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What's a MUCK?

New version uploaded!

v0.1.3 (05/01/2015):
- Properly fixed the image file-related bug mentioned in v0.1.2.1.
- Fixed a bug that was causing memory corruption if the player pressed the Shift key after a battle.
- Altered some scripting to use DynParams, changes should be invisible to the player.
- Added a (quite possibly temporary) title screen image.
- Added PepsiOtaku's System: Display Options plugin and used it to set the game to start in windowed mode.

That Shift key bug turned out to be a lot simpler than I thought, and it was related to the code section I thought I'd eliminated as a cause early on. There was a function for splitting the party which I later thought was not such a great idea, so for purposes of churning out a playable version of the game, I simply turned off a switch used to determine whether party splitting is allowed at a given time. Well, turns out that switch gets turned back on in the aftermath of a battle, and if the Shift key is pressed anytime after that, the code for splitting the party (which doesn't play nice with the rest of the system anymore) gets called. X) I've placed a more robust check to keep the party split function from being called. As for the appearance that the bug was behaving differently when I added code to try and debug it or ran it on a different computer, that was symptoms of a separate bug, which has also been fixed. As far as I'm aware, the current version is stable, but please, try it out and let me know if you find any more bugs. :)

I suppose I'll use these monthly updates to give little tidbits of insight into what I have planned for Forgotten Gates on top of the progress reports. Today I'll talk about the MUCK theme of the game. MUCK stands for Multi-User Created Kingdom (among a few other disputed interpretations, but that's not particularly important) and is a type of text-based online virtual world program, commonly used to create role-playing "games". I put "games" in quotes because they don't always fit anything more than the loosest definition of a game, and Triforce MUCK, on which Forgotten Gates is based, is pretty far on the non-game end of the scale. There are no stats, no dice rolls, no combat system at all. It's a pure role-playing environment, where players simply create stories collaboratively by taking turns writing what their characters are doing, saying, thinking, etc. Obviously, Forgotten Gates is at the other extreme--a single-player game which does have a heavy emphasis on combat--but the characters and setting of the game are based on the world we've crafted in our role-playing community.

The story of Forgotten Gates will have two main layers. The first is the In-Character (IC) layer, which takes place in the world of Hyrule with all of its fantasy and the familiar lore of the Zelda series. The second is the Out-Of-Character (OOC) layer, which deals with the actual players of Triforce MUCK as they play out the IC story. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this sort of duality from stories like .hack and Sword Art Online, although they tend to end up focusing primarily on the OOC layer. In Forgotten Gates, the OOC layer will mainly serve as comic relief, as the players occasionally drop out of role-playing mode to make silly comments or argue the finer points of the story. It will also have some gameplay implications, though, most notably in the form of the interactive narrator system...which I'll explain in more detail another time. ;)

In case anyone's curious about the Unity project I mentioned, it's come a decent ways. I'm calling it Bombercan, since the player model consists mostly of colored cylinders stacked on top of each other. X) I've managed to get the basic movement functioning, which was an interesting exercise. I'll probably make a game profile for it once it's playable.