Spellbound
And yet another quick update…
Work was super-busy all week, so I haven’t made much progress on action processing. I tried taking a video of it in action with Classic99, but curiously, it didn’t record any video. Also, when my units tried to move on top of one another all sorts of interesting (buggy) things happened, so there’s some work to do with that yet.
Actually, what I spent most of the week on was in design. I had always planned to have some defenses in place. The basic “combat resolution” is only used to determine damage suffered. I wanted potential misses, parrying, blocking, and dodging in the game, though, so the question was, how to represent it? I decided on making it fixed to the classes, so some are better than others in various areas that are fixed. Luck may or may not contribute, as well as spell effects and items. I had to redesign my player data array to accomodate some new statistics, fortunately, I had some new room freed up with another change.
Spells and spell usage has changed over the years. (I’ve been at this WAY too long…) My original plan was to have the players hold spell books that contained a fixed number of spells, and they could only cast the spells their class was capable of out of the book. However, I dropped this in the last redesign in favor of permanent “learning” of spells. I was never quite happy with this, though. In my opinion, it made the spell-using classes too powerful, and I regretted losing the spell books that had names of 99′ers in the community, past and present.
So as part of the new statistics, I added a spell “affinity”. This means that with ONE school of spells, the class is more powerful; they are less likely to miss and do more damage/have greater effect when used. I won’t bother restricting spells to classes; by tying spells to books again, each character has a practical limit of 8-16 spells at the most. And I even freed up enough space to increase player inventory to 10 items each!
The necessary changes to accommodate this redesign will take some time and involve some regression testing, but it shouldn’t take too long, and it feels “right”… And I don’t have to create any kind of annoying spell training system. Find or buy the spell books!
On another note, I’ve noticed I haven’t gotten many comments of late. I don’t know if it’s because of the move to WordPress, or if I’ve just reached that “Put up or shut up” stage where until I actually get something workable out that people can play with, no one’s going to say much. Maybe I need to increase publicity? Ah well…
Don’t worry – I’m still with you as our blog is still terrific!
I’m also super busy right now so not much in the way of comments right now – but I absolutely second your recent remark about only wanting to relax when coming home from work. So not much done on my project but I plan to surpass you in one aspect, anyway: I will need many more years!