Frayed Knights: Save Me, You Jerks!
Problem: You and your adventuring party find a hottie chained up in the awful evil dungeon filled with nasty monsters, probably awaiting some horrible fate. What do you do?

Solution: If your answer was to rescue her, you may have fallen pray to one of the oldest tricks in the book. If you are an old-school pen & paper RPGer, that is.

And if you happen to be one of the Frayed Knights, you get into an argument over whether or not to rescue her. Because everyone except the new guy in the party (Benjamin) realizes there's a better-than-even chance that she's going to stab you in the back on the way back out of the dungeon. With a snipe or two from the ladies about how this kind of trap is designed for typical parties of all-male adventurers, who think with something other than their brains in these situations. Now, this sort of communication and discussion of conflicting opinions isn't necessarily a bad thing - except when the subject of your argument happens to be standing RIGHT THERE behind a cell door (something she keeps pointedly reminding her potential rescuers...)

So what will you do? And what will SHE do if you rescue her? Well, only you can answer the first question (both options are acceptable), and I ain't gonna tell ya the second. You are gonna have to figure that one out by yourself. I just brought it up as an example of some of the clichés that I am trying to not avoid, but rather highlight, in the games' design. If it is a cliché, the Frayed Knights will often recognize it as such. And I'm trying to build the world so that those clichés (or conventions if you will) are explained.

And it's just too funny to see the Frayed Knights argue about whether or not to rescue a girl. Kinda tosses heroic fantasy on its ear. Okay, yeah, so they kinda did it in Raiders of the Lost Ark... but not quite like this. Oh, and you'll see that the Torque Elf is happily filling in for the Potentially Evil Traitor Girl Who Claims To Be In Need of Rescue in the picture. That's the beauty of stand-in art. At least she resembles a girl. Somehow Kork the Torque Orc just wouldn't have been the same...

On Long Hours
Well, I spent a lot of time at the day job this week, which has turned into a day-and-night job. Ugh. But it pays the bills. I'd love for that to change, and who knows? Maybe Frayed Knights might go on to sell tens of thousands of copies in just a few short months! And those monkeys might start flying out of my butt any moment now...

And then there was the matter of playing Aveyond 2 and Eschalon: Book 1 (and a li'l bit of Galactic Civilizations II + Dark Avatar). Which helped me keep my sanity amidst 12-hour workdays. All three are great games, BTW... go indie! Maybe they were so good because I was hallucinating half the time - and man, that Cyclops was, like, RIGHT THERE, man!

But work I did, and sleep I did not... well, not very much, anyway, even for me. It's hard for the brain to do heavy lifting late at night when you didn't get enough sleep the night before, so I largely kept things simple. Stuff like just getting the lighting right in levels can be surprisingly time consuming, by the way.

Pokmor Xang Revisited
James got the "real" statue of Pokmor Xang done (well, the first version at least) this week. After getting him placed and lit correctly, I think he looks more twisted than I had hoped. We added some corrosion to the brass (you didn't think those cheapskate cultists would actually have made him out of GOLD, do you?), which really helped make him look ... ickier. James also decided to spend polygons on making the jeweled pimples & blisters actual 3D objects rather than textures. Seeing those things... er... pop out at you... really makes a difference!

So here is happy Pokmor Xang, ominously lit from below and in front... Now, would YOU accept a donut from this guy?

What's funny (again, possibly caused by too little sleep) is that I feel like I have been LIVING in this dungeon lately. I hope the other ones will go much faster than this (since I'm learning as I go, and developing code as I need it). It's like back when I was playing too much EverQuest, and got to know Cazic Thule and Howling Stones like the back of my hand.

Technical Stuff
And it was a voyage of discovery for me. Some fun things I learned about Torque this week:

#1: Torque translates a negative translation about an axis into a positive translation around a negative axis. Something to bear in mind when you have to move collision volumes around because Torque Doesn't Animate Collision Volumes! Grrr! Okay, I understand there are good (well, not good, but reasonable) technical reasons for that, but it's still annoying.

#2: Torque translates a rotation of zero (or even "close to zero") around any axis to a rotation about the X axis (pitch). So if your object suddenly changes axis when you are monkeying with it algorithmically (for the reason above) - well, now you know. Surprise!

#3: Torque Constructor's export to legacy dif format was obviously not carefully tested with the last release. Since I'm still running on the 1.4x code base (it's seriously Frankencoded, so upgrading to 1.5x may not be a reasonable option), I have to do this, and Constructor pretty much chews it up and spits out an ugly mess that resembles a transporter accident aboard the starship Enterprise. Fortunately, the command-line tool map2dif_plus.exe is my friend. I just skip using the internal exporter (that sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?) and run it in another window.

I also spent some time this week working on level initialization and re-entry. Not that you can leave the dungeon and come back yet (or even save the game and re-load it yet). If a door has been unlocked, a trap set off, a treasure chest looted, and a boss slain, you don't want those to reset every time you come back to the dungeon. Well, okay, maybe for some games you do, but not for this one. This part is still not "done," but the framework is there.

What's Next?
I don't know yet what next week will look like. Our goal is to have the Temple of Pokmor Xang wrapped up and "alpha ready" by the end of the month. That's still a lot of work to do in just over three weeks (particularly with the holidays and ... well, crunch-mode).


(Vaguely) related half-conscious musings:
* RPG Design: Quest Abuse
* Frayed Knights: Prologue - Background and High Concept
* Wandering Monsters and Random Encounters
* To Sleep, Perchance To Dream...

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Labels: Frayed Knights, Roleplaying Games

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