RMN Anniversary Postmortem

With 10 days, 34 entries, and 39 participants, the RMN 10th Anniversary Retro Gamemaking Event is now finished.  Unfortunately, my submission is not.

Does this look like a finished game to you?

It's, well... not exactly unexpected.  I have a long commute to and from work, I spent the week that the event was going on dogsitting and unable to access my computer, I had some things to do on the last weekend that the event was going on, and even when I was available there were a few more hours that I could have spent working on my game instead of doing other things.

What I'm Working On: RMN 10th Anniversary Project

I have to say, the best thing about not having any readers for my blog is that I don't have to feel worried about losing them when I forget to post anything for half a decade.

So, RPGMaker.net (henceforth RMN) just turned ten years old.  My first instinct is to say "So Old?", but then when I think about it a little more I wonder if so young? might be the better reaction.  I joined the site in July of 2011 (and had lurked for a few months prior to that), and the site already seemed as well established then as it is now, so it doesn't really feel right to me that the date that I registered an account is now closer to the site's founding than it is to the present day.

Before I go on to the main topic of this post, I will digress a little bit to clarify something that might be misinterpreted from the previous paragraph.  Though I said that I've been there for the majority of the site's existence, I haven't really been there.  As with pretty much every forum that I sign up for (or blog that I establish), I pretty much lurk and don't really contribute in any way.  Giving my history on RMN a quick glance, I have...

• 2 games, both of which were small-scale things for contests.  Neither of which were good (the games, I mean.  The contests themselves were great).
• 15 reviews.  Only 12 of these are still available due to some of the games being pulled from the site.  There's also apparently a review for MinST that I began writing and never finished (and now never will, as the game has gone some upgrades since I first played it).
• 88 forum posts.

So overall, it looks like I contributed one thing every three weeks.  Not bad given my usual nonexistent presence in web communities, but also not as active as I'd like to be.  This goes double once you take into account that most of those things (especially the reviews) were bursts of activity, so the time between contributions is in reality even longer in most cases.

As a digression-digression since we're already on the topic of activity, I'll likely be queueing my RMN reviews for this blog.  I've already posted one such review a few years ago when the game was pulled by its creator, and now I'd like to finish the process with the others, even when they are still available.  This is definitely something that I am doing because I would like to ensure that my work remains accessible and easy to find, and not because this blog desperately needs content and I'm too lazy to come up with anything new.

So anyway, end digression.  Then end that other digression as well.  I'm going to be talking about the currently-unnamed project that I'll be submitting to the 10th anniversary event.

The game, in all of its incomplete, nameless glory

D20 House Rule: Favored Weapon

Let's get things out of the way: the Fighter class in Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 sucks.  Not to say that it can't be made effective, or that nobody will ever find it fun to play, but the class simply can't compete on the same level as some of the more powerful classes such as the Wizard, Cleric, and Druid.  Part of the reason this situation arises is likely due to the fact that a fighter's only real class feature is bonus feats, but the fighter will eventually run out of good feats to select, at which point his rate of power level gain will slow.

One of the things that I'd like to do for Tologan-Var is re-evaluate the feats in order to make them more powerful, but I also happened to stumble across the concept of modular weapons in a forum thread.  I don't really like the idea of modular weapons as such (to me, it feels as though the idea removes the already-tenuous connection weapons have to their historical counterparts and turns equipment into nothing more than a mechanical manipulation).  One idea that was suggested in the thread that I can get behind, however, was the suggestion that a fighter may be able to invest more points into his weapon as he levels up.  As such, I have the following class feature as a concept:

Favored Weapon (ex): At first level, the fighter chooses a Weapon Group that he is proficient in.  He may select one of the following abilities to apply to that group:

• +1 on attack rolls
• increase damage dice by one size category
• Increase critical threat range by 1
• Increase critical damage multiplier by 1
• Increase range increment by 50% of original value

At 5th level and every 5 levels afterward, the fighter may select an additional weapon group to apply a single effect to.  In addition, at each such interval, he may apply an extra bonus to one of the weapon groups that he has already selected. (The same bonus cannot be applied to a weapon group more than once).

D20 House Rule: MAD Spellcasting

A while ago I posted the beginnings of a procedurally-generated hexcrawl.  While I've neglected further postings on the matter, the project has since expanded into a programming project that implements the techniques that I was developing into a videogame.

A Sample Map of one of the many forms of the Island of Tologan-Var

While I would like to base gameplay off of the D20 rules, I've been considering implementing various tweaks.  One such idea was the implementation of Multiple Ability Dependance (MAD) for spellcasting classes: By default rules, there is only one stat that a given class has to improve in order to improve all aspects of their casting ability (Spells per day, Spell save DC, and whether or not a spell can be cast).  In this variant, each class would have two different ability scores that govern different aspects of spellcasting.

A Procedural Hexcrawl I:The Land of Arador

I've always found the idea of procedural content generation to be rather fascinating.  Since I also find worldbuilding and Role-playing games interesting as well, it's natural that I like the combination of all three elements.  As such, this series of articles will follow my creation of a hexcrawl-style map, procedurally generated as much as possible.

What is a Hexcrawl?

Hexcrawling is a form of content organization for RPG content in which locations or other points of interest that the players might run into are keyed to a grid made of hexagonal tiles.  In addition to the tile, each tile also has a terrain type.

A more in-depth explanation of Hexcrawling can be found in Justin Alexander's excellent series of articles on the subject.

Starting Out: The First Parameters

The two things we need to know right away when creating our hexcrawl are as follows:

1. How large are we going to make each tile?
2. How many tiles do we want?

I'll be using tiles with a 6-mile radius (giving them an area of just over 125 square miles), generated in a 24x24 grid.  This means that in the end, we'll have a total area of 72,000 square miles, roughly the size of the US state of Washington.

Our map will come from the Wildgen Hexmap Generator.  For this step, I generated several until I got one that I felt had a satisfactory mix of terrain types (all present, but not dominated by any single type).  The end result looks like this:

Asking YAFNAG for some suggestions, I've chosen the name "Arador" for this land.

The Out Casts Review: Unpolished, Unbalanced, and Nonsensical

 The following review was something I wrote during RMN's post-NaGaDeMo review drive back in July 2012, which I've already talked about here.  The game this review was attached to has since been taken down from the site, rendering the review unviewable to anybody except myself.  As such, I have decided to preserve the content of the review here on my own blog.  The text of the review itself is unchanged except for reformatting it for my blog; I'll discuss some of the out-of-date information at the end of the post.

The Out Casts: Unpolished, Unbalanced, and Nonsensical

The Out Casts is an RPGMaker VX game created by redwall10.  This appears to be redwall's first (and, as of this post, his only) game on this site; as such it could be expected that the game would not be a masterpiece.  Unfortunately, The Out Casts has many more issues than would be considered acceptable even for a first game, featuring unbalanced gameplay, a barely-sensical plot, and spelling errors galore.





Summary:
At this time, the game page for summarizes The Out Casts as such: "The Outcast follows the journey of Chris and Ashley, two siblings who have become outcasts for practicing magic, as they fight against the forces of Zio and attempt to reclaim their place in society. Throughout their journey, Chris and Ashley will be aided by Sakura, a woman from Japan, and a powerful fighter known as Alex 'The Guard'. "

In actuality, The Out Casts follows Chris and Ashley, two siblings who became outcasts after Zio attacked their village out of a sense of racism.  After defeating Zio, they then go on to fight his master, the Earth King, who kidnapped their mother.

Fire Emblem: The Amazon Challenge I

In which Muninn embarks on a quest for revenge against an evil uncle, armed with naught but the power of teenage girls.  Confused?  Then why not start from the beginning?

Chapter 1: Footsteps of Fate

A remarkably easy chapter, what with everybody on the enemy side being armed with an axe and Lyn having a sword.  Even taking into account the few enemies towards the beginning where the game forces the use of Kent and Sain, Lyn was able to grow from level 2 up to 4.

Level-Ups	Level	HP	STR MAG	SKILL	SPD	LUCK	DEF	RES	Weapon
Lyn	4	19	7	9	11	7	2	1	Sword D

Chapter 2: Sword of Spirits

Another easy chapter.  The boss, Glass, had a sword instead of an axe, but even so he was quite the pushover.  Didn't even bother breaking the west wall of the temple, because I had to send Lyn south to take care of the bandits in that direction anyway.  Lyn grew two more levels (to Lv6) and attained her C-rank sword ability.

See that 67 Hit rating (78.22%)?  That's the only attack Lyn was hit with in this chapter.

Level-Ups	Level	HP	STR MAG	SKILL	SPD	LUCK	DEF	RES	Weapon
Lyn	6	20	8	9	13	7	3	1	Sword C

Fire Emblem: The Amazon Challenge Introduction

I've recently held the desire to go back and re-play Fire Emblem.  Back in 2004, shortly after the game came out, I was quite into it (as can be seen from many of my game design documents that I have from back then which very much ripped it off took inspiration from this wonderful game).  I beat the game several times back when I was a frequent player of it and have only played it sporadically in the time since then, but in coming back to it, I've decided to spice my experience up just a little bit.

I intend to restrict myself to only using the female characters.