One thing you always bring to a project is ideas. For this game, there are lots and lots of ideas. Experience has told me that, mixed in with all of the ideas, there are good ideas and not so good ideas. The trick is picking up the good ideas, even though they may not be the most fun at the time. I learned this from a company I set up with a friend and few others years ago.
My friend and I were the coders and we were both enthusiastic about technology. In a world where there were only a few application frameworks at the time, it seemed like a great idea to build a new framework for our new business. Our business partners might have been buoyed by our enthusiasm or, perhaps side-blinded by our jargon. In any event, weeks went by and there was no product; then months, and then suddenly, there was no company.
In hindsight, we should have built an application prototype, something the business could have used to develop a place in the industry. My point? Ideas are shit, if you can't use them.
IMI OW is like every other new project and has plenty of ideas. The best idea, so far, is to develop a working prototype.
Prototype Objectives
Playable and fun - Hell, if a game ain't fun, it's homework. And if a game ain't playable, it ain't fun. As a TCG it's tempting to try to go for PvP on the playing field with a drag and drop UI, special effects etc etc. That would be a cool prototype, but it would also be the same as a lot of other games right out of the gate (and those bells and whistles you need to show off the combat etc. take a lot of time to get right, google the 80:20 rule). Instead, the aim will be for solo Player 1 to select a deck from a fixed pool of cards and then take that deck on a dungeon crawl. I'll hard-code the dungeon and script the NPC encounters. If this works, then we've started: deck building; the game server; round, turn, combat and event mechanics; and messaging. It might not look as cool as some other prototypes, but it should be playable and fun.
Deck Building
For me this is one of the most rewarding parts of this style of game. Choosing cards from a library and making and maintaining a collection. At the time of writing this, I've already developed the basic card structure. The key here will be doing this in such a way that cards are flexible and can manage a dynamic state, not only during the game, but over the life of its time in a collection.
Game Mechanics
It's not a risky statement to suggest that game mechanics don't have to be complex to work. They must, however, be robust, secure, scalable and extendible. Along these lines, I'm going to decentralise game functionality; it makes sense to build a client-server based structure from the start during prototyping. Right now I have a simple futter client that will be the user interface. The other part in development is the server where all of the calculations take place. If calculations, especially resolutions, in a game take place on the player's computer, there is not way to guarantee that the calculations haven't been tampered with. No open invitation for cheating in this game!
Events
My gut feeling is that events are going to make or break this game--events like interrupts, but also triggers for sequenced events--so thinking it might be worthwhile to spend time prototyping something close to the final mechanics. Towards this goal, already coded is the prototype event classes and definitions, they are also working with web socket messaging to the Azure PubSub service and being handled by prototype message routers (the soft kind).
Story Telling
From a creative perspective, I want to explore gaming as a way of expanding stories beyond prose. Some of the early RPGs did this for me, like the original Baldur's Gate by Bioware and the Half-Life series by Valve. If only it will be possible to bring in some of the freshness that those game provided in their ability to carry the narrative. The trick, I think, is going to be how to translate the character development and world building we crave in stories in to a deck-builder/TCG. Hopefully the prototype can prove to be a testing ground for this kind of thing too.
As you can see, there is a lot to do and every day brings new ideas. I just have to ask myself, what's a good idea, and what would become homework...have a great week! I'm looking forward to dropping the next dev diary brain dump :D
<◕.◕> May 2023.
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