Frayed Knights - Frantic Dungeoneering
And here's my weekly status report on Frayed Knights - the comedic fantasy role-playing game in development!

External Pressures
Crunch mode at Ye Olde Day Job ended more than a week later than expected. Not fun. However, I think I can say that the other game, The Game That Shall Not (Yet) Be Named, is coming along pretty well. Three weeks ago I was pretty worried. But in the last week or so, it's been looking pretty sharp.

But onto Frayed Knights, the game that will one day sell a million copies and spawn a host of imitators! Well, okay, I can dream, can't I? So what if it's hard enough to get people to download and play games for free...

Stocking the Dungeon
Ten days remaining to finish the dungeon.

A zillion things on my plate, most of them not particularly exciting.

I'm in trouble.

The entry hall is very large and, without any combat encounters, kinda boring. I'm working on trying to remedy this. My philosophy - where the necessities of budget and time allow - for Frayed Knights is that the player should never have to walk in a straight line for a long time without encountering something interesting. And that doesn't mean just lots of meaningless combat encounters.

I've spent some time scouring old Dungeons & Dragons modules, and walkthroughs of adventure games for additional ideas. Even if the combat system is brilliant, tactical joy for players, I don't want to rely upon that as a crutch. I want things for the player to explore and to do. Due to budget constraints, I can't do a gigantic world. I've talked about scope before. So instead of giving players a larger area to explore, I have to provide - insofar as is possible - more detail. More things to click on. And more activities for the player to do.

Some nifty things I've implemented this week is the ability to run custom scripts as part of an event (leveraging Torque's "eval" command), and some fixes in static dialog priority. And I worked on the lesser priest barracks area, so it's more-or-less complete. I'm going to have to get about a room per day completed at this rate, besides other coding.

Continued Development
Unfortunately, this is pretty much the "mid-development doldrums." A lot of the stuff I'm working on now is not strictly new code, but improvements, enhancements, and bug-fixes. We've been iterating on dungeon stuff --- it's getting some cool trim and a texturing overhaul, but except for two early guard rooms, not anything new. In other words, this is the (long) period in game development where an awful lot of work goes in without a ton to show for it.

My (non-spoiler-esque) tasks for the week include:

• Duration spells aren't expiring. Fix.
• Add duration spell icons on character portraits
• Interactive objects: XP gain command
  
• Interactive objects: Drama Star command
  
• Interactive Objects: Trigger portal command
  
• Get keys working for doors
• Wandering Monster Post-Trap / Lock (double chance)
• Message scroll should be visible during navigation mode
• And about seven dungeon rooms need to be fully fleshed out.

A Note On Developing Dungeons In Torque
Note to self: For future dungeons, do all lighting LAST. Adding a few lights to "check things out" early on resulted in a lengthy lighting pass every time I run the game after modifying the level in any way. This is very frustrating.

On Arianna's Cultural Heritage
And a snippet of dialog that might not make it into the demo:

Arianna: I'm only half-elf.
Chloe: On which side?
Arianna: My mother's. My father was a man from Willowshire.
Dirk: A Willowshire guy got to it on with an elf? That sounds kind of kinky.
Arianna: Dirk, if you ever use the word "kinky" in reference to my parents again, I'll be forced to gut you like a fish.

TTFN!


(Vaguely) related fun key ness:
* Frayed Knights: The Scoping Saw
* Big World, Small Dungeon: Does Size Matter In RPGs?
* Wandering Monsters and Random Encounters

Read Comments, Make Comments, Insult My Heritage On the Forum Thread!

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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