04 October 2008
Written by
Gareth (
)
Published on October 4th, 2008 @ 12:17:41 pm, using 407 words, 38 views
Another period of lessened posting frequency has hit here on the Blog of War; over-work induced, as usual. Another Saturday spent at the office, another weekend which adds to my fatigue instead of reduces it. Bah.
Well, at least there’s hope. I’m working like an SOB right now but the promised land of vacation time and holidays down the coast looms on the horizon. I just need to grit my teeth and push through.
And buy shit. Buying shit helps. Retail therapy. I’ve been buying anything that catches my fancy, media wise. DVDs, books (including the latest Dresden Files), games, whatever. I don’t have much “down time” so shiny new entertainment helps refresh the mind. Or that’s what I tell myself. In reality, when you’re overworked, you feel kind of resentful towards life in general, so you feel like you deserve to have the things you want.
Oddly enough, I’ve been buying games I usually wouldn’t. I bought Crysis, even though I almost never buy shooters. And today I picked up Sacred 2. Action RPGs have to really stand out to tempt me, and Sacred suffers from an extreme case of “teenage male pandering", something which usually sets my teeth on edge. Seriously, does the Seraphim need to run around in a thong? Argh, who am I kidding, there are plenty of adult men who love that. Bah. What makes it worse is I generally play the mage, which means that in this case I get stuck with the teenage-girl like High Elf eye-candy.
At least Diablo 3 will let me choose gender with my class, thank goodness. I’m one of those weird males who DOESN’T play every RPG as a scantily clad young woman.
But yes, returning to my point. Not games I’d usually buy. Yet I’m enjoying Crysis, I think I’ve gotten into “genre rut” over time, as far as my gameplay habits are concerned, where I don’t play as much variety of genres as I used to. So it is kinda refreshing. And I’m hoping Sacred 2, which is taking half an hour to install, will be similarly entertaining.
Can anyone tell me if Hinterland is worth the purchase? And worth re-installing bloody Steam again?
Well, this has been a fairly pointless post. But at least you know I’m not dead. Well, half and half, really. Anyway, I’m going off to grind monsters and loot for gear that lets me grind bigger monsters and shinier loot.
Later.
29 September 2008
Written by
Gareth (
)
Published on September 29th, 2008 @ 05:19:33 am, using 1261 words, 186 views
Well, I had a fun weekend. I spent it doing a bit of game design, a certain type of design I find deeply, deeply satisfying. This statement qualifies me for geek of the year, you see, what I was doing was “fiddling with the numbers".
Which is another way of saying I was playing with the underlying equations driving the skill system. Fiddling with ratios, balancing skills against another, working out how a change will affect a certain build of character vs other builds of character.
There is nothing “shiny” about this process. No cool screenshots to be had. It’s pure number manipulation. In fact, at least 50% of it happens in MS Exel. You write up an equation, say for the increasing costs of purchasing skills at higher levels, pump in the numbers, see what pops out.
If you like what you’re seeing you then put that into the engine, so you can test the whole system with these changes. Ok, so you’ve changed how agility affects ranged combat. But does this make ranged combatant builds too powerful against other builds? Too expensive?
I essentially sit there, running numbers and going through the character creation screen, for hours. I shit you not. And I’m feeling warm and fuzzy while doing it. Happy. Geek of the year, indeed. I’m one of those people who likes really crunchy stat systems in RPGs, I can sit in a character creation screen for ages agonizing over my choices. I love it. And that’s someone elses game. With my own game I can directly manipulate the guts of the engine. Stat based bliss! 
Of course, extensive playtesting is required to really nail it. But you can get part of the way there simply through crunching numbers.
You might be wondering “why do this now?". Well, the underlying character system has been revamped considerably over the last few months, and I needed to sit down and properly balance all the changes.
Let me discuss the changes a bit :
- Removal of mana. No mana anymore. Actions use stamina, casting spells included. This provides a natural balance since swinging heavy weapons and wearing heavy armor drains stamina, the same resource you use to cast magic. Which explains why mages don’t like heavy armor quite logically.
- Moving away from character “levels” to a large degree. I used to do the Dungeons and Dragons thing, where going up levels gave you more hit points and a bunch of skill points to spend. No more. The game still tracks your level based on how much experience you have earned, as a relative measure, but it has little effect beyond that. There is one thing I’m tying to it, but I’ll discuss that later. Most of the system doesn’t care about level.
- Directly spending experience on character development. Like I said, you used to level and gain skill points to spend. No more. Now it works like Vampire:Bloodlines. You spend your gained experience directly on skills and traits whenever you have enough to buy the skill you want. You want to purchase an expensive trait, save up for it.
- An extra attribute was added : Willpower. Mage types had no attribute tradeoffs during character creation. It was all about Intelligence. Willpower was added to add another dimension, a choice. Intelligence is essentially mental Agility, Willpower is mental Strength or Toughness. It ties into hitpoints, stamina points, mental resistance and the power of your spells. The system is better now that there is more than 1 attribute for mages to focus on.
- Build point system. I’ll elaborate further, let’s just say character creation works more like Shadowrun than DnD now. There are more interesting choices and trade-offs during character creation, which makes the whole thing more enjoyable, IMO.
- Less is more. By which I mean I decided that fewer skill levels are better. More distinct differences per level. I don’t know about other people but personally I don’t like systems like the Elder Scrolls, where skills rank 1-100 and every so often you allocate a percentage point or two. Ugh. So what difference is there between 57% and 59% again? None really noticeable to the player.
The mainline skills in SoW used to be ranked from 1-20, with the game intended for 30 levels of play during which you could get a couple of skills to 20, a couple midteens and a few in the single digits. Now, mainline skills rank 1-10, some rank 1-5 and a few rank 1-3. Each level you put into a skill feels like a real difference, a solid thwack of extra capability for your character. You are no longer getting all those levels during level-up but I think each micro-step increase will feel more solid now.
This also helps prevent skill inflation. What do I mean by that? Most will have played a DnD game, say NWN. Now think back to the skills. Say you chose Persuasion. Think about how that played out. You put the maximum number of points into it per level right, just to stay even with the ever increasing difficulty of the game checks. By end game, an “easy” check is 16, because you’re expected to have rank 20 if you were actually focusing on it. Any skills you don’t put points into every level become useless. You put 5 points into intimidate? Well, that might have made a difference in level 3 but now that you’re level 20 it’s useless. Basically, it’s all or nothing.
Well, with only 10 ranks, you can put easy checks in throughout the game, at rank 3-4, and reasonably expect that a character who isn’t totally focused on a skill might make the check. You don’t have to put points into a skill continuously just to stay on an even keel with the difficulty checks.
This of course means fewer level ups during the game. You aren’t constantly going to be getting the “ding"! feeling. I’m thinking 20 levels, but I might drop it as low as 10, depends, the character level isn’t as meangingful as the skill increases. We’ll see. But I dunno, sometimes I think that going overboard with constant level ups detracts from just enjoying the roleplay. You’re constantly chasing the next “ding".
It certainly worked in Vampire:Bloodlines, hell, they had only 5 skill ranks for most skills. And each level up of a skill felt really rewarding. I think it’s a good change.
- Derived stats layer. I’ll talk about this more later. But basically, your attributes determine your derived stats, and your derived stats are added to your skills to get your capabilities. But the nice thing is that most derived stats pull from 2 or more attributes. Meaning that you have to play more of a balancing game, it’s harder to focus on just two stats and have everything else be “dump stats". For example, Attack Rating is drawn from Agility and Perception. You can’t max it without maxing both those stats, but, if you do that, can you also max Endurance to make the stereotypical warrior? No.
So yes. Many, many changes have been made since last I showed screens of the character system, so lots of tweaking and recalculating was needed, and I’m not completely finished. I’m not quite sure Agility is properly balanced, it might still be a little too useful, a little bit too much of a no-brainer to focus on. But I like this final iteration a lot, it’s turned out nicely.
Once the tweaking is done I need to fix up the gui art so I can show some screens of that again without burning out your eye sockets with the horrible prototype art. 
Gareth out.
24 September 2008
Written by
Gareth (
)
Published on September 24th, 2008 @ 11:49:00 am, using 1234 words, 123 views
Hells, but it’s been a busy week or two. It was a public holiday today in SA, thankfully, so Denbeigh and I took the opportunity to go watch Hellboy 2 this morning and I quite enjoyed it. Over the years I’ve gone off elves in general in fantasy but I have to say the ones in this movie were totally badass. The creatures in Guillermo del Toro’s movies in general are wonderful, both in Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth. Kudos to him for breathing life and excitement into some old fantasy cliches like elves and fauns.
After the movie we came home and I intended to do a bit of work on SoW in the afternoon. But then I lay down for 5 minutes and suddenly it’s dark outside and I’m wondering why I’m starving? Ah well, I guess my body decided I needed the rest more.
Anyway, enough nattering. Let’s talk about SoW.
Some people, on reading my descriptions of the setting, seem to have gotten the impression SoW is a low magic setting. Well, it isn’t. There is, in fact, a fair amount of magic. So no, SoW is not low magic. What it is is what I like to call logical fantasy.
What do I mean by that? It’s best illustrated by an example, I think. Let me show you the most influential magical working in the entire SoW setting.
It’s called an Uld Stone, one of many. You can find these stones all over the setting, wherever you find civilization, a great latticework of the things. Besides the gently glowing runes you won’t notice much else to distinguish them from ordinary rocks. If you touch them your fingers might tingle a bit, if you touched the runes themselves, but little else distinguishes them from any other rock or boulder you might find in the fields.
Yet these stones are the most influential, most important workings of magic in the entire setting. Destroying one results in a public flogging and a 10 year jail sentence. The mages who create these Uld Stones, a specialized sect known both singularly and collectively as Amandar, are greatly respected in society, nearly as much as healers and physicians. As they travel the lands, creating and maintaining the magic of the Uld Stones, they can expect to be treated with the utmost courtesy; no Amandar pays for his meals or lodgings while traveling.
What is it about these rocks that makes them so special? Why do their creators receive such reverence?
Simply put, because they make plants grow better.
From each stone emanates a subtle magical field, a gentle weave of magic which seeps through the soil, twining about the roots of plants, strengthening them, guiding their growth, warding off rot and disease. This great magical latticework, spread throughout field and farmland, has had a greater impact on the setting than any other working of magic. Fireball slinging and spells of invisibility may seem more impressive, visually, but they pale in comparison. The Uld Stones affect entire societies at a fundamental level.
You see, the fundamental basis of every civilization lies in food production. Here’s some interesting reading to go along with this post, something I read a while back on the Codex that has stuck with me; try to spot the parts that directly inspired the concept of the Uld Stones. 
To summarize for those not interested in reading the entire thing, a societies’ ability to produce food efficiently determines many, many things about that society. The number of individuals of non-food generating professions, such as warriors, blacksmiths and politicians, supportable army sizes, population density per acre of land, the prevalence of cavalry in warfare and hence the weapons used, the rate of technological advance, even the equality of the sexes.
In most ancient societies, around 90% of the population were farmers. A very small fraction of people did anything more than work continuously just to feed themselves and their families. The reason the Uld stones are so important in SoW is that they change this ratio. Crops are larger, more resistant to blight, more stable. Each peasant farmer produces greater surplus, allowing them to support a larger number of other professions. In SoW that farmer ratio is closer to 70% of the population, alowing three times as many non-farmers as a standard medieval society.
This changes the setting, quite significantly. You see, another mistake people make is thinking SoW is medieval fantasy. Sure, it is fairly medieval in it’s technology levels, for the most part (some aspects, like sanitation and architecture are closer to the ancient world, before the dark ages). But in other ways, cultural, political, societal, SoW is closer to the later periods of history, the early Renaissance. There are large, powerful guilds, many unrelated to food production. Politics is more complex, Athar for example has both a Royal Court and a Senate. Universities and schools exist, home to scholars pursuing esoteric knowledge. The arts flourish in the major cities. There are even banks, but I will come back to that later.
As I said, SoW is logical fantasy. In many games, magic is put to use in fairly selfish, individual pursuits, mainly in amassing more power for the mage. But any force or knowledge which could reliably be harnessed for society would be applied to solving the fundamental problems of that society, not just individuals. Food, shelter, medicine, transport, communication, warfare, even simple things like lighting the darkness at night. I’ll discuss these more in future posts, but the most fundamental and influential of these is food production.
I’ll end this post by coming back to the Amandar. In most fantasy settings, any discussion of magic users who deal with plants would inevitably involve that most hippy, tree-hugging of fantasy archetypes, the druid. Amandar aren’t druids. They don’t preserve abstract natural balances, or commune with nature spirits, or resist the influence of civilization, or what have you. They are highly trained, respected specialists in a very useful, practical field of magic. The Amandar tradition stretches back through recorded history, there have always been mages who used their magic to enhance the crops for their people, and they have always been highly considered. Unlike druids, Amandar don’t fore go material wealth. In fact, they are, for the most part, quite well off. Their talents are always in demand; merchants, landowners and farming communities paying well for them. Most spend a fair amount of time traveling the countryside, like country doctors on call-outs, except their patients are the hills and fields, the countryside itself. While most appreciate nature, they have no special connection to it, many choose this field for financial reasons, for the pay and job security, in the same way some modern doctors choose to specialize in urology. Which reflects another reality of mages in SoW. Most aren’t battle mages. Their powers make them highly useful, in demand, and most use this to seek high positions and comfortable lives in society, not combat. Most aren’t wondering around looking for spell duels.
You know, it probably says something about my personality that I find thinking about setting “fluff” details like this the most satisfying part of game development. I’ve just written an entire post on magical rocks, heh. And one day I hope to be able to work full time on making games which allow me to think about magical rocks and the like all day.
19 September 2008
Written by
Gareth (
)
Published on September 19th, 2008 @ 01:52:28 pm, using 1136 words, 266 views
In an awesome display of internet cross-pollination I have decided to write a post about a post Scorpia made recently, which is in turn about a post by John Walker on Rock-Paper-Shotgun. I’m original like that 
To summarize, John wants to play a gamer where your avatar is invulnerable. And Scorpia isn’t sure that this is a good idea. Could a game where the challenge of death was removed actually be fun? Seriously? And if so, how would you make it fun and challenging for the player?
To answer the first question, I think that yes, you can make a game without death fun and challenging. Allow me to elaborate.
Firstly, we need to analyze it from a game design point of view. Is it actually death the player is afraid of in RPGs?
No.
It can’t be death. The player can’t permanently die. A quick whack on reload and WHOOSH, back to life and fighting fit. No one would actually play a game with a real threat of death, anymore than anyone would ride a roller coaster that had a good chance of actually hurling you into the ground at high velocity. So what are players afraid of?
First, failure. Simple enough. No one likes to run slap back into the “you weren’t good enough” lamppost. Failure stings. Success makes us feel warm and fuzzy and powerful. These emotions alone are enough to provide the desire to avoid death, But there is more.
Penalizing a character resource. Some RPGs require gold to ressurect a character, some drain experience or apply an experience penalty for a time after you spring back to life. Either way, players hate feeling like they’re losing out on something, even completely virtual resources. So this is another motivator to avoid death.
Thirdly, penalizing the players resources, invariably time. The old arcade games could cost you money to buy another go but this doesn’t work for a home system, so costing the player some time in the form of lost progress is essentially “it".
None of these elements are inherently tied to death and death alone, which is why I definitely believe you can make a game without it and still succeed at providing the player a challenging and entertaining experience.
The reason death is usually the main way of challenging the player in RPGs is because, usually, the player’s avatar is the main thing he has to lose. The avatar’s setback is the players. Almost all of the players interest is invested in his character or close companions, so putting them in mortal peril has been the mainstay of providing challenge to the player.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can solve the “no death” challenge simply by investing the player in factors beyond merely his own avatar.
In fact, there are games that already do this. RTS games. In these the player is an intangible, omnipresent, invulnerable force. No one can attack him directly. He can effect the world, but cannot be affected directly. What can be affected are his units. If the civilization or species he is guiding dies, he loses. If they succeed, he succeeds.
With a little imagination, we can fit this concept into the RPG mold. Sure, your character is an immortal, but that doesn’t mean we can’t base his success or failure on his ability to successfully guide or serve an external interest other than his own survival.
A simple example. Who here has watched the movie Ghost? Yes, the one with Patrick Swayze. To summarize for those who haven’t seen it, ol’ Pat gets killed early in the movie by a man hired by a work colleague. And becomes the titular Ghost. He can’t really be hurt but he also has a limited ability to affect the world and communicate with the living. Using his new ghostly abilities he determines that his still living girlfriend is in danger from the same work colleague and works to save her from the same fate.
This is a prime example of what I mean. Imagine it as a game. You can’t be hurt, but you need to achieve a goal external to your own survival. You need to ensure that your girlfriend survives and your murderer is exposed. The challenge remains because invulnerability doesn’t mean unlimited power to affect the world. You have a limited set of actions you can perform and the challenge is figuring out how to use them to achieve success in your goal. Different actions could take you closer or further away from that goal you’re working to achieve.
Or what about playing the patron god-spirit of a native tribe? You are an immortal, magical being but the denizens of your tribe aren’t, they are frail and prone to being eaten by hungry tigers. Your job is to use your power and influence to see them become a full fledged civilization. To do so you can advise the village shaman (not really that different from other RPGs, everyone is always looking to the player for solutions to every damn thing anyway), use your powers to guide and protect, decide which villagers to save from tigers (since you can’t be everywhere and save all of them, you must choose on which members to focus), negotiate and deal with other tribes and their patron spirits…pretty much an RTS, but from the ground, personal-like. You cannot die, but your goal of seeing your people successful can be thwarted based on the choices you make and the path you follow. Do you encourage war and perhaps invoke the wrath of too many enemies? Do you negotiate alliances with other spirits and together become the “pantheon” of your united tribes people?
Speaking of immortal spirits, what about an immortal, sly trickster, a Loki archetype? That could make for a fun RPG I reckon. You’re a sly, shapechanging bastard, always seeking to promote your own goals but not fond of outright conflict. Instead you use your wits, your shapechanging abilities and your silver tongue to manipulate people and factions around you to achieve the goals you desire. In fact, one of the gameplay aspects could be achieving your goals with no one the wiser. I know from playing Thief that succeeding with no one being aware of your actions is a lot of fun, pulling a great, big con over the powerful NPCs in an RPG could be a pretty entertaining.
The great thing about these kinds of design restrictions is that they often force a designer into new, creative directions. I can certainly see why John posed his challenge. Of course, there is little chance of the mainsteam taking it up anytime soon, it’s too easy to stick to the tried and true. Ah well, maybe I will get round to it, eventually.
Written by
Gareth (
)
Published on September 19th, 2008 @ 07:55:28 am, using 216 words, 71 views
To quote a recent GarageGames announcement :
TGEA 1.8 will feature OpenGL Shader Support via GFX2. This means TGEA will finally have Mac support
I thought a few of you might find this interesting, since it is one of the features a lot of users of the Torque Game Engine Advanced have asked for. It’s been a fair while coming, but I’m sure it’s very welcome.
What does this mean? Well, for one, it means I can release my games without hassle on Mac, SoW included. Since many indies report that Mac accounts for about 40% of their sales, this is a very, very nice bonus.
For our Linux friends, well, it makes it much more likely that a Linux release will come along. Porting the engine renderer to OpenGL is a big task, with that out the way I just need to concentrate on the Linux specific porting. Or hire a linux guru to help me out. Either way, this is a major barrier along that path removed.
I must admit, when I first heard about the recent GG buy-out I was fairly skeptical. But we’ve seen more awesome updates to the engine in the last few months than ever before. Kudos to the garagegames guys, it’s great to be working with such a vibrant, powerful development platform.
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