Each adventure has a series of settings with actions that can be performed and challenges to overcome. In this, the Dusty Tomb, we have 3 challenges to overcome. They are represented by the map icon on the right side. A Challenge Card is drawn from the “Maps” deck (normal difficulty) and that encounter ends with a victory, Defeat or Failure. Defeat ends the entire quest, while Failure just means the encounter wasn’t passed. More on the Challenge Cards in the next post, for now, we’re exploring the Setting!
There are 3 actions the crew can perform while they are here:
- Consume Food to perform a rest action
- Play a card with the Fight icon to gain a treasure
- Play cards with Magic and Lore icons to gain 2 treasures and 1 Action token
The action on the bottom represents the reward for encountering all three Challenges. Since it has two locks, at LEAST two areas have to have been successfully explored (no Failure result) to get the reward.
Since Dursolacca, Gazrendal and the Conscript just arrived, we’re not going to use the Rest action yet. Each action can only be used once on the setting.
Jumping right into the middle of this work in progress – I’m designing a lightweight card-based role playing game. To create a character, the player selects:
- A Character Card: Values for mind, body, spirit, hand size, level and special rules
- Play Cards: Choose cards up to the hand size, defining the character’s abilities
- Archetype: A Play Card that doesn’t count towards hand size, but level 0 characters can’t choose one
I have two other characters already created, but I might recreate them (or simply list them) before the adventure begins.
For the third character I’m choosing a “Conscript”. This is a level 0 character, and will not increase the difficulty of the adventure (choosing higher level characters increases difficulty, which is only an idea right now).
As you can see in the Conscript card, she has 2 body, 2 mind and 1 spirit. She is level 0 and has a hand size of 8 (which after some consideration is being changed to 7, so I’m going to make her with 7 Play Cards).
Additionally, any card that has the FIGHT icon can be refreshed for free. Once a Play Card is used, it has to be “paid” for to refresh. If a card requires 2 SPIRIT to refresh (refresh costs are listed on the bottom left of the Play Card), that character will need to have 2 available SPIRIT points (not injured or fatigued – which we’ll get into later). I’m going to use this character to augment the two main characters, Dursolacca and Gazrendal.
The conscript will be used as a meat shield and her focus will be to refresh her Play Cards for free (at least most of them). As a level 0 character, she won’t be able to pick an Archetype or tier 3 Play Cards (granted, that doesn’t mean much at this point, but I figured I’d mention it).
Attributes are represented by a card with an icon to represent mind, body and spirit. When ‘fatigued’, it is inverted. When ‘injured’, it is flipped over. To regain an ‘injured’ attribute, you’ll need to rest. The ‘injured’ attribute is flipped back over and inverted to show ‘FATIGUED’. Attributes that are in the ‘FATIGUED’ state are a bit easier to recover.
Next up, we’ll be drawing a random Setting Card and encountering the challenges found there!
Sometimes the toughest bugs are little ones. For some reason, the fights in Beards were expiring even before the participants got a chance to beat on each other – a new fight was being created every 2 seconds with the same participants.
It took a long time to track down, but it came to the “performFights” method…
fightOver = [[allFights objectForKey:aFightKey] isFightOver];
[removals addObject:aFightKey];
Should have been…
fightOver = [[allFights objectForKey:aFightKey] isFightOver];
if (fightOver){
[removals addObject:aFightKey];
}
I forgot to check the fightOver test! Gah. Oh well, such is coding.
So, the new base for combat is coming along. I’ve switched the way the dwarves work from an orders based system to using finite state machines – the work was a pain in the butt, though definitely worth it for the flexibility. I’ve nearly finished the bit where the good guys and bad guys face off.
Yeah, I had it “done” before, but that wasn’t using states, so it had to be redone. Now it is almost redone! I’ll end up posting a video when I’ve got it working a bit better. Once the core functionality is done, I’ll clean it up.
Here is the basic background music for Beards! the game. Hope you enjoy it. Thanks Jason Haury for your work on it! It’s great.
I posted a very quick rough video of the “jabbing” in the combat system. Basically, every half second, each creature involved in a combat gets a chance to make an attack. So, until I get real art in there, I just put in a “jabbing” motion for baddies and dwarves alike.
Enjoy!
I’m posting these blog entries in both the new site at racingspidergames.com and here as well for a while.
I’m working on reopening the old Racingspider Games, LLC website. That’ll allow me to put more custom content in and all that jazz. Some cool stuff eventually coming!
You can find the website at
which will redirect to
http://www.racingspidergames.com/wordpress
The wordpress is the developer blog, and that’s where all the new posts will be going, though I may link between the two for a while.
I started last month reworking the old Job Manager to handle jobs differently. I got frustrated trying to shoehorn in the new functionality, and then took a break from it for about a month. In that time, I fleshed out some other ideas for different games, and started porting Expedition:Beyond the Walls to iPad.
I’ve now spent a couple days rewriting (completely) the Job Manager and fixed some inconsistencies with miner status (sometimes he didn’t change his status to idle). Anyway, now jobs are created on a tile, and you simply move the correct worker type to it. Once he’s idle, the Job Manager will assign him (and make him start building).
Once all required worker types are present, the countdown will begin to completion!
Beards is on hold for now. It got deeper than I thought it would, and some extra complexity got mixed in. I’ve decided to switch to a less vigorous project – but just as cool.
The project I’m starting on is loosely based on Tiny Adventures (the Facebook one), but with more of a choose your own adventure type feel to it. It’ll use a dice combat mechanic I’ve already created and am tightening it now in javascript and HTML.
The main driving idea is that players will be able to create adventures, enemies and encounters and share them. This is going to start off as an iPad game and then to iPhone (as universal). If it all goes splendidly, maybe it will jump to other platforms.
The game will also take a fair amount of ideas from Expedition:Beyond the Walls, and while it is definitely NOT E:BTW2, it gives a nod to that game (available on iOS).
Watch for more information!
I’ve taken a bit of a break from Beards and worked on a map for the next incarnation of Expedition: Beyond the Walls (iOS game). I’m going to break the map into sections so the player can move his PC party between territories and complete quests and whatnot.
While I haven’t actually played the Facebook game Tiny Adventures, I checked out the wiki on it and thought it was a great idea. I’m reinventing E:BTW2 with party management, gear management and a dice system for encounters. All in all, it should be cool.
Here’s the early version of the map, scaled down a bit.
Racingspider Games, LLC 