One of the things I’ve been working on recently is utilizing Moodle to its utmost. Since I do want to charge for class access, albeit more for the time I’ll spend interacting with course members than for the actual content, I need to be absolutely certain that I am delivering the maximum amount of quality for the largest possible audience, utilizing as much of Moodle as I have the assets to. Continue reading “Project Update: Utilizing Moodle”
Category: Project Update
Project Update: So You Want To Play?
One of the things that I noticed when I’ve been writing my recent series for the “Table Reflection” Friday articles here is that I really wanted to cover a lot more stuff than really could go on the blog, and since I like to keep series pretty short, I wasn’t going to be able to continue it, especially since I said at some point that the blog series was going to be for novices. So I’m officially announcing So You Want To Play? as a Moodle web-course. Continue reading “Project Update: So You Want To Play?”
Project Update: Scaleability
Orchestra as a game is designed to create an environment in which no character will become unbeatable. One of the core goals is to create scaleability; the idea that you can use multiple characters of the same archetype. For instance, if you had multiple people specializing in Dominance they could still cooperate normally and not rival each other, even were they to use the same exact skills and abilities, and two hackers can still team up to wreak havoc on their opponents’ attempts to boot them out of sensitive computer systems. Continue reading “Project Update: Scaleability”
Project Update: Character Creation in Orchestra
I mentioned a few things about character creation in the last post about Orchestra, but I never really touched on it entirely. One of my major goals for Orchestra is to create a complex and deep but accessible and fast system that combines the best of both game design worlds in terms of allowing players a large degree of flexibility in character roles and giving everyone enough to do to be valuable to a party, and I hope that the character creation reflects this. Continue reading “Project Update: Character Creation in Orchestra”
Project Update: ABACUS
For those (few) people who were familiar with the original version of Orchestra, it used a system I called ABACUS-PH; this was when Orchestra had more storytelling inspirations than realistic ones, and the prior system was very different, but the core attributes are going to be rather similar. The core ABACUS system is a measurement of any character’s intrinsic attributes: Agility, Brawn, Awareness, Cunning, Understanding, and Sympathy. When combined, these form a basis for providing a framework for further character development. Continue reading “Project Update: ABACUS”
Project Update: Orchestra and Degrees
So this week I’ve been getting a lot of stuff done on Orchestra, and some of it is really figuring out how to handle certain things that would be very complex and need to be simplified in a way that can work well. As I’ve mentioned before, the combat system was originally going to calculate hits based on recoil versus bullets; this is perhaps the most realistic method of tracking this, and it’s incredibly hyperlethal, but one of the major downsides of it is that it doesn’t translate to other things very well, meaning that it’s a new mechanic to learn that means nothing in other cases. Continue reading “Project Update: Orchestra and Degrees”
Project Update: Health in Orchestra
Long story short, I’m kind of through with the interesting things of Orchestra for right now. Of course, that’s not to say I’m done working on it, but there’s only so much stuff I can do until I reach the end of stuff that’s really worth discussing what I did and why, compared to things like skills and such that I’ll probably handle more in explaining what I did and some basic reasoning, rather than the reason why I think Orchestra is special for doing it. Continue reading “Project Update: Health in Orchestra”
Project Update: Combat and Initiative in Orchestra
Orchestra is really at heart an experimental game; I’m working with a system that has a fair deal of intentional quirks to see how it works; such as the probability curve-based system 2d20 core roll system, which means that there’s a number of things that I can take into account as a difference between Orchestra’s unique mechanics and some more mainstream mechanics such as linear dice or multiple dice. Continue reading “Project Update: Combat and Initiative in Orchestra”
Project Update: Rebooting Orchestra
Yeah, I’m not writing about Defender of Azekal today, because I’m still working on some system design stuff (namely how to handle loading of enemy data) that isn’t terribly interesting. For those interested, I’m working on arrays through a number of separate files that determine the enemies’ statistics and the animation they use for the battle. As I mentioned, trying to figure that out is probably not that interesting, unless you want to learn more about loading up lists in Stencyl, which I kind of doubt. Continue reading “Project Update: Rebooting Orchestra”
Project Update: Why Stencyl?
When working with Defender of Azekal I had a few criteria other than it simply being an educational game. I’m a long-time supporter of free software, and though Stencyl itself isn’t FOSS it has a number of things that are very enticing from that perspective.