Our project involves the three words

1. Jiggly
2. Echo-location
3. Horror

So we are making a horror game where you are a marshmellow who throws his own body chunks which jiggle when they hit the ground or wall. These jiggly pieces created a sound which will let you see. There are monsters in this dungeon that you have to escape and you can only move to places that you see because you are scared.

Our team is way behind, however I have coded up a cool map that supports multiple layers, shadowing, and different tile sets.

I am working on a level editor that is almost done now, here is a screenshot of it

Note the tile graphics are mine right now. I am waiting on a team member to create the actual graphics.

I suppose it is just as well that we have the next meetup December 11th.

One thing I like about this style of gameplay is that it’s turn-based. You’ve got all the time in the world to decide what you’re going to do (at least, if you’re playing against a computer). This really adds an element of strategy that couldn’t exist in a more arcadey-type game. I’ve always liked the Heroes of Might and Magic series for that reason. It’s totally not realistic, but it lets you really focus on each individual character and the effects of their actions.

Anyway, I’ve never really thought about how to design a turn-based system, but it seemed the next logical step after the stats system I posted a few days ago. Turns out there are more problems to be solved than are immediately apparent.

Considerations

Initiative
The D&D rulebook says that turn order is based on “Initiative,” which is a random roll added to your character’s dexterity. No problem. We’ll just make sure that every character has a DEX stat.

Parties
Typically, turn-based RPG games are all about party-on-party action. So, in addition to the character stuff in the system already, we need a Party system to keep track of everyone.

Death/Disabling
What happens when a character dies or is disabled? Take ‘em out of the order and move everybody else forward. A sub-point: what happens if they are revived, or if the disabling was temporary? Stick ‘em back in and rearrange accordingly.

Victory
This was an interesting one. How do we know if a Party has won? Well, assuming we’re battling to the death here, the battle can only continue if at least two Parties have active members. The system will handle as many Parties as the game requires, and will keep handing you the next member until only one Party still stands. If there’s no nextCharacter(), then there’s a winningParty().

Implementation

So now I’ve got a system. To use it, you:

1. create your Characters
2. create and populate your Parties
3. create a BattleOrder and feed it all Parties involved
4. call battleOrder.nextCharacter
5. when the character’s turn is over, call battleOrder.turnComplete()
6. repeat 4 and 5 until there is no nextCharacter
7. battleOrder.winner is a reference to the winning Party

Conclusion
Even though I got the thing together, I’m not going to post it just yet. It integrates with some other stuff I’ve been working on, so I’ll probably keep it to myself until I’ve tightened up the API and made sure it runs perfectly. I just thought the process was interesting, and what better place to share game design thought process?

-Zack J.
Happy Ninja Clan

Examples:

• Character stats (STR, CON, INT, and all the rest)
• Item stats (weapons, buildings, countries, whatever)
• Generic stats (physics properties, 3D stuff, anything really)

As of version 0.1, you can:

• -add any stat you want
• -limit stats (or don’t) in both directions (0 to Infinity, -10 to +10, whatever)
• -add RPG-style Affectors (“+4 STR Staff Of Suffering”, “+10% CHA Vest of Punctuality”, etc.) that affect the value of a stat
• -keep track of Fallout-style Perks, which are just on/off values used however you see fit (remember Bloody Mess?)

So, even though it’s simple and unrefined, I figured I’d still put it up in case somebody wants to play with it. I’ll probably polish it up quite a bit in the future–maybe even make an official release of it. Until then, have fun.

PXW Stats System

Zack J.
Happy Ninja Clan

• Fantasy
• Smiley
• Exploration

That’s practically a game name right there, right? I’m sure it will change, but for now we’re going to call it exactly that. I’ll add two more keywords though, so you can get a better idea of what we’re doing:

• Ninjas.
• Physics

How’s that? Interest piqued? I’ll put up some screenshots or something once we’ve got a prototype going. Stay tuned, kids.

Zack J.
Happy Ninja Clan

If you want to be an author and I haven’t sent you an invite, email me, I have a gmail account with username mempko