I’ve been kicking around this idea a little bit in my head for quite a while now, and I figured that it would be better if I sat down and wrote about it as opposed to trying to keep it all locked up–Where I’m usually apt to forget about it. Here are just a couple rambling ideas that I’ve had so bear with me..

‘Delinquent - Law of the Fist’

Objective - As a new student at a Japanese School, it’s you’re objective to become the “school guardian” or Head Hoodlum. By joining clubs and forming aliances, you will hone your skills to overcome and crush your enemies, while making sure not to be expelled.

Format -On-Line Based… Though I suppose you could do other things as well.

Attributes -

Strength
Speed
Stamina

Honor Based Systems -

Authority
Classmates
Hoodlum

Authority would be Teachers / Principals / Gangleaders (Yakuza) / Police, etc..
Classmates would be non-combatant characters for who you would interact.
Hoodlum - You’re overall reputation with the other ‘gangsters’ in your school.

You social ranking with these groups would determine how or what you would be able to get away with. For example, say you start off at a 0 ranking in all three attributes. If, for example, you had a Positive Ranking with Authority, you would be less inclined to be bothered by those if you ended up being in a fight.

Club Activities
By participating in certain clubs, for example the Judo Club, you could get further experience in special attributes in certain combat skills. The more you train within that subset, the increase amount of skill you would have for additional combat.

Work
If you decide to participate in a Job, it’s a means to earn extra money.. Or you could do nefarious things like bully your classmates for money (but you would end up getting a negative attribute in doing so.. )

Fighting
Don’t really know how you would go about doing this, but you would have certain hoodlums that have a set social ranking. For example, if you tried to fight a higher end hoodlum, you wouldn’t be able to even approach them unless you had a high enough experience / hoodlum level.

You would start off fighting someone at a lower level and after defeating those people, you could work your way up to fighting the ‘boss’ of that particular gang.

In fighting someone, if you defeat them, you could either form an aliance with that person, or you could utterly defeat them — Making them a pure enemy.
So as you go further up in your fighting, say you got involved with a turf war or whatever, you could call on your alliance of other people to help out in that fight.

Anyway, those are just some ideas I was kicking around in my head. In reading it now, I guess it sounds a little bit hokey… But I figured that if it was an on-line environment, it could have various people going ot the same school, trying to each become the head hoodlum. The clubs could have there own forum, and if you wanted, you could challenge other people online in a gang fight.

I suppose it all comes off either too much like those ‘Pimp Wars’ games (or a more recent type — Bite Fight’), but it would have a specific nitch audience.. Those people who are familiar with the early Japanese Macho Anime / Manga where might made right, and the most extreme weapons you would see would be like a knife, baseball bat, or bicycle chain..

So I guess it would be pretty much a strategy game to a certain degree.. But how to put it all together is beyond me at this point. But I just wanted to share my idea and see what you think.

Influences - ‘Angel Densetsu’ Manga by Norihiro Yagi, Anime / Manga taking place in the late 70’s..

- Rob

Been a bit swamped with a combination of work, personal stuff, Supreme Commander, Pirates the CSG, and other things recently. Haven’t had a chance to get as much done on the game as I’d like. I did however recently purchase BESM, 3rd Edition and took the time to jot down some of the mental notes that have been in my head forever regarding some possible RPG games (including a Gemini BESM game).

Have a couple things to do this weekend and Wizard World is next weekend, but I expect to get some time to do some further coding this weekend at some point. I’ve also got some art that I need to scan in and colorize. So much time, so little to do… wait strike that, reverse it.

Ok, so the grid thing hasn’t been fully decided… looking into melding in more click-destination/pathfinding/RTS elements to the interface (as 2D shines for this). May do some sort of vector A Prime with Quadtrees to get rid of the need for a polygrid across the whole map.

In other news, got some Ability tree stuff working last weekend, and a lot of cleanup to the character code. Looking forward to making some handlers soon for some of the commands.

Alex (Xenon) starts working today on some character sketches so I’m looking forward to that.

And my Rhythm game engine in flash is coming along nicely. Nothing like really small amounts of code that do big amounts of cool.

Some cool successes over the weekend.  First connect with the new chat system (still working on full chat however).  Got a Timeline/Sequencer for Flash written that will greatly simplify animation and time-based operations client-side.

A decision was made that needs documenting here:

Absolute time is stored and transferred in millseconds since epoch (1970/01/01 00:00:00).  This is a natural form for javascript and actionscript and a quick operation away for PHP.  Deltas are stored in millisecond form and are simple to create across multiple bases using base translation (sub and add).

Well, now that I finally know about MTASC, there is no need to fear pure ActionScript driven flash projects.

Some ideas with assets and icons. I’m going to try to leverage Flash 8 as much as is possible, by utilizing filters, color transforms, rotations and scales. I think by using these we can maintain a level of customizability and width to our assets without having to spend as many hours in photoshop. That said I’m trying to slowly build up a list of assets that we MUST do.

(more…)

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.

Based on our talks of Trade and LFG systems, I’m working on making the interface tests for those now.  I’ve also re-arranged the tests folder in the repository to be a little more structured.

Trade and LFG will use the same system which requires two interfaces:  a “Submit” page which allows you to put what you’re looking for, and optionally what you’re looking to trade / make available.. and a Amazon-ian browse/search interface.