strength. Let's see if I'll be able to conjure something in terms of the artist too, even though we plan to have minimalistic graphix (probably as complex as Wasteland I, lol), art style still means a lot.
. Disregard the ugly texture stretching at the cliff walls, as I intend to cover it with actual cliff mesh later on.
