Fate's Developer Journal

From LSWiki

Often when I'm playing Lost Souls (and sometimes when I'm not), I'll get hit by bouts of inspiration on projects I'm working on or features/mechanics I'd like to change or implement. Instead of leaving them to stew and eventually be forgotten, I've decided to write these down in a journal so that I will remember them later and hopefully actually work on them. The entries tend to devolve into rants or fantacising on my part.

The journal is in org-mode format, separated into headings for convenience. Please keep in mind that this is not so much a list of stuff I will actually do as a collection of my thoughts on the game from a developer's perspective. Maybe I will work on the entries some day; hopefully another developer will read some of them and be inspired in turn; and most likely they will sit here to be interesting exercises in wishful thinking and naught else.

* sensory acuity traits <2014-01-21 Tue> :traits :new:

Add five traits for acuity in the five senses, to use in room description detail / searching / quests, etc. Value should go from 0 (don't have that sense) to 10 (localized omnipotence), with five being the average using humans as a reference. Traits should increase in value with skills/attributes like CF/OF, 1 per 100 awareness and perception.

* mounts <2014-01-21 Tue>  :mechanics :revamp :rant:

Overhall the mount system to make more sense and be less broken. With low riding skill, directing a mount should be difficult and imprecise. For example, complex go commands should be badly interpreted, directions should mix up. Have mounts keep going in one direction until you issue a stop a command; only implement current system of stopping after go command is fully executed for really high riding skill. Add the chance of mounts throwing you off during movement and combat. Using a mount should train riding/equestrian (props to Agun for this). Give mounts the ability to carry containers (saddlebags, sacks, etc) and to pull stuff (carriages, ploughs, etc); alternately create a separate module for this (mule). Using a mount for too long in too short a time should tire it out and make it less effective (temp negative mods to skills/attribs), dependant on how well the rider understands the animal (animal lore, equestrian, biology, etc) and the mount's own skills (stamina, running, possible new skill specifically for carrying people). Since the game is already a simulationist fantacy, why not set up a system of stable outposts for exchanging tired mounts for fresh ones (I.E roman postal system)? The mule system can be taken further too; have a network of carivans between the major towns to ferry passengers on horse-drawn carriages. These carivans could experience random raids from bandits and the like; this could lead to a new slinger-like association for fighting them off? On the other side of the coin, players could attack and steel from trading caravans for plunder (melange shipments from the desert, magical gems from Liathyr, etc). Maybe Shatterspire could have like huge flying steam ships pulled by drakes and powered by Hellhounds to move their troups! The possibilities that this system would open up are pretty awesome. I can just imagine it now; the whole island of R'lyeh tethered to Cthulhu's back as he flies into combat against the collective forces of Aedaris, who wait on a fragment of the Exoma that has been shifted into the Prime and materially tethered to Puff.

* flight <2014-01-21 Tue> :mechanics :revamp:

Our monolithic flight system is actually pretty nonsensical and should be separated out into different functionality. This thought came from another of Agun's complaints (about levitator not granting a boost to flight). The game currently uses one skill to govern all forms of flight. However different flight mechanisms require profficiency in completely different fields. For example, magically directed wingless flight doesn't require knowledge of wind drafts, how to rise with thermals, how to take advantage of slipstreams, etc. On the other hand, even though dragon flight is partially magical, they will use skills involved in muscle manipulation that a bezhuldaar has no need of. So, the flight skill should really be turned into several different skills that affect different forms of flight, or use a wider range of skills (I.E somatesthesia might control how well a faerie can flap hir wings; or willpower might affect a Bezhuldaar's ability to direct its levitory).

* Arborlon descriptions <2014-01-21 Tue> :new :areas:

Previously I've been trying to make the room descriptions in the Arborlon revamp really descriptive. Too descriptive, I've decided after some thought and reading some articles on area creation. Instead of trying to be really flowery, room descriptions should have a single sentence for each sense. This should be enough to be fairly descriptive, and make the rooms accessible to blind/deaf/anosmic players. The room summaries should also have different values for different senses, so that you can for example explore while blind while still getting an idea of where you are from your hearing. A system of sensory acuity traits could be used here to determine how much information each sense would contribute. For example, a player with low hearing acuity might be able to only get the auditory room summery but not the auditory description elements; or be able to see the latter but not see the auditory elements of the individual element's description. The idea is to make Arborlon's descriptions offer complex multi-sensory descriptions, rather than just really flowery visual ones which nobody will appreciate while slaughtering everything with brief depiction on anyway.

* room generation simplification :new :utility:

Write a python script to make writing rooms less tedious. Currently the bulk of room code is the really lengthy map feature function names and the abstract item nested descriptor structure. Instead of dealing with all that, the room generation script should ask for abstract item identities, long descriptions, summaries, day/night, and flags for the different senses, in a dialogue format. After everything is entered, the script generates the room code with correct descriptor nesting and indentation (because indenting descriptors past the second level becomes a big hassle to deal with). I should probably write this script before I get back to Arborlon, to make it less dull and tedious to work on (the idea here is to focus on the content when creating an area, rather than the code itself).