Gold Chest design goals

[sproket]

Hi All,

I just thought I would summarize some of my design goals and ideas around Gold Chest so everyone can get an idea of where I'm heading with this.

First of all I'm maintaining the original feel of these old school games. Same view perspectives, menu system - keyboard oriented. But at each step I'm carefully evaluating what I think were weaknesses and improving on those areas.

First of all I'm not going to be following D&D rules. My thought is to leave the rules open ended so that during the design I won't be constrained. Also, I feel that people just know D&D too well now. There's no mystery in that.

BUT

Gold Chest is designed to be rules neutral. So you will be able to plug in your own rule-sets if you want a strict D&D game.

So I'm looking at thinks like:
Inventory management
Movement and travel
How XP is earned (hint it won't be 100% by killing monsters)
Combat tactics
Player classes

I'll be posting details as I go on my forum as I go.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/goldchest/

 

[Kosmonaut]

Cool! It would be great if you could post a message here whenever you post a new design idea in your forum, just to know.

I'm interested mostly in how to translate from the game rules into programming code (structures, scripts, etc).

I'm starting to program a simple 2D isometric engine. I'm still working on the nuisances of z-ordering and sorting, but parallel to this, I want to try some ideas I have about a RPG ruleset, either in command line program or a GUI app.