Stumbling Blocks and a Lack of Screenshots
January 30th, 2007 LukeWell, I’ve hit a stumbling block. First off, I’ve slowed down in regards to my code; it’s not being frantically produced at a rate of 50-100 lines/hour, it’s now being…lazily produced, at a rate of ~5 lines/day or so. Very slowly.
Also, I haven’t been taking any screenshots lately. Why? Because everything that’s been happening has been under the hood, and the same screenshot multiple days would just be weird. So I suppose I’m modifying my daily screenshot initiative, to something more along the lines of ‘I will put up screenshots whenever I have something neat for looking at’.
I had to rewrite Bear, my latest project, because there were some database design issues. Those are all resolved now and the rewrite is finished(and utterly filled with syntactic sugar), but I’m not sure where to go from here. Bear has combat controls, a user-run shop system, and everything like that. The only ‘feature’ remaining to implement that is on the ‘guranteed features’ list is that of shops. Shops are sort of…key to Bear, in that they provide the interesting gameplay.
It’s not hard to kill Rabbits for 6 hours at a time.Bear has absolutely no limitations to doing this, if that’s what you feel like doing; I designed it that way. I designed it that way because I don’t like “dailies” or “hourlies” or anything like that. I don’t think systems that make you wait are actually fun. This might just be because I’m impatient. But I don’t.
For this reason, Bear’s Shops system is what makes the gameplay interesting. The shops are what vary the gameplay, and I’ve deliberately designed(and redesigned) Bear to make it very easy for me to add shops on-the-fly, whenever I get a good idea for one(or someone suggests one).
However, I can’t think of names.
I can think of a few shops to have. There’s your hospital(pretty generic to a single-character RPG), and your search-the-marketplace shop, but what about the training shops? Should it be just one training shop, that lets you train in all of your attributes? Or should it be a training shop for each attribute? If we went with the latter idea, we’d have a lot more shops. This would give players the illusion of more content to devour, but at the same time, each shop would feel emptier, in a way. Instead of going to a gym and seeing this:
- train in Agility for 5
- train in Strength for 8
- train in Health for 62
And so on, all a player would end up seeing is this:
- train in Agility for 5
Granted, it would achieve it’s purpose. Players would still be able to train. And maybe something cool would come out of dividing up the training shops; we could call them ’schools’, and give them fancy names like ‘School of the Running Coyote’(Agility), or something. But at the same time, it feels emptier.
Ultimately, I’m not sure which to go with. And the training areas aren’t the only that I can’t decide on. What am I supposed to call the shop where you can turn in animal parts?