Bay 12 Games Forum

Guardian just to be contrary.

A little less than two months ago, Warden's Kickstarter ended in abject failure. Sometime after that, I pulled it off of Greenlight. After taking a break from everything to consume copious amounts of ice cream and blubber pathetically, I made a postmortem video of questionable quality on the project, which I'm finally leaving behind for real (unlike last time I stopped working on it). GitGud, the channel that video is on, is going to be all about learning stuff so that next time I try something like this I (hopefully) won't mess up quite as much.

Thanks for playing, everyone who joined in the testing! I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as far as I did if you hadn't helped.

...oh, I just realized:

Quote from: micelus on April 27, 2015, 11:56:02 pm

[6]A band of knights calling themselves the Order of the Lamp have settled in the village, commandeering the Eights'
shrine as their base. While supposedly pious soldiers, they have refused to allow our local priest to perform his duties.

Order of the Lamp. These people might be very friendly to us.

@micelus: What's our Mage Guild rank?

I would be completely ok with establishing a mage guild chapter here.

Well, isn't that interesting. If the Guild still exists in any sort of official capacity, we might be able to set up a teleportation destination linked to the other chapters. If this is after the White Gold Concordat, though, we have no guarantee that these really are part of the Order of the Lamp. Out in the hinterlands with no actual knights to call them out on it and an unconcerned lord not bothering to investigate, posing as members of a knightly order could be very convenient for bandits.

Better idea: Hit the fields for a bit. We can train our alteration magic, get to know our citizens, talk to them about our humble begining and extablish a reputation as a noble who does more than just sit in his manor all day, and perhaps even have a small effect on the food supply or alteration costs for the season.

Sputter incoherently at the notion of sullying our hands with field work. Reject the absurdity on principal. (The meeting with the quarreling leaders is a good idea, though.)

I completely agree about opposing vassalship to Lecroix. We need to stay free to pursue our own nefarious ends. Therefore, I propose/support the following:

- Send a letter to Lecroix, graciously declining a personal meeting until our fief is secured and order is ensured.
- Begin preparing defenses without any mention or indication to the outside world. Commissioning (or rather, having our steward commission) arms and armor for stockpiling and send out surveyors to assess our land's defensibility.
- And most importantly, prepare a study or lab to continue our magical endeavors.

Fighting is for peasants and mercencaries. It's beneath us.

Not only does that mesh well with having soul trap from Mysticism

Yes, we can trap the souls of all the monsters we'll fight.

Also, does this game use Morrowind Mysticism? Or Oblivion Mysticism? Mark and Recall might not work.

Hmm. I'm leaning towards illusion, destruction, or conjuration. Probably illusion (since we're a noble) or conjuration (since we're a Breton). Eh.

We have mastered the art of conjuration: the summoning and binding of daedra. We traveled to Wrothgar with our companion, The Trader. We don't trust him in the slightest, but for now our purposes coincide. Thus do we arrive at our late uncle's wretched little barony: Arkwick.

You're right that it's important to break down a game mechanics into viable chunks, but when those chunks themselves are not interesting, then I start getting worried whether the enterprise itself is worthwhile.

The chunks alone without any detail usually aren't interesting. Break down Team Fortress 2, for example.

"Team A attempts to prevent Team B from completing objective" or "Team A shoot Team B".

The fun parts come from the details. Step it up to the next level:

"Team A attempts to prevent Team B from moving a bomb to the objective by giving players a choice of classes with a variety of weapons and abilities and pitting them against each other."

That sounds more like a game, despite the clinical description. Add in the fluff:

"A group of mercenaries working for the mega-corp 'Red' attempt to prevent an identical group of mercenaries (working for another mega-corp, 'Blu') from moving detonating a bomb in their base. Each of the nine mercenaries has a unique set of weapons and abilities that allow them to fulfill different roles in the team, all amidst a comedic and lightheartedly brutal war."

And that's without going into the specifics of each class (cloaking, headshots, ubercharging, sentries/teleporters/dispensers, rocketjumping, sticky traps, spychecking, airblasting, etc). Every game starts with a boring description. "Take turn, buy stuff, end turn" isn't that bad.


What is the player buying? Ships? Parts? Weapons? What differences do the ships have (size, speed, etc.)? What do the weapons do (think of the differences between bullets and projectiles in TF2: bullets are hitscan, projectiles travel over time. Both are weapons, but there's a very distinct mechanical difference between instead of just having numbers change)? Instead of upgrading from weak missile A to strong missile B, could there be guns? Lasers? Tractor beams? What are the effects of each type of weapon?

What variables are involved? Do the ships have limited power? Could a player be forced to choose between attacking without defenses (and subsequently being at the mercy of the RNG) or diverting power to their shields and increasing their odds of survival until a more opportune time?


Sorry for the rambling monologue, I'm just spitballing ideas. As a general rule, it's better to have a few simple (and very diverse) mechanics that interact with each other a lot rather than the endlessly increasing numbers that phrasing the idea as 'take turn, buy stuff, end turn' suggests. There's a lot you can do with that one starting point.