Frayed Knights: Skull-Drudgery
Some weeks, it feels like my progress on Frayed Knights is inexcusably slow. This was one of those weeks. Much of this last week has been devoted to a skull.

One. Frickin'. Skull.

And poetry.

Kinda.

See, I've been working on a little bit of "black triangle" stuff again. While I'd hoped to just start populating dungeons with all kinds of stuff, I've found myself having to go back and support a lot of new functionality. This is because I'm not satisfied just throwing a bunch of combat encounters in my dungeons and calling it done. I figure if that's all somebody wanted to do, they'll be playing Diablo III or something like that.

I want my dungeons in Frayed Knights to have a lot of things going on in them besides combat. Not that combat will (usually) take a second seat. But I want to have things to tinker with - little "micro-quests" going on - things to discover, things to talk to, things to experiment with. I want to be able to populate an area with lots of interesting stuff to do and tinker with and talk to and quest for instead of just fighting all the time.

I'd like each area to be a little mini-adventure game in its own right - but with some options rather than a single solution to every puzzle. Though at the same time, I worry if the environment is beginning to sound a little too "adventury." Did I just make up a new term? But if somebody wants to play an adventure game - well, thanks to the indies, there are a lot of new indie adventure games out there now, too.

Frayed Knights is written for - well, ultimately, for ME. While I loved adventure games back in the day, I haven't completed many of them. I'm kind of the dumb jock of the adventure game world. I enjoy a good smattering of puzzles. But I'm mainly there for the scenery, and when things get too difficult, I get frustrated and just want to KICK OPEN THE DAMN DOOR ALREADY. So I try to be careful to allow alternative, more "brute force" options where possible, and not to stray too far on the adventure game puzzle side of things.

And so the skull (there are a few skulls in the Tower of Almost Certain Death) was one of those things. It's got a playful and silly mini-quest associated with it, which didn't seem like it needed as much coding support as it did. I'm not really sure where the hours all went, except it seemed like I was constantly re-starting the game, testing, and finding out that something else wasn't working right, stopping, going back, hunting down the bug, and then doing it all over again. For HOURS.

My hope is that once I get some more functionality in place (and fully debugged), it'll be as easy to throw these kinds of quests together as it was when I was doing Neverwinter Nights scripting. That's not likely, but that's my ideal.

But as I've been doing this, I've found holes in my code that needed fillin'. I've had to write new code to support some of these activities. Some of 'em are pretty basic - like determining if anybody in the party has a particular item (and then supporting the expenditure of said item as part of a quest). But the real pain (and drudgery) comes from dealing with the expansion of all the combinations of the things the player may be doing, and making sure that not only the code and interface support it all, but that there is an appropriate conversation dialog for all of these situations (if talking is involved).

So there was a bunch of additional groundwork I had to lay recently that I hadn't counted on. Ah, well. Thus the apparently slower progress. But it's not been from lack of effort. As I said before - we're "white boxing" as much as possible to get things to a fully playable state more quickly, so screenshots aren't the prettiest. They won't be for a while, yet. But I do feel like we're making progress.

Brian has been working on the lizard man tunnels - which are also for this first chapter. While not fully textured (and looking a little too modern right now because of this), I like 'em enough that lizard men may have to have more appearances in this game (with similar dungeons).

So at this point, where are we in terms of content?

We have six indoor / "dungeon" environments that are functionally complete (but not all are detailed or populated yet). And we have two more indoor playing environments currently under construction. We have one town more-or-less complete (but not fully populated with all quest NPCs and so forth) - the expanded version of Ardin from the pilot. We have four outdoor environments currently playable (but incomplete), a whole bunch of small buildings, over a dozen functioning monster types.

I'm not gonna guess as to the hours of gameplay yet. But if you figure the Temple of Pokmor Xang was about average for the size of these dungeon crawls, that might give you some idea. And that's only about half of what's needed for the first act of the game.

So we're getting there. Just not as fast as I'd like.

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design, Torque

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