Some thoughts on what abilities the classes could have to mix things up. Then there is some terrain and positions to help introduce tactics into the game.

Character Abilities
Knight

• Cleave - hits units in a 180 degree arc with 6 damage.
• Interception - Allies soak 30% of all damage (post defense) for 5 seconds

Painter

• Death Rot - Damages enemy 2 damage/sec over 20 seconds.
• Fireblast - Deals 25 points of damage.

Monk

• Healing Chant - Allies are healed of 50 damage.
• Charm - Single ally gains 1 magic & 1 physical defense.

Scholar

• Tactical Weakness - Allies’ attack is increased by 3 for 5 seconds.
• Target - Single enemy loses 1 magic & 1 physical defense.

Terrain

• Grasslands/plains
• +0% movement
• +0% attack
• -0% defense
• Forest
• -20% movement
• +0% attack
• +20% defense
• River/stream/snow/ice
• -30% movement
• -30% defense
• -10% attack
• Hills
• -50% movement
• +30% defense
• +20% attack
• Road/dirt
• +20% movement
• +0% defense
• +0% attack

Tactical Positions

• Flanked
• attacker +25% to attack a flanked target
• Behind
• attacker +50% to attack from behind
• Pincered
• attacker +40% to attack a pincered target

Concept

• One or more characters per player face off against one or more additional sides.
• Simple real time (movement has a cost and is locked during actions) combat.
• Characters are chosen from 4 basic classes
• Combat continues until only characters from one side are left, this side is victorious
• Movement occurs over a 2D plane (X,Y)
• Ranges are in vector distances (radius circle)
• Attributes are 1 to 10 in dots
• Physical attacks are soaked by physical defense, Magic attacks by magic defense
• Each ‘dot’ in Defense reduces damage by 10%
• Each ‘dot’ in Attack causes 3 Damage
• All Characters have 100 Hit Points
• Each character has a special ability that can be used when at full ‘charge’
• Charge returns for each point of damage taken (2x) or given
• Special Abilities all effect a radius around the character

Character Classes

• Knight - Melee Defender
  • Physical Melee Attack - 3
  • Physical Defense - 5
  • Special Ability - Allies soak 30% of all damage (after defense) for 5 seconds
• Painter - Ranged Nuker
  • Magical Ranged Attack - 4
  • Magical Defense - 2
  • Special Ability - Damages Enemies for 25 damage
• Monk - Healer
  • Magical Melee Attack - 2
  • Physical Defense - 2
  • Magical Defense - 2
  • Special Ability - Allies are healed of 50 hit points of damage
• Scholar - Ranged Buffer
  • Ranged Melee Attack - 3
  • Magical Defense - 5
  • Special Ability - Allies’ Attack is increased by 3 for 5 seconds

Further Ideas

• Experience is gained from victory
• Experience may be used to purchase minor upgrades
• ‘Combo’ special based on combinations of units included
  • 2 Healers can resurrect a unit
  • Mage + Scholar: Ranged AoE attack that damages and decreases magic defense

Added some code for Proposals and Votes and for the Trade system. Also loosely added the concept of a ’service’ for the trade window. Haven’t thought up all the specifics regarding Context generation and all, but basically a service would work similar to WoW’s enchanting in trades. Only the target is typically the other player, possibly an item of theirs, and possibly an auxillary point of information. Services could be anything from buff enchants to armor repairs to transportation to item crafting. Some services are ‘hard binding’… basically you place them up there with a target/context, and if both parties hit accept the service is automatically triggered, assuring that the servicing party makes good on their deal. Soft binding services are ones where the player has to do something manually, typically over time. Soft bindings create ‘contracts’ (viewable on a contracts tab of inventory, have no mass), which detail the contract. Possible types of contract:

• Employ - Effect transfers money per time unit from servicee to servicer, useful for things like guide me to here, taxi service, henchmen.
• Split - Half now, half on completion. Useful for fetching quests, mob deals, etc.
• Contract - Pay full on completion. Typically requires trust or power inbalance between parties

These would be tabs/radio buttons for trades in addition to normal ‘trade’. They would still likely include a servicee trade for each ‘payment’ (Employ gives this much per X, gold, arrows, whatever; Split would have two panes for now and later). Both parties would gain a contract on acceptance of the contract.

On opening of a concurrent contract, there will be possibly option buttons: “Conclude” and “Break”. Conclude would be an option for the servicee to say that they rendered the service and to finish payment or that they’re done paying the person via Employ. Break would be an option for both parties, typically when unhappy with the contract. Payment is not rendered on a break. The initiator of the break however gets an +1 to their ‘broken contracts’ which is visible to all as a percentage of honoured/broken and as totals.

Through a little careful flexible coding, I think services, proposals, and deeds (debts, land ownership, etc) can make a healthy political/economic game.

A couple decisions we made:

• The background isn’t going to try to be photoreal, instead we will build layers. Similar to google’s ‘hybrid’, ‘map’, and ’satellite’, only more like checkboxes. One useful mode will be parchment map-like giving more symbolic cues than photographic ones. Also the ’satellite’ mode will be more about washes of colors and impressionism (you walk slower, the parchment lines show little inverse ‘V’s, the ground is brown with spatterings of white spirals… you get the feeling of being in the mountains, without having to visually see it).
• Movement rates and collision will use the same system, server-side: a simple grid division of your movement rate multiplier through the given area, and some possible flags (hinders flyers too, etc). The resulting grid that the vector lands in will be used for determination, regardless of passage.
• Map-based effect spells will be dumped into a linked list of shapes with a type (full square, circle, gridmap) for best-fit occlusion. These don’t scale that greatly, so there shouldn’t be that much emphasis placed on them.
• More emphasis will be placed on 2D-specific strengths: Oekaki-style drawing on the map will be able to be used as a communication medium between players.
• AoE spells might have a tradeoff of size of circle vs spread of damage, with minimum and maximums. Circles can be drawn easily with a click and drag (center->radius)
• Spells like summon wall, lifelines, etc can be easily drawn with a click and drag between two points. Some of these might snap to valid targets (players).

Ok, don’t really want to make this post, but I have to and it’s been at least well thought out now.

We need to consider reconciling all of the old game mechanics and world design with the new Transitional Game.

There are certain things I think need the axe/revise until we can better find a way to work them in:

• Race - This is paramount I think.  The original game concept calls for many races and for races to be a fuzzy gradient process of race sliders in an intermingled state.  Natural faction benefits, racial abilities, and sympathy benefits as an output.  For the most part this isn’t too terribly difficult.  However, doing anything visually with the races AT ALL I think nighs on impossible for this release.  There is no way to do anything morphically, for sure, and I think the ability to handle more than overlay graphics over the standard body shape in 2D is also very difficult (no way we can do 2 genders per races as body types and then have each item done per body type).  There are some possibilities in doing overlay (elves get the ears and slanty eyes maybe, but their build retains the same), but by doing so you lose other customizations as they are not typically meldable.  This would mean all elves would look mostly the same.  In addition, I think there is enough story that needs to avoid being complicated by more factors.  Race is truly one of my favorite Gemini game mechanics and I’m loathe to remove it but I’m not sure I see any other way, other than keeping it as a purely stastical manifest with optional face reconfiguration/overlay.
• The two-sided war - I think the Empire vs Guild / Magic vs Tech is a fine premise, but I think we need to focus more on multiple empires that are not directly involved or have their own issues as more fodder for story and politics.  Two monoliths in a system where players can make their own kingdoms is hardly helpful.  That being said we can still have those two as the biggest kingdoms out there.
• The flipside - I think this is something we can still do but we need to refine it more based on the final solution for Race.  I have been actually toying with the idea of multi-dimensions and shards as another add on dynamic in the future, sparked by the idea of the MSOG.  I think that the flipside can be an ‘expansion pack’ type material.
• Icons galore - As much as I absolutely adore icons and iconography, some 500+ for skills (crafting an non), couple hundred to a thousand more for items, a hundred more for effects, 30ish for classes, etc is more than we could do asset wise in a huge span of time.  I’m suggesting cutting it down to be as informationally relevant as possible but no more:  30ish classes, skills only text (think final fantasy menus), items have icons based on parent type (a couple different swords, a couple items for potions etc) or possibly snapshots from the actual asset image (like the hilt center), maybe 20 for interface stuff, another 20 for informational things, effects without icons (we’ll find a way to display them usefully).  I think this 150ish or so icons will be doable.
• Art galore - Same for character / equip art.  I’m looking at what Flash 8 abilities we can utilize to make variations (color hue shift, etc) on a smaller set of graphics.  As far as weapons and such I would very much like them to be piecemeal (hilt + blade + gem images, each piece shifted/edited).  This way we can get hundreds of thousands of variations with only hundreds of original images.  I’d also like some of it to possibly be analog (like some of the color dye customization abilities, just enter in numbers into the flash hue filter algo).
• Background/world graphics - This one is tricky as fuck.  We need some seriosly good background graphics, but to do so in a decent sized world would require obscenities.  Some possible options to consider:   We need some sort of world-builder.  We need placeable flash structure items.  There may be a way to do a world builder painting with textures using random noise brushes in flash.  If not, we have a lot of photoshop shit to do.  We can also possibly do something heinous like stealing from Google Earth in uninhabited areas of the earth and use those as texture fodder.  I see background generation any way we do it as a major pain point.

Let me know what your counter-point is on any of these.

Next up I’m building a list of needed art assets so I can get artists to start work on them.

Classes

Some title ideas and their 6-matrix + notes:

• Pirate - [danc, illu, summ]
• Ranger - [danc, monk, stra]
• Archer - [illu, stra]
• Paladin - [danc, monk]
• Necromancer - [monk, illu, summ]
• Overseer - [monk, stra, summ]
• Sculptor - [summ]

Not all titles have to come from the 6-matrix, some can come from just tradeskill specialization or playstyle:

• Baker - Good at making cakes
• Chemist
  
• Swordsmith - Specialized in swords
• Diplomat - Specialized in political and social tree
• Politician

These ‘titles’ might better be referred to as ‘class’ or ‘profession’. Something about class is that it may give players less of a feeling that they’re playing Minesweeper on the battlefield. You’re free to make assumptions. You’re also free to be wrong. Also an Illusionist ability to hide the class from casual eyes, or misrepresent them.

Titles

A second field in a character might have a status title from faction status or play awards.

• Mayor
• Duchess
• Coward
• Slaughterer
• General
• Master

These might combine to form a wholistic title:

• Master Swordsmith
• General Archer
• Mercenary Shadowblade

If in a given titlespace, multiple things qualify, or in the class sense, you are very close to multiple things being ‘most applicable’ (i.e. ‘tied for first’), the player could choose.

Advantages

Now, short of status, there can be a real reason for getting a title. Each title could come with a single skill or set of skills that you have for as long as you have the title. Some might not do much (Pirate - “Avast!” - Makes everyone in range talk like a pirate in battle chat), while some may be very useful (Coward - “Escapism” - Once per day, can escape from battle all locks and teleport to home city). When you have multiple titles to select from, you can only pick the one you want, even if you qualify for many.

In short, I’d like to use titles as a friendly identifier, a status symbol, a ‘collectors boon’ (gotta catchemall / find the hidden easter egg titles), and a customizer.

To one side of it is medals (I plan on giving medals of honour for things like in BF2), and to the other side is Starsign (Astrological sign at character creation, gives very minor stat / attribute customization). Basically as much customization for a character as possible and more feeling like this character is ‘mine’ and unique. The down side is we might have to make a lot of little icons.

Ok, I don’t know what’s wrong with the wiki, it just stopped displaying suddenly. Working on it, but it never gives me any error to work with, just a blank page.

In the interim, I wanted to post some skill ideas for discussion:
stra - Strategist, illu - Illusionist, danc - Blade Dancer, monk - Monk, summ - Summoner, sorc - Sorcerer

• Birds-Eye View [stra] - Gives a view of non-battle movements (minimap) and discussions even during battle.
• Elemental Cocktail [stra, sorc] - Attempts to determine elemental strengths / weaknesses via an attack utilizing weak damaga of all elements.
• Camoflage [illu] - Disguises self as random non-combat object
• Group Camoflage [illu] - Camoflage for the whole family
• Mirror Shadow [summ, illu, sorc] - Summons a Mirror Shadow from target (Hovering near to target, mimics every move, immune to phys., aspects are inverse of target, damage done to mirrow shadow is dealt to target, mirror shadow vanishes after taking 1/4th target’s MaxHP in damage)
• Mirror Demon [summ, illu, sorc] - Summons a Mirror Demon to attack target (Mirror demons are copies of target, can cast Mirror Color and Mirror Blood on target or self, all damage applied to target applies to demon)
• Mirror Color [sorc] - Flips all aspect values for a duration
• Mirror Blood [monk, illu] - All damage dealt to target is *-1
• Quivering Sky [sorc, danc, stra] - All ranged projectiles are at +100 to PA,AA
• Crushing Sky [sorc, danc, stra] - All units move at 1/2 speed
• Assassin’s Fold [danc, illu] - Teleport to melee range behind target (breaks lock condition)
• Trading Spaces [danc, illu] - Teleport-swaps caster and target
• Turpentine [monk, stra, sorc] - All aspect attack is converted to Physical
• Palette Knife [danc, sorc] - Target’s aspect points are randomly redistributed
• Certainty [danc, monk] - The next physical attack cannot miss or roll less than 0.5 factor
• Sincerity [danc, monk] - The next attack does not trigger any defensive chains (other than resists and onDamage)
• Vicissitude [illu, sorc] - Caster’s defense aspects continually randomize
• Perfection [danc, monk] - The caster’s factor rolls are forced to 1.0 for the duration.
• Vortex of Hunger [sorc, summ] - Summons a Vortex of Hunger (keeps track of color damage done to it, will suck away 100% damage of the color that has damaged the Vortex the most from surrounding attacks, attenuated by distance)
• Masonry Wall [summ] - Summons a wall in the battlefield, drawn by caster

Many of these are obviously powerful abilities (ones that need careful tweaking and consideration). But remember that the game plays more at card-game speed than FPS speed, so you don’t have the ‘breakneck’ to consider.

Couple ideas:

• Structures are world items that are databased, but don’t move. They have hitpoints, and they block movement. Trees, rocks, walls, etc. Summoners can make them with permenence (but they can be destroyed through damage). I feel this could present some interesting metagaming as long as the griefing was kept out.
• Along with the idea of ’sympathy’, I’ve thought it would be neat to have land mass items (with radius and position, or some just based on box clipping / zone) that affect abilities, or can be used in ability scripts.  Like “Caster’s EA +100/+150 if there are turnips nearby”.  Summoners could be useful for this too.
• Characters could have ‘Titles’, in one part stealing from Fable and the like, and in another part replacing the traditional concept of ‘class’. If we came up with 20-50 ‘classes’, and just had a large matrix assigning points to each bin for each skill, you could have something that’s easy to lookup with a spell that tells you someone’s ‘class’. Like: Fredrick Tantalone Ranger - if someone got used to these names (and many of them are self explanatory), it would be a lot better than the traditional “hey 50% healer, 20% mage, 30% fighter LFG” arguments against skill systems. These ‘classes’ could also have their own Guilds if they so wished, for the purpose of acting as guides for people of that class.
• I like the idea of powerful abilities being ‘inherently neutral’.. meaning they are only situationally useful, but even so, the enemy part could take advantage of it as well. Basically the litmus test for this is “does it matter who cast it?”. Notice I haven’t yet come up with any abilities that affect the whole other party (cause those are harder to turn around and therefore not neutral).

Apprenticeship and the socio-economic ramifications of any related game mechanics have been the forefront of my thoughts lately. Some visibility:

• Some rite of passage grants someone a Master Craftsman status (also vote). The craft guilds could be handled as factions, with one ranking ladder.
• Each Master can take on a number of Apprentices. The Apprentices take care of doing low-level sub components, gathering, and anything else menial. There is an exclusivity arrangement with the Master (the Master will likely fire the Apprentice if he goes and sells his sub components on the auction without the Master’s permission).
• In exchange, Apprentices gain a mentoring bonus to their craft progression and ability that makes them want to stay with the Master.
• Eventually, they begin to be able to make simple sellable finished items. After a specific level, Apprentices may raise to Journeymen. Journeymen traditionally are day-labourers, and are payed for their services by their masters, and may travel working under different masters to round out their training. I’m not exactly sure how to work in either concept if feasible [making money for services / employment] and [going from Master to Master], but I think they are worth exploring. Especially if you have some sort of ’stamp’-like system where certain advancements (for example getting a Master skill level, or getting certain skill trees purchased) require some sort of quest/trial/service/apprenticeship to complete under a different or number of different masters to be able to go forward. This is not unlike the ‘pyramid inversion’ of specialism in knowledge I was discussing with skills.
• When a Journeyman is of the Master ability level and meets the requirements of journeying and apprenticing times and certificates, they may attempt to make a “Masterpiece”. This is a huge endeavour, perhaps one that must be completed entirely (all sub components) by the crafter, and one that takes a considerable amount of time and toil. It should be not something we make easy enough that ‘everyone’ can get it. Only the truly craft-dedicated can approach this.
• I have toyed with the idea of patenting a Masterpiece with the Master’s own choice of naming or their name on it, and perhaps some graphical customization above the normal (and possibly being able to submit their own image for approval). I’ve also toyed with the idea of them gaining a bonus to the future creation of that Masterpiece (as replicas) for clients, a bonus large enough that they would become famous for making that item.
• When a Journeyman has completed their Masterpiece, they must approach the guild that they wish to join and show it as a resume of their skills. The Guild Masters must vote on the addition of another Master
• On a successful vote, the Journeyman is now a Guild Master and can vote on Guild decisions and partake in all of guild politics.
• Grand Mastery is still a possibility (more vote weight, status)

I am reminded of an atricle about games. To summerize players when interacting with a game expect feedback and the ability to change their input. They crave positive feedback, but negative feedback is a good learning tool as well.

CRAFTING

Let’s look at WoW for a bit and look at their crafting system. You gather the materials, aquire the correct recipe, and push a button. So there are 2 chances for fun: 1) Gathering materials, 2) Aquiring the recipe. In WoW #1 is usually the result of needing to grind certain monsters to get the materials. Grinding is typically boring. This brings me to a side point, making quests fun, but I will skip this tangent. #2 is either bought, or found on monsters. This part is really not hard nor too boring so i’ll skip this. Pushing a button is very boring and if you have to batch craft your in for a world of boredom. This is boring because they player is not involved in the process. His input into the situation is always the same it never changes. It is “OK, craft it.”.
We choose to eliminate the button press by making crafting interactive by using mini-games. By allowing the user to change inputs, providing solutions to the games you involve the player.
SKILLS

This is one place where it is easy in some sense and very hard in the other. By the vary nature of having skills the player is directly effecting what they are in the world. So they are able to see directly the result of their choices. The feedback loop is completed. On the other hand this is where we can fall into our biggest trap. If all skills focus on the same goal. Dealing damaging/stopping damage we have significantly flattened the whole scope of the character. This makes the other aspects of the game one dimensional. Skills need to reflect the other aspects of the game.
COMBAT

Combat is tactical and strategic. Information on your foe is just as important as having skill in a blade. This is not your typical select target and click. This kind of interaction gets boring and repeative. Having to change your tactics and stragetics based on your opponent and your knowledge of him make for a much more interesting combat that is hard to get bored of.

Another possible pitfall. Someone doesn’t want to be a scholar like job. They would not be able to figure out anything about the foe and would not enjoy the tactical aspect of the game. It would become click and prey for the character. I propose a basic information bar be provided to all characters so they can at least be stragetic and tactical.

SOCIAL

This is perhaps the easiest one. People provide their own interaction. We just need to make tools that facilite communication properly. I think we are going in the proper directions with our channel system.

WINNING

Winning in an rpg is a bit nebulus. Most people consider winning an rpg to either be the best or one of the best. Even this I don’t think is good enough. I think the real secrect to an rpg is you can NEVER win. If a player has won they are finished and have no reason to stick around. The trick is to keep giving the player positive feedback. Keep giving them more and more challenges. Look at PNP RPGs you can go on forever and ever with these things. So the challenge is creating more and more high end content to keep the players interested. PVP in this game promises to be more interesting considering the number of abilities and the slot
limits. PvP, raids, and PvP raids are a lot more promising in this system.

QUESTS

Quests are the part where we need to figure out how to make them engaging and not repeativite. Having live DMs helps with this but I think our automated quest system should be more advanced. I will post about this in another post.

I would like to go over some of our discussions and decisions regarding communication in the blog setting, so Jeremy, you can ignore the future-tone of this post:

Most MUD-derived online videogames (this means almost all of them), have an interesting duality: they continue along ’state of the art’ graphics, sound, story (ok, only sometimes), and ‘virtual world’ concepts. One thing that’s particularly ancient is chat. Most MUCK/MUSH/MUDs and IRC are actually MORE advanced and capable in serving a communication medium than MMOs are (granted, it’s all they have). Many ideas and discussions have been made about revolutionizing chat.

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