Project Update: The Eve of Things to Come

I’ve been working on a few projects recently, and I figure that now’s as good a time as any to officially announce a couple of them, as well as give a status update. I’ve been doing a little bit of work on YMICAE, but I’m nowhere near where I had hoped to be; I basically got in a few hour’s coding, then schoolwork picked up, then I finally got around to doing a little more coding a few days ago. Like DiceLord, which also needs work, I’m probably going to rewrite at least a substantial part of the system.On a more positive note, I’ve been doing a little more on the game development side. Miracle, which is my pet name for my most recent project, is shaping up to be about a hundred pages. Set in a post-apocalyptic Gothic fantasy world, it attempts to allow for a great deal of flexibility and freedom in character design with a point-buy system for character creation and a simple roll-under mechanic.

Unfortunately, Miracle has been somewhat over-designed, and needs some significant streamlining before it can be released. You can check out the latest published version over at 1km1kt, but it’s far from playable and there will likely be significant balance changes. A lot of this kicking around of ideas is taking the form of a side-project, 1-800 Regime Change. If that sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve been following this blog for way too long. Inspired by fast-paced action movies, 1-800 Regime Change greatly simplifies the Miracle ruleset (perhaps even more than it should), to allow for fast play. 1-800 Regime Change is intended for an early 2015 release, and Miracle should be completed by June or July if I stick on my timeline.

YMICAE’s still in an early drafting phase, with a few snippets of code. I was working on combat systems today, which brings me to a feature that I’m planning to add. YMICAE will have a simple sentence creation mechanism that will allow it to describe things. I’m not sure how exactly these notifications will be delivered, though a mouse-over system is not something I’m too opposed to. Ideally, this will eventually be paired into a dynamic story generator that uses NPC’s and plot hooks to create minor plots to follow, and more complex notifications will be possible; for instance “Jack”, and “the plumber”, may result in an output line like “Jack, the plumber, grimaces as you give your report.”. This wouldn’t be a particularly intelligent system; there would be no more than twenty-five responses (from joy to agony). Once such a system would be implemented, it would include rules to procedurally generate NPC’s, though story scripts would not be so simple. This might include some stats and rules behind it, though I’d prefer not to emphasize too much of the mechanics over the storytelling aspect.