Write stories, forge worlds.
Long time since the last activity on this blog, mainly as since real actual work has started on the game, I’ve been preferring to use the forum to get work posted as opposed to this place.
However, the project presentation to University of Virginia Student Game Developers was today and this is the notes for people who wants the information…
A long but fruitful group meeting last night was. Now it would be great if people could stop straying off topic until a meeting finishes, but that might be asking too much. Still… look at it on the positive side: the faster the official business for the meeting is done, the faster we can get to random discussions.
The most important decision made at this meeting was definitely the name of our now no-long-tiny game development group. With consensus from all and approval from most, we now declare ourselves the Major Arcana gamedev group (or Marcana for short from me).
Well at this point of the project it’s getting really hard for me to specify exact details of what I want done next within two weeks, particularly since planning for scripting details is only a few scenes ahead (if any) of the actual story scripting. Not to mention that with the increase of team size and full ignition of project development, the priorities amongst all tasks is starting to fluctuate a lot more. Therefore I figure the best time to address each week’s work is… well the Friday planning meetings itself, rather than attempting to plan weeks ahead in advance.
However, although detailed long-term tasks are no longer on the agenda, I do have goals in mind for the project which I’d like to share.
With Ren’py found, which solved a good portion of my current problems, and with July rolling around the corner and signaling that half of Summer Break has already passed, I have decided to announce the full start of TIP. Yes, we are done with the 2nd design phase for now (which took a really long time) and WE ARE STARTING! We’ll still be dealing with a steady amount of continuous plot/char design, but we won’t be focusing all of our time upon it.
By starting, it means we’re actually going to get work done that will be on the product, and not just designing how work should be done for the product. Still confused? Here’s an example: I’ve just finished the first 1k words in TIP yesterday - most of the 1st scene in the game.
Any and all updates to the game will be posted on the forums (which I just did some renovations on), thus if any of my team members hasn’t developed the habit of checking it often yet, you SHOULD now.
Look forward to the meeting this Friday, we have a lot to discuss, the top of the list being our groupname.
Just a short note, but due to all the excessive problems GTGE has given us, I’ve decided that the engine really isn’t worth the troubles and might as well drop out early to avoid even more problems later on ( particularly during the SRPG coding ). Any engine developed using Java but must use it’s own GUI-tools rather than the well developed Javax.swing well… has problems. There’s absolutely no reason why they made the GameLoader unable to accept JButtons but only the customized TButtons ( which I wonder if it even works ).
Therefore, we’re switching from the GTGE engine to the Allegro Library ( see Wiki, Library Wiki, and Main Site ). It also means that we’ll be using C++ instead of Java as the main language, and I intend to use Python bindings for additional support.
After the discussion with Citrus about Lothair’s role in TIP, I realized something that I should have recognized a long time ago : that each of the heir’s role in probably isn’t all that clear to everyone and what efforts I have made towards explaining isn’t enough. Well, this is indeed a mistake too easily made given that the one who designed a setting knows almost everything about it and thus thinks so and so should be obvious with just a few pointers - the sign of an amateur writer, in assuming the audience can understand some easily when… they don’t.
Just to prove I’m every bit as inexperienced as every fanfic writer out there… except I don’t write fanfics, self-insertion is definitely not allowed ( and in case you’re wondering, I started using the name Zanaikin after I created Aoric, because it was the first original character I made and the first original name I created ).
Discussions with Citrus last night, which yielded in a second and more focused draft-basis for Canan path, also reminded me that all my writings have left out a critical element - the relationship and structural balance between the three primary members of the TIP Heirs: Exelar, Aoric, and Lothair.
[TIP Spoilers Alert]
I’m feeling far too lazy right now to write out anything more complicated for a blog post than to raise awareness from my project members…
The news is simple: the setting technology descriptions for Federation ( which reflects Earth tech level in general ) and the Arcanum has been updated on the wiki, accessible through the List of Technologies page. I’m not sure if I’d actually classify the Fateseeker’s reverse-causality weapons as ‘magitech’, so I left it out for now.
On another matter, after Sylon informing me that the format I came up with seems too complicated for those without programming experience to easily grasp and use ( even if it is simple to those who have experience coding, particularly if you did low-level language coding like x86 ), I’m once again picking up the thought of using XML data scanned in via Python/Jython. More on this later once I do a bit of research.
A concept I’ve been trying to grasp in my head, which must be settled early in order for proper design of both game balance and code/class architecture, is how to handle the scope of the battles in TIP. For early game this is hardly a problem since most battles are small scale, along of lines of skirmishes between small units or characters. As a matter of fact, the Archiry breakout battle might be the largest engagement of all early game combat. The effects of the Leadership aura system will be grossly undervalued in these circumstances, and the Tactics score of characters would almost seem useless. However, this is sharply contrasted by the massive field battles that will be the focus of late game ( and Astraea Arc if the player screws up with Tolkin ). The question is simply a matter of how to handle these epic battles, for it’s certainly unrealistic to fit tens of thousands of troops onto the game screen ( actually that’s very doable, but would create quite the mess ), and even more so to expect the player to control all that in a turn-based game while maintaining a sense of the situation. A game scenario like that isn’t “tactics”, it’s just pure “chaos”, not to mention insanity on the matter of time consumption for a single battle …
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