Frayed Knights: Please Don't Swim In Our Toilet
More words from the development diary of the fantasy/comedy indie RPG Frayed Knights - coming sooner than I'm comfortable with to a hard drive near you, if you are crazy enough to volunteer for the alpha test of Chapter 1.

A Deadline Approaches!
I realized earlier this week that I was down to "40 days and 40 nights" remaining before our contest entry - Chapter 1 of Frayed Knights - is due. Bearing that in mind, we've had to make some difficult scoping decisions. The wilderness land between the temple of Pokmor Xang is likely gone (for now). It's not that it's hard to throw in an extra zone into the game... we could whip out a big empty wilderness full of random encounters in a day. But --- that's not what we're going for.

I mean, we can't do state-of-the-art graphics, elaborate animation, or voice-overs by name actors. But we think we can approach the vicinity of "fun" and "interesting" and "exciting." A big empty wilderness area isn't any of the three, IMO. Our plan is to have the wilderness areas packed with a high density of "mini-adventures." Some will involve smaller interior locations of a handful of rooms (much smaller than Pokmor Xang's temple). Others may be location-based - a buried treasure you find from a map / clue somewhere else in the game, a little micro-story / mystery, or whatnot. Some will tie in to other parts of the game, others will be stand-alone.

We Don't Swim In Your Toilet, So Please Don't Pee In Our Pool
And so there I go talking about what's NOT gonna be in Chapter 1. Unless it gets added later due to feedback on the alpha demo. So let's talk about what we are currently working on...

I spent a little too much time this week ruining a perfectly good dungeon by creating the Pokmor Xang meditation-room pool. I include a render here. It still needs some tweaking - there's a texture anomaly on the metal decoration (based on the Pokmor Xang symbol James McEwan came up with, sans the full "biohazard" symbology). Yes, it is a pool! A strangely shaped pool. I know, my skillz as a 3D modeler are truly 133t. And you may say it resembles some other device known for holding liquid, but I assure you - it is NOT, and such devices did not exist in medieval society.

But it makes it all the funnier when Dirk has to swim in it.

Not that he has to, actually. That's an optional part of the dungeon adventure. You may, in fact, save yourself some amount of grief if you don't. But with great grief comes some mediocre jokes and a little bit o' loot, so... your call.

Here's a screenshot looking upon it from the balcony above, so you can see what it looks like in-game. Yeah, not as cool as the Pokmor Xang statue, I guess. But that comes later. Maybe I should have some discarded magazines scattered about the benches.

Playing Through
I did a play-through of the Pokmor Xang dungeon, which is still lacking some content (and lacking some equipment, some spells, and all drama star effects, and the ability to drink healing potions). I skipped about half of the combat encounters with a cheat code, explored - VERY quickly - all of the rooms, clicked on everything that could be clicked (but didn't really read the descriptions). Total time for play-through: Approximately 40 minutes. This means, once everything is in place and someone doesn't cheat their way through half the fights, I think a first-time play through should actually be about an hour for the dungeon. This sounds about right for me.

I already talked earlier this week about the secret doors. There's only one in this dungeon, but I hope there will be plenty more in others. I'm pleased to have those in place - those were on the list for potentially being scrapped (at least for the contest).

I started work on the buying / selling interface this week as well. It doesn't actually work, yet, but the prototype UI is there, based heavily upon the inventory UI.

Random Yet Predictable
Frayed Knights is consuming my waking hours, and I've found it has turned me into a horrible conversationalists. What else do I tak about? People ask me how was my weekend, and I all I can do is tell them how many hours I spent in the Temple of Pokmor Xang balancing out combat encounter difficulty, affixing torches to the walls, and building locks.

It really makes dinners with relatives extremely entertaining - from my perspective, at least. I love seeing their deer-in-the-headlights expressions as I can practically hear them thinking, "how to I politely excuse myself from the crazy man?"

One thing I've noticed, while balancing combat, is the tug-of-war between randomness and predictability. (See, this is the sort of thing I bring up during dinner discussions. I can practically hear what you are thinking right now.)

Players want predictability. Predictability gives the player control. Randomness reduces that control. But it also keeps things interesting. My probability model follows (perhaps a bit too closely) standard dice-rolling loveliness of tabletop gaming, and while it yields fairly predictable results over the long term, in the short term it leads to very erratic fights. Nothing torques off a magic user in D&D (for example) more than having their awesome uber-spell completely negated due to spell resistance or a good saving throw. Likewise, players hate times when they have an 85% chance of completely ignoring a save-or-die effect, and they blow their save.

However, players (at least secretly or subconsciously) love the CHANCE of having the spectacular failures. The risk that the next die roll could be your last... well, until you get a resurrection. But they want to be on the "lucky" side of that risk. Every time. They want to be the person who takes the long shots - and pulls it off. The risk and randomness is all very exciting - but you want it to pay off more often than probability says it should.

So I'm re-looking at how combat works (again) in Frayed Knights. Should I normalize the results a bit more? Skew everything even more tightly towards the middle? Part of that would include making "hits" far more frequent than misses. The original rules called for a slightly better than 50% chance of hitting against an equally matched opponent - which is actually, IMO as a former fencer and medievalist, really too high (at least for the kinds of melee combat I'm familiar with). But missing is boring. And makes combats too random.

I've skewed attacks now so they occur a little more frequently, but now I'm trying to make decisions about damage. Should they be more normalized? It feels weird when, during a round of combat, Arianna lands a pathetic 2-point hit, followed by Chloe who - in spite of being much weaker than Arianna and a less skilled combatant - does five times that damage on her own hit. Granted, if you graph the hits over the long term, you'll find that Arianna hits far more often, and averages about 2 points of damage per hit more than Chloe in melee. But - that random spread makes things feel too random.

So I may be doing more tinkering.

"To Do: Slap Together a Game"
The "to do" list is truly staggering, even without the wilderness. I spent time this week making sure we'd have music and all the remaining artwork that will be required for the game. Characters / character models are the principle area we're struggling with right now. Aside from that, from a content perspective, I'm looking forward to (and working towards) the stuff we're going to be doing after the contest. But the contest is going to take precedence for the next two months.

Upcoming for this week - more of the same:

• Make sure there are more things to click on and do in the dungeon
  
• Get the writhroots and blurry form spells working.
• Travel between the temple and the village.
• All dungeon loot / items.
• Get dungeon dialog 100% completed, self-edited, and then send off to my editor friends who promised to take a look at it and still remain friends with me later.
• Get spellcasting working out-of-combat.
• Get activated items working both in and out of combat.
• Finish the merchant trade system
• Fix encounter spawning
• Get Freelook working
  

Man. I am getting tired just looking at that list. But I think we're down to about 36 days as of today, so... I'd best get cracking. But if I could actually manage to knock out the majority of what's on the list, we'll be in AWESOME shape.

'Till next week!


(Vaguely) related delves into metaphorical dungeons:
* Wandering Monsters and Random Encounters
* Disappointment In the Demonweb Pits
* Frayed Knights: Twisty Paths and Flickering Torchlight
* Waiter! Why Is My Dungeon Stale?
* What's the Difference Between Adventure, Puzzle, and Role-Playing Games?

Discuss Dungeon Plumbing On The Forum Thread!

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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