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”
Tag: Orchestra
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”
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”
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”