Dust Watch: Dabble And Dip

Dust Watch is a game that attempts to emulate a classic D&D experience for a solo adventure as well as a party-based adventure, and part of this will be obvious from the game design.

Unlike pretty much all of the D&D mechanics-modeling video games, Dust Watch is a solo endeavor-one does not encounter companions, because the Watchmen are too few and desperate to send a whole team for every last thing.

In this way, Dust Watch draws inspirations more from roguelikes-the player has to have a way to do everything in a single character. A locked door may require a Stealth roll (Stealth doubles as the general larceny skill), but it could also be opened with a Hardiness check. Continue reading “Dust Watch: Dabble And Dip”

We’re Back!

Sorry about disappearing for a while, I went on an unplanned hiatus due to school, but I should be able to contribute more regularly for at least the next couple months.

  • Here’s the stuff I’m working on:

Dust Watch (I decided to switch the focus over to being an old-school d20 game [albeit on a homebrew system]) on StoryNexus as well as in a standalone tabletop format. The two will be compatible.

Rise of the Tenno, a Warframe fan-game that is a test of an experimental die system as well as being a really interesting experiment in combining influences from a ton of games, both simulation and action focused, into a single coherent game. (For those who don’t know, Warframe’s a free-to-play MMOFPS with space ninjas.)

  • Stuff that’s been temporarily or permanently put on hold:

1-800 Regime Change (This one’s temporary, I want the experience from simpler projects before getting back into some of the more technically demanding things here.)

Orchestra on StoryNexus (This one is permanent-ish; I’ve decided that Orchestra is an example of stuff growing too far away from both what the platform supports and the original design decisions-it’s still hovering up there, but it’s not going to be quite as major.

  • One last thing:

I’ve started working in Blender on a variety of things; feel free to check back here from time to time to get a glimpse at it, or you can follow me on my YouTube channel.

Here’s the url to get to my channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/kaw19atlas

Orchestra: New Game +

This post is well ahead of time, and details what I’m planning to do with Orchestra once the game is “beatable”, which as an open-world game with no more than 1% of all the main story content integrated into the game (and it’s about a sixth of the content, about 5% if you count player perceived content), doesn’t mean very much yet.

Let’s start out with what New Game + will offer: Continue reading “Orchestra: New Game +”

Orchestra: Armor And Protection

One of the slightly annoying things about StoryNexus is that it does not, at least of the time of writing, support conditionals. It’s really not a huge deal, but there are times when it forces an indirect approach to certain things, namely in this case, healing and armor.

Because I cannot check to read a person’s armor every time they get hit, and because I cannot use functions to subtract an armor rating from damage taken (not that I’d necessarily want to, that linear system gets a little unrealistic and forces upward escalating spirals of damage) I wind up having to take an indirect approach. Continue reading “Orchestra: Armor And Protection”

1-800 Regime Change: Guts and Glory

Guts is a statistic that plays a key role in 1-800 Regime Change. If you’ve played a recent tabletop game you’ll probably have noticed that almost everything includes a mechanic that allows a player to reroll a bad roll. Guts is that, but on a per-die basis, meaning that instead of rerolling everything they may reroll one die (before explosions, if appropriate). Continue reading “1-800 Regime Change: Guts and Glory”

Orchestra: Character Creation Revisions

Orchestra on StoryNexus is becoming less and less representative of the true Orchestra world and eventual tabletop game release. Characters currently resemble a standard Orchestra-setting agent, but character creation is far more simple than it should be. I’m going to be implementing a Quick Creation (the old way) and a Detailed Creation (the new way) method. Both will give about the same amount of power, but Detailed Creation will plunge players straight into the setting and allow more fine tuning of their characters. Continue reading “Orchestra: Character Creation Revisions”

1-800 Regime Change: Full of Class

That’s something you never thought you would hear about a game that attempts to replicate stuff made for the lowest common denominator.

1-800 Regime Change, however, is class based, but not in the ways one would think. The Secret World is a major inspiration for my class system, despite itself having only cosmetic classes (called Decks). 1-800 RC uses a slightly more complex system and one that has two stages; Starter Classes and Professional Classes. Continue reading “1-800 Regime Change: Full of Class”

1-800 Regime Change: Reining In The Dice Regime

One gripe I have with certain tabletop games is that they entirely neglect any sense of the complexity of certain actions, or they make actually rolling for things impossible from the very start. I’m trying to avoid that entirely with 1-800 Regime Change, with a tree-based attribute/skill/specialization system. This allows me to make, say, assembling a gun different than sewing a ballistic plate into a vest, but have a shared skill so that it is not impossible to have some synergy. Continue reading “1-800 Regime Change: Reining In The Dice Regime”

1-800 Regime Change: Arming an Army Part 1: More Flexible Than A Champion Gymnast

1-800 Regime Change will rely on an incredibly complex system of firearms, so much so that guns will have their own character sheets (well, maybe two per page, but it’s up there).

To do this, guns are made from a number of components. A popular and recent video game that used this system is the Borderlands series, but they did more of a cosmetic-driven approach rather than a mechanics driven approach. Continue reading “1-800 Regime Change: Arming an Army Part 1: More Flexible Than A Champion Gymnast”

1-800 Regime Change: Birthing A Mercenary Part 1: Love, Drive, Fear

So I watched Commando yesterday (I’ve been buffing up on action movies to work on 1-800 Regime Change), and I was pleasantly surprised. The first thing I noticed was a long montage relating to Schwarzenegger’s character and, more importantly, his motivations. Immediately we saw Colonel Matrix’s drive when he was spending time looking after his daughter and doing things with her. Continue reading “1-800 Regime Change: Birthing A Mercenary Part 1: Love, Drive, Fear”