Frayed Knights: Serena, Switches, and the Little Green Book
In today's installment of the development updates on Frayed Knights, the obnoxiously tongue-in-cheek indie RPG in development here at Rampant Games (which basically means: "my basement"), I want to talk about Serena, switches, a little about world building, and the "Adventurer's Journal." Wow. Bored already are you? This game development stuff isn't as exciting as it sounds, sometimes.

Serena
First off, meet Serena. She is the final member of the Heroes of Bastionne. She is the party rogue. She is everything a rogue is supposed to be - silent, deadly, sneaky, and discreet. Everything that Dirk is not. Nobody - even her own adventuring group - knows much about her. She doesn't talk about her past. Serena doesn't talk much at all.

She seems to have an active animosity towards per Dirk. Maybe it's the whole pirate / ninja warfare thing. She's definitely on the ninja side of the fence, and Dirk is clearly on the flamboyant pirate side. But Dirk claims ignorance in knowing why she seems to harbor such a grudge against him.

Serena is a highly competent. While she is something of a mystery to her own fellow party members, they've learned to rely on her. She's quietly saved their bacon many times in the past.

And now you've been introduced to the rivals of the Frayed Knights. And now you know who stole the eyes in the pilot...

Switches
Switch-based puzzles are among the most uninventive, unimaginative, and potentially boring elements a designer can throw into an RPG.

Now I've got 'em in Frayed Knights.

I'm going to hell.

My excuse is that they are just too friggin' convenient and reusable. I mean, they are big and obvious (technically, I had a hidden text-only switch that opened a gate in the Temple of Pokmor Xang, but I won't count it here). What adventurer can resist pulling a big lever like that? You do it, and something happens.

Maybe they aren't inherently evil (he says, travelling the well-paved path of good intentions). They are just tools that have been poorly used. But then, I'm using them to open a freakin' magically-powered gate, which is - again - pretty uninspired. At least it doesn't make you guess the right combination or anything truly obnoxious like that.

I'll try and do better in the future. I promise...

The Adventurer's Journal
After chatting with folks in the forums a bit, I decided to go with 'simple', with the ability to add your own topics and notes to the journal. It's not exactly a "quest journal," as not everything in it is related specifically to a quest - just a topic. All notes in the journal under a topic are listed in the order in which they were received - including ones you add yourself.

Basic development is done, but there are a few loose ends (and a lot of stand-in buttons that look like crap). And I don't yet have the ability to save or load data, or to filter "resolved" topics from the list. But it's functional.

The first page is a table of contents, with a list of topics. You can select and jump to a particular topic, or you can simply flip through the topics page by page. Topics and the notes will be filled out automatically as you play, discover things, and talk with people. But you can add your own notes under any topic, and even create your own topics for keeping your own notes.

World Building
The eastern wilderness and the caverns of anarchy are coming along. My goal is to pack the world with interesting stuff to do or see (and have snarky conversations about) every few steps. It's not a small world, so that's a tall order. Even so, I'm finding there are times I really need to shrink down the explorable area. Even if I manage to cram something into every single 100' square block of terrain, eventually the player is going to resolve it all and will be left with walking along territory that has already been "cleaned out."

So I'm finding myself creating more tightly-packed environments than I originally intended - which in turn, in 3D, drives the frame rate up, because so much is on-screen at once. The next solution is to increase the player walking speed so they can cross the entire visible distance in seconds (which plays horribly), shrink the visible distance via denser fogging (which looks horrible), or to break up the environments into smaller, more bite-sized "chunks" (which involves more time spent "zoning" between environments, which is horribly tedious). Or a horrible combination of all of the above.

Decisions, decisions.

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design

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