Frayed Knights: Interview With Chloe
More silliness from the world of Frayed Knights, the upcoming comedy indie RPG!

Since some people said they liked last week's interview with Dirk, and nobody screamed what a waste of bandwidth they were (can anybody REALLY say that in a world of YouTube videos?), I have decided to continue the interview series with members of the Frayed Knights. You have been warned. There's actually a little bit of boring crunchiness after the interview, if anybody wants to know about the minutia...

Interview With Chloe, of the Frayed Knights

Q: First off, can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
A: Okay. What do you want to know?

Q: Your name, how you decided to become a sorceress, and anything else about your background.
A: I’m Chloe. What’s your name?

Q: Hans.
A: Hands?

Q: No, Hans. And what I really...
A: Oh. I thought you were telling me about your hands. Which seemed a little weird, as I’d just asked you your name. I was about to scold you for talking about hands instead of names! After all, you started it!

Q: Er, started what?
A: Talking about names, silly! Unless you’d rather talk about hands. I mean, I like mine. They may look pretty delicate --- well, okay, not right now, they don’t. That’s because of all these scratches.

Q: Since we seem to be on that topic, why don’t you tell me where you got the scratches.
A: Sex.

Q: What?
A: What?

Q: I mean, I’m afraid to ask… how did you get the scratches on your hands from sex?
A: Have you ever seen any horn-backed devil boars mating?

Q: I can’t say I have.
A: Good for you. And you’d better not accidentally disturb them when they are, or they both get really, really grumpy. And devil-boars are really grumpy and mean when they are in a good mood. But when mating – they’ve got those horned backs and everything, which probably makes everything really tricky in the first place. And then if interrupted, they might lose their concentration, and then… ouch!

Q: By all the gods, that’s a disturbing mental image. So that’s what happened? You stumbled across two devil-boars… ah, in the act… and they scratched you?
A: You are a silly man! Of course not! If they’d gotten to me, they would have ripped me into hundreds of pieces! They gore, bite, and stomp, and impale. They don’t scratch!

Q: So how did you get the scratches?
A: I had to run away, naturally. It’s bad enough dealing with one devil-boar, let alone two!

Q: So you got scratched while running?
A: Not exactly. They could run faster than me, so I climbed up a tree and waited for them to get bored and leave.

Q: And you got scratched climbing the tree?
A: Not much. I’ve been climbing trees since I was a little girl! I’m very good at it! No, what happened then was that the branch I was hanging onto broke, and I fell – with the branch – onto the back of one of the devil-boars.

Q: Good heavens! Then what happened? I’d guess more than just scratches!
A: Well, the tree branch hooked onto the horns on the devil-boar, which I think was more angry than hurt. So it began to run, but the branch wouldn’t come loose. The other one was angry, too, and began charging at me. So I held on to the tree branch and rode it, pulled by one of the boars, chased by the other.

Q: Naturally, you were scratched up by the ride.
A: A little, but mostly on my legs. It totally ripped up my good gown! Anybody who was watching could tell you the color of my underwear!

Q: I’d love to ask, but I’d rather have you continue your story. So how did you escape?
A: The boars ran – one pulling me, the other chasing me – into a bandit camp. This distracted the devil-boars, but really annoyed the bandits. The bandits killed the boars in a big fight! And I even helped them! Got them started on a little bit of roasted boar with some fire spells! I’m pretty good at that.

Q: Oh. I see. Well, that ended well, then. But that doesn’t explain the scratches.
A: Ended well? Are you kidding me? A half-naked girl in a camp full of angry bandits? And they blamed me for six of them being gored to death by devil boars! I ran for my life!

Q: I’m going to guess that your hands were not scratched at this point.
A: Right! That came later. See, I ran right past a nest full of dragon-wasps.

Q: Dragon-wasps?
A: Those are wasps the size of cats, and look a little like dragonflies. Kinda cute, in a creepy way. You don’t want to get stung by one, let me tell you! You will swell up like an angry pokerfish, itch like you took a bath in poison ivy juice, and barf your guts out. Unless you die. Or maybe you’ll do all that even if you die, I don’t know. You just don’t want to get stung by one. Or especially not by a swarm!

Q: I take it you weren’t stung?
A: Oh, no. Leave them alone, and they leave you alone. Usually. But I saw some of them were hovering near a blackberry bush. So I pulled off what was left of my gown to pick some blackberries.

Q: Wait – you picked blackberries? While being chased by bandits and in the middle of some dangerous dragon-wasps?
A: Naturally. Of course, I was hiding by the blackberry bushes so they wouldn’t see me – I’m not stupid!

Q: Can you please explain to this non-adventurer why you’d do that?
A: Hide? Duh! They’d see me and kill me! Or worse!

Q: I mean pick blackberries. While being in mortal danger!
A: Oh! Dragon-wasps love blackberries. It’s like fine wine to them, and they are all alcoholics. So I picked a bunch of blackberries as I could while hiding. Then I ripped my dress into strips and put some berries into each one, as carefully as I could.

Q: The point being…?
A: I turned them into thrown projectiles! When the bandits discovered me, I threw these berry-bundles at them! They made nice, juicy explosions when they hit! And then I ran.

Q: Oh! And that attracted the dragon-wasps!
A: In great big roaring swarms! Well, after I torched the nest with a fire-spell. That got them stirred up. I didn’t even use up all the blackberries, before the bandits all fled, so I got to munch on them on the way home.

Q: So… wait a minute! You still didn’t explain how you got those scratches!
A: Blackberry bushes are thorny, and I was in a hurry. I got all scratched up.

Q: You could have answered my question fifteen minutes ago by saying, “I got scratched picking blackberries.”
A: Of course! But that would have made a boring conversation, wouldn’t it?

Q: That’s it! I’m done.
A: Goodbye, Mr. Hands! It was nice talking to you!


And Progress On Frayed Knights.
Boy. I want to talk about all kinds of sexy stuff that's been going into Frayed Knights this week, but I'm definitely entering in the "hard slog" stage. Lotsa work, lotsa bug-fixing, very little noticeable progress.

One disturbing little realization came when I discovered that I'd hard-coded monsters. Which means ONLY pus-golems could appear in combat. That code has been fixed now, so I've got encounters with all two of the monster types currently supported in the game... Brittlebone Skeletons and Pus Golems. Go us! And yeah, the pus-golems look mysteriously like zombies. That's stand-in content for you.

The automap is now as functional as it's probably going to get for the time being.

Among other odds and ends I've had to tackle:
* Initialize Drama Star Graphics properly at zero points
* New Title Screen
* Main Menu Music (stand-in, but closer to what I'm looking for) & Dragon Roar
* Fixed Combat: Characters with weapons were doing far too little damage on a hit
* New sound effect for closing door / chest
* Sound Effect for gaining a drama point.
* Fixed call to get the class-based magic defense modifier
* Non-combat "Rest" button & option

I've spent a lot of time this week working on tweaking combat. It's still nowhere close to "right," but at least the characters are defeating the monsters before keeling over in exhaustion. I'm still working on wandering-monster appearances, spell duration expiration, and so forth.

I'm also assembling an (unfortunately HUGE) "hit list" of things that need to be done. This includes bugs and missing features. Things like monsters giving XP, leveling up, Drama Star Powers, Secret Doors, Freelook, Phase / Turn progress while walking, Zone transfer, subzone / area transfer, loot from combat, attack special effects & feedback, quitting the game in mid-combat, and many other little items of annoyance have made the list so far. There is plenty more on the list, and it's nowhere near exhaustive.

The big "deliverable" is the demo next Tuesday at the Utah Indie Game Developer's Meet at ITT Tech in Murray, Utah. I don't know if it will be playable enough for anyone to just jump in and try it out, but it should at least be demo-able.


(Vaguely) related backmasking from a Black Sabbath album:
* Frayed Knights: Cartographic Incompetence and Dirk's Interview
* Frayed Knights: Learning the Lingo
* What Makes a Great RPG: Story

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Labels: Frayed Knights, Roleplaying Games

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