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    Ville's new game

    Crazy 15 years ago
    (EDIT: I'm talking about in-menu/in-inventory the whole time of this post. Just felt i should specify that.)

    You could keep the double-click equipping, but assign a primary and secondary (and a tertiary, etc.) hand/foot/head/nosehair settling places.

    Ie., you double-click a shield. The shield is assigned to your left hand. You then double-click another shield. This shield is assigned to secondary position, the right hand. It is, of course, somewhat more difficult to code but ultimately, the experience is just as simple for the player as with a single assignment position, there are just more choices now.

    A doll of you character could be shown, much like in Notrium. The item would be transfered from your inventory to your doll, freeing up an inventory spot. Then clicking on any of the equipped items (on the doll) will unequip them and return them to your inventory.

    To further this idea, you can come up with some nifty things. In example, you may apply a system where there are no specific warnings as to why any given item cannot be equipped, the slot background simply flashes red. But imagine the shield had a tertiary position in which it could be strapped to the characters back, taking up the torso space. This could be something for the player to discover. Double clicking a third shield would only produce a flashing red background, indicating that the player cannot equip that item, but not specifying that the player cannot equip this item because he has already filled the tertiary slot.

    I can see however that this may quickly become tiresome to design and create, particularly the fine line of why the player is unable to also strap shields to his legs, in addition to the player finding the unspecifying system as more of a hindrance than an opportunity to explore. (Also, icons for noting that an item is beyond your stat level is definitely needed anyway, so it wouldn't be completely "purist", pushing the idea from "interesting concept" to "annoying lack of feature")

    Oh, a secondary system could be incorporated where the player could drag the items to the doll in addition to double-clicking, allowing for a single shield to be set in the secondary (Or tertiary or quaternary or even mumbo-jumbo-lambinary (my preferred position)) position, while also retaining the double-click thing.

    Oh, and what will the setting ultimately be? Fantasy? Or are you going to mix magic and technology? That still not very widespread, you can still come up with some relatively unique and interesting concepts. But please don't fall into the bit where everybody calls it "magic", just like we treat it from our viewpoint because we connect it with things we have seen (or not seen) and as such notice what's been changed when compared with reality. It would be fun to still have things like gypsy fortunetellers that are completely fake that people dismiss as "magic and tricks", while living in a world with actual magic. Whooooah. My mind is kinda racing on the subject now...

    PS. I think i drew concept art for this game, when i was, like, seven or something. Little did i know back then...
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    ville 15 years ago
    Your idea has merit Crazy. We're probably not going to have a doll for the player. I want the inventory to be visible while playing the game normally, so it's going to be pretty small and simple. Wearing something shows immediately on your character, so holding a torch for example you can see it in your left hand. The drawback is what we've been discussing, the wield slots are fixed to what the item maker has set them. So the shield on your back would likely have to be a different kind of shield in this system. A back shield sounds hilarious though.

    The setting will be the magical world of Driftmoon, where new technology is just getting a hold. I would like to call magic something else than magic though, I haven't really thought of that yet.
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    Crazy 15 years ago
    Aaah, no inventory screen. Well, i hope it's not that cycle-through menu system many console games have, i've always rather despised those as a PC user as you eventually have to cycle through a lot of items. Beyond Good & Evil is notable, because it essentially had 2 health potions which you needed often and cycling through 2 items would be a lot simpler. However, a large amount of your inventory was cycled through there, many which were things like keys you would use automatically anyway. I found that kinda odd.

    Right, going off topic there. If it doesn't make me seem like an absolute tosser, i could recite a bit of a rant as to how i think people would react to things like magic in their universe at some other time- i am yet to sleep.

    EDIT - Oh, and i forgot to mention that shield were sometimes carried like that - strapped to the back. Remember the Scout Cavalry from AoE2? Had one like that as well.
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    ville 15 years ago
    There's not going to be a separate screen that pauses your game while you look at it. Instead there will be a system pretty similar to World of Warcraft where you have a small slotted inventory in the corner of your screen. It can be moved and closed, but I'm trying to keep it visually very small so you could always keep it open. At least I didn't like in Notrium that you had to scroll around, and always pause the game while you needed to use something.

    If anybody has ideas for what magic could be called, I'm all ears. The term magic is sort of a cliche these days, so I'd like to avoid it if possible, at least I wouldn't want the non player characters to call it magic.
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    Grim Reaper 15 years ago
    What if they called it "science"? It could as well mean "mysterious forces which can be used to manipulate various things" in the world of Driftmoon for all we know.

    This would of course warp the age-old handwave into "a scientist did it"
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    MageKing17 15 years ago
    There's the age-old sci-fi "magic" stand-in Psionics.

    Personally, I find making up silly names just to avoid the word "magic" more annoying than just saying "magic". Call it what it is, I say. (This includes the Elder Scrolls "Magicka" silliness.)
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    ville 15 years ago
    A valid argument, but I do think making up a name for it gives the invented culture more depth, and distances it from all the Tolkieneque settings out there. I haven't set my mind on this yet though.

    Grim, that's a good idea, but we're still going to have some amount of science in the game, so I would have to think up a new name for that as well. That would get confusing.
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    Grim Reaper 15 years ago
    "ville" said:
    Grim, that's a good idea, but we're still going to have some amount of science in the game, so I would have to think up a new name for that as well. That would get confusing.
    So call magical forces/disciplines/etc. "science" and "regular" scientific things "technology"?
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    Amarth 15 years ago
    I found it pretty nifty how various scientific things are given religious terms in Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (with particle physics being called "experimental theology" and such). It quite clearly demonstrates the way the Church has power over the world. Same thing with Lucasart's Loom, where (a particular form of) magic is called "weaving", signifying the powers of the guilds in that world.

    Just change the name is silly, but make it have a story and there's something in it.
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    Narvius 15 years ago
    If the "mechanical" science is kind of banned (/ considered evil / whatever) in this world (like, let's say, in FF10 / FF10-2), you might consider not giving it a collective term at all.

    [Edit]
    Probably the player could have influence on how it's called in-game :3
    I can imagine something like this:
    You sabotage a mine for some obnoxious reason (mines are usually run with the help of technology), and it collapses. People saw that this technology stuff is unreliable. So they start calling it in some bad way.

    ...I'm putting too much thought into this, I guess it's completely irrelevant.
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    ville 15 years ago
    "Amarth" said:
    Just change the name is silly, but make it have a story and there's something in it.

    That's true of course, and the technology/magic divide is not at least planned to be very integral to the story, as there are many games that go into that in depth.
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    Grim Reaper 15 years ago
    Maybe have both magic and science labeled in-'verse as science, and call the magic part "thaumaturgy" (or some other scientific-seeming name that could be used to describe utilization of (un-/)natural forces to do various things)?
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    Crazy 15 years ago
    Oh, look, a really long post! I'll make some statements about stuff and then three ways magic could work. Maybe they'll start a train of thought.


    Okay, what i meant when i said what i said way back then (ie. a few days ago) is that the people living in this universe would not have a name for it at all. You see, we still have no idea what gravity is, exactly. This does not make us label it "magic". In fact, we don't label it at all. "An unsolved scientific conundrum" one may say, but that is an explanation, not a label.

    One may also argue that this is such a large, strange part of their lives, they would notice it and name it. But i would return to my gravity argument. For the longest time, it didn't even have the name of "gravity". It was just incredibly natural that things fall down. And gravity is, after all, a somewhat important aspect of our lives.

    "But magic is something they actively make use of in their life, gravity is a natural force", one may also say. But we have, in fact, purposefully used gravity to, amongst many other things, bring fresh water into Rome and tell time with pendulum clocks. At this time, no-one thought twice of it.



    Ultimately, it may well be an artisanship, and have a name alongside "woodworker" or "smith". But artisans are classified by what they produce, not what they use - both the woodworker and smith may use a knife in their everyday life. As such, both of they may be able to use some sort of magic in their work, but a spell to light a forge would still be named alongside tools such as "hammer" and "anvil". How people think of it and how the mechanics of using magic are very connected. If it is a very specific and difficult thing to learn, a smith may not have access to it and it may have it's own name. However, if it is common and using a fire spell is more connected to making, maintaining and using fire than using something such as spellcraft, it would probably not have any specific term associated with it.

    Alternatively, we may look at the pagan peoples of Europe - the Gauls, Germanic tribes, and later, the viking nations. These people believed in the existence of magic and used it. Things like curses and fertility prayers were completely real to these people. As "magic", they largely explained things they could not understand, which would apply to the magic of a game. But they also couldn't explain things like breathing. To them, the soul was a moving thing. One had to let it out and draw it all the time. If you would keep your soul inside of you for too long, you would die because your soul can't move and if you didn't draw breath again, your soul would stay out of your body and you would die (I do believe that the world "breathe" is inferred from "soul" in the Finno-Ugric languages). As such, in a game, magic could be connected to religion and have things attributed to it that aren't true. Continuing the smith example, he may have a spell to light the fire which he calls something like "magic". But - he may believe that the fire he has lit and keeps hot with coals and an airflow is the same spell, that his spell does not end when the fire is lit. It certainly seems magical, this strange moving thing that can MELT METAL FOR CHRISTSSAKES.

    Thirdly, we may look at the myriad of "-logies" of the Victorian era. Sciences that read the shape of the skull and treat people with electricity. Things that we would now consider to have no scientific merit whatsoever. As such, in a slightly steampunkish world, magic could easily be some sort of science or pseudoscience, though probably more likely to be widespread. But i would still imagine that the internal combustion engine and a some ingenious new spell would be treated in similar victorianesque fashion. The creator presents his new invention in some astonishing way, such as the the guy that got into an elevator and had the wires cut to demonstrate elevator breaks or so many other demonstrations of the era. Monocles are popped. Papers are signed. And so on.
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    ville 15 years ago
    That's a really well thought out post Crazy, here's a hearty thank you for it!

    Magic has one relation to the story, as the player has some magical ability, though he doesn't know it at the start. I want the magic to be very strange to these people, a very mysterious, even a religious thing that very few people know of. The player is therefore something to be afraid of and looked up to perhaps. It's a magical world as for our standards, as there are talking animals and such, but magic used by people is not the standard there as it seems to be in most RPG's.

    I definitely like your idea of calling the magicians by what they do, like he's a shaper, he shapes things, and not like he's a magician, he uses magic to shape things. Maybe they believe all the powers come from some deity or some form of ritual, so they would mostly use that as a reference to when they talk about magic.

    Technology however is something of an era gone by to these people, as they have had technological wonders in the past, but have forgotten how to work their machines. So a Victorian setting doesn't suffice, and I'm actually going for a more Ultima setting or a pirate setting.
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    DRL 15 years ago
    "ville" said:
    "Bien45" said:
    Will it be shareware or such?
    And will we be able to craft items?

    It will be shareware, and well worth the small price. And there will obviously be a free version of it that will be interesting to play on itself.
    Sorry to annoy but... *Which* will be the limitations you will put in the game?; I ask because many games have, for example, the "free" version fully playable, but must pay(Register) for the Map Editor.
    Others Limit you for time of play (personally, I don´t think you are going to use this method; basically because it very user-unfriendly); and anothers limit several aspects of the game, *example*: You can have pets, party, items, levels, blah,blah, super-magic-blah, but eventually you hit a need or need something and find you need to register/buy to either continue playing or leveling up.
    Finally others have free the "main" part of the game and to have access to expansions/add-ons/plug-ins you must register/buy...
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    However, now, on another topic, I would like to play this game, which, hopefully will be one of many great games I have played (And maybe, it could compete for the title; Notrium did get this chance , it failed, but maybe this games WINS it , he,he )
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    DRL 15 years ago
    "ville" said:
    Grim, that's a good idea, but we're still going to have some amount of science in the game, so I would have to think up a new name for that as well. That would get confusing.
    Maybe you could even have the "Combination of Science and Magic" - Alchemy. It might be an interesting class, and it could have both Spells/Craft skills.
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    ville 15 years ago
    I haven't decided on the demo limitation yet, but at the moment I'm leaning towards area limited. I find this is the most common limitation in roleplaying games, and leaves room for fully exploring the starting area without any rush. I'm probably not going to limit the map editor out of the free version, as I want to see how ingenious maps people can make with it.
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    Anonymous1157 15 years ago
    "ville" said:
    I'm probably not going to limit the map editor...
    *Sudden explosion of happiness*

    ...

    ... Enough said.
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    ville 15 years ago
    Check out the main page, the screenshots are there! I'm moving my progress updates to the main page. If you'd like to comment the development news, do use the blog comments section.

    I'm also opening a subforum here for Driftmoon (that's the new name!).
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    Quanrian 15 years ago
    "ville" said:
    Check out the main page, the screenshots are there! I'm moving my progress updates to the main page. If you'd like to comment the development news, do use the blog comments section.

    I'm also opening a subforum here for Driftmoon (that's the new name!).

    Nice to know your lazy ass finally updated the look of the site. The site looks good, and I'll try and keep tabs on the project as it progresses. Might be interesting to apply one of your older combat styles, like the one used in Magebane. I always felt that style was most original, and had room to grow. I am slightly biased however, as that was one of my favorite games, even if I did not finish it.
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