If anybody is still reading this despite the lack of updates, you may have noticed that another contributor has mysteriously appeared. That would be Cormroc the Great, or just Matt. I have been friends with Pratt and Lio for a few years now. I met Pratt at school and then got to know Lio mostly through theorycrafting and number-crunching WoW with him.
I was brought on to the project to help with the technical side of the RPG. I am not a very creative person and don't have much to offer to the story side of all this. However I love games and game mechanics, and am a software engineer so I hope to be able to actually contribute to this project in these regards. From what has been explained to me so far there is a lot of potential for a fun and fairly unique game system here.
I am currently trying to recover from spending my weekend at GenCon, but hope to actually start offering diving into mechanics and start on the programming side of things soon. The only thing I can really promise for sure is that I won't be updating here more often than Pratt and Lio.
Monday, August 20, 2012
Saturday, August 11, 2012
It's Been Too Long
It has been too long. Pratt and I talked about keeping the Blog active with frequent updates. Well you see how that has gone. On the bright side we have started work on the Table Top part of the game in earnest. So far so good. We intend to have it take place about 300 years after the events in the books we are currently working on. We have kicked around some pretty interesting ideas and hopefully we will have something we can roll out in the not too distant future. Pratt is looking forward to play testing. I'm just looking forward to finding out if people want to play it.
Sorry it has been so long since the last update, I was finishing Law School and preparing for and taking the Bar. Meanwhile Pratt has a family to worry about. Essentially that makes him busier than I am. In any case I will endeavor to do a better job of keeping this up to date.
Another project that is currently underway is my building a website called 7 Dorks. It's still looking for a visual artistic direction and the content is nothing special yet, but it's growing. Check it out at www.7dorks.com
Saturday, February 11, 2012
It's Mine, All Mine!
I spend a lot of time playing games. Today I got to spend some time playing various games that I love. One of them is my shiny new toy and one of them is an old favorite.
The new game is called Kingdoms of Amalur. It is a fun roleplaying game set in massive open world. The story is interesting and captivating, but as an open world game, you spend a lot of time running around doing whatever you want. I love those types of games. I really feel that I get to play an actual character of my own devising. Sure, I may only have two to three dialogue options, but I feel I can shape my character by picking which quests I do and where I go.
My old favorite game is called Shadowrun. If you are familiar with video games, you may have heard of a game called Shadowrun, the one I'm talking about is the pen and paper RPG that the game is loosely based on (how they justify turning a fantastic RPG into a shooter I don't fully understand, but I promise to keep my ranting on the matter to a minimum. Oh, that means I should have stopped a sentence ago. Sorry.) As a pen and paper game, and one that has no classes to speak of, you really get to a make a character your own. It is pretty awesome. Whether you are a recovering drug addict trying to get his family's forgiveness, a blood thirsty troll that hunts man and beasts, or an Irish Don Quixote you get to make your character truly your own. The down side is you have to share that spot light with a bunch of other people, where as in Kingdoms of Amalur you're a force to be reckoned with (pun intended for those of you familiar with game.)
Ultimately one of our big goals for our dream video game project is to make it so that each character you make you feel is truly yours. From appearance customization (which is of course old hat) to some new tricks we are playing around with conceptually (which I'm not giving away here) we want everyone to have the chance to feel that their character is really truly their own. It's a feature of the game that might not interest everyone, but just like you can play Kingdoms of Amalur without really taking tons of time in the character customization the game will work just as well for people who want to run around and not spend much time customizing their characters.
-Pratt
The new game is called Kingdoms of Amalur. It is a fun roleplaying game set in massive open world. The story is interesting and captivating, but as an open world game, you spend a lot of time running around doing whatever you want. I love those types of games. I really feel that I get to play an actual character of my own devising. Sure, I may only have two to three dialogue options, but I feel I can shape my character by picking which quests I do and where I go.
My old favorite game is called Shadowrun. If you are familiar with video games, you may have heard of a game called Shadowrun, the one I'm talking about is the pen and paper RPG that the game is loosely based on (how they justify turning a fantastic RPG into a shooter I don't fully understand, but I promise to keep my ranting on the matter to a minimum. Oh, that means I should have stopped a sentence ago. Sorry.) As a pen and paper game, and one that has no classes to speak of, you really get to a make a character your own. It is pretty awesome. Whether you are a recovering drug addict trying to get his family's forgiveness, a blood thirsty troll that hunts man and beasts, or an Irish Don Quixote you get to make your character truly your own. The down side is you have to share that spot light with a bunch of other people, where as in Kingdoms of Amalur you're a force to be reckoned with (pun intended for those of you familiar with game.)
Ultimately one of our big goals for our dream video game project is to make it so that each character you make you feel is truly yours. From appearance customization (which is of course old hat) to some new tricks we are playing around with conceptually (which I'm not giving away here) we want everyone to have the chance to feel that their character is really truly their own. It's a feature of the game that might not interest everyone, but just like you can play Kingdoms of Amalur without really taking tons of time in the character customization the game will work just as well for people who want to run around and not spend much time customizing their characters.
-Pratt
Saturday, January 28, 2012
An Uncompromising Past
One of the great challenges of putting together our world has been figuring out how magic works. Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that there are almost as many types of magic as there are cultures. (There actually may be more types of magic, now that I think about it.) That particular issue hasn't felt as daunting as it could be because the separation of magic, belief, philosophy and religion has felt like it organically follows from the created world. In our world there is not some overriding type of magic, but many different abilities that different cultures have learned to tap into. The real challenge has come from figuring out how the magic functions.
For better or for worse, Pratt and I both have an inescapable scientific background, though neither of us chose to fully embraced it. That background has shaped the way we view magic working. There are still mystical parts involved, but the function must be one that makes some sense. By "some sense" of course I mean that we cheat horribly and the change of mass to pure energy and vice versa does not have the drastic physical manifestations that one would realistically expect - that's where the magic comes in. Some types of magic users if they could exist in this world would be instantly vaporized, while others would merely be so radioactive that even if by some miracle they managed to survive, anyone near them would not live long enough to have to worry about cancer. Hence, magic.
What is fun are the more mundane uses of elemental magic - earth, wind, fire, water - or maybe, but not really, solid (inorganic), gas, plasma (sort of), liquid. Earth involves the manipulation of inorganic solids and seems to lend itself readily to those wanting to do melee combat. Wind requires high pressure and low pressure points and has some ready applications for scouts, spies and snipers as well as being the most explosive. Fire ends up being about what you would expect (though our justification for it is such pseudo-scientific drivel that I have trouble looking myself in the mirror afterwards). Water ultimately is extremely useful and entirely unexciting at the moment.
There is a part of me that wants to grip a calculator just so I can discard it because I know nothing short of actual computer modeling will come close to satisfying my desire to see how materials will respond under certain conditions. Excuse me for a moment, I want to make an extremely rough estimate of how many kilojoules our shapeshifter absorbs by instantly dropping 100+ kilograms of mass. No doubt this can be converted into Megatons of fun!
For better or for worse, Pratt and I both have an inescapable scientific background, though neither of us chose to fully embraced it. That background has shaped the way we view magic working. There are still mystical parts involved, but the function must be one that makes some sense. By "some sense" of course I mean that we cheat horribly and the change of mass to pure energy and vice versa does not have the drastic physical manifestations that one would realistically expect - that's where the magic comes in. Some types of magic users if they could exist in this world would be instantly vaporized, while others would merely be so radioactive that even if by some miracle they managed to survive, anyone near them would not live long enough to have to worry about cancer. Hence, magic.
What is fun are the more mundane uses of elemental magic - earth, wind, fire, water - or maybe, but not really, solid (inorganic), gas, plasma (sort of), liquid. Earth involves the manipulation of inorganic solids and seems to lend itself readily to those wanting to do melee combat. Wind requires high pressure and low pressure points and has some ready applications for scouts, spies and snipers as well as being the most explosive. Fire ends up being about what you would expect (though our justification for it is such pseudo-scientific drivel that I have trouble looking myself in the mirror afterwards). Water ultimately is extremely useful and entirely unexciting at the moment.
There is a part of me that wants to grip a calculator just so I can discard it because I know nothing short of actual computer modeling will come close to satisfying my desire to see how materials will respond under certain conditions. Excuse me for a moment, I want to make an extremely rough estimate of how many kilojoules our shapeshifter absorbs by instantly dropping 100+ kilograms of mass. No doubt this can be converted into Megatons of fun!
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