Project Update: A Digital Ostravia

As February draws closer, I’ve been working with redoubled effort on a CYOA-esque web implementation of Ostravia using the ABACUS Light ruleset. It’s not fully featured, but it’s something that is very much at the core of the project; as a way of learning about and teaching history, I want Ostravia to be accessible both to avid readers and players of roleplaying games and those who prefer their narratives fictional.

Continue reading “Project Update: A Digital Ostravia”

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”

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”

To Monetize or not to Monetize

I’m working on a game on Story Nexus called Orchestra, after the tabletop game of the same name that I made a year and a half ago or so and I’m currently redesigning the rule set for.

My biggest issue coming up is whether or not to monetize the game, and if so how. Obviously I need some more content before I can monetize solely on the criteria of action refreshes (StoryNexus mandates the use of an action pool, which helps since I don’t have super huge amounts of content), and it is not very polished in the grand scheme of things, something which I am working on as I do a partial rewrite of mostly unreleased and still-on-a-notepad content (the tutorial and several of the not-quite-finished things are always sources of irritation to me), as well as the first Metamorphysis (one of the factions in-game) story mission. Continue reading “To Monetize or not to Monetize”