The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

This month has mostly been spent finishing up the DynBattleDisplay plugin, which is now available. Those few extra bits I wanted to add took longer than I expected. X) Plus I was sick for a bit and lost about a week's worth of productivity time. :P Such is life.



One other thing I've managed, although it mostly wasn't my doing, was creating a new title screen for Forgotten Gates, shown above. The main drawing is by a Triforce MUCK player whose main character is called Mituni (she also did the character portraits, by the way). I was amazed by how much detail she was able to achieve in a 320x240 256-color image. X) It's possible we'll tweak the picture a little further, but for the most part this should be the face of the game from now on. Oh, and if you're wondering how the menu window ended up in the corner rather than the usual spot, it's thanks to DynMoveTitleWindow, a little plugin PepsiOtaku threw together when I asked if anybody had done something like this.

So, I guess I'll finally talk in more detail about the interactive narrator system I've teased about before. ;) To be honest, while this is something I've promoted because it's intriguing and unique and represents the MUCK-themed flavor of the game, it's purely conceptual at this point; I haven't even begun implementing it. The basic idea is that at any given time, there will be a "player" (meaning one of the people who role-plays on the MUCK, not the actual player sitting there playing Forgotten Gates) in charge of narrating the circumstances of the adventure. In other settings, they might be called a Dungeon Master or Game Master. The player currently narrating is the one describing the world, giving voice to NPCs, determining the actions of enemies, etc.

The way this will translate into a game mechanic for a single-player computer RPG goes like this. Suppose the adventurers are fighting pirates on a storm-tossed ship at sea, and the current narrator is Aubrey, who is a big softie. If he sees that the party is struggling, or just feels like making something happen, he might say, "Suddenly, a huge wave sweeps over the deck, and half the enemies are washed away!" And it would be so. :o If somebody else were narrating at the time, maybe somebody who likes to see how players deal with limitations, they might say instead, "Just then a bolt of lightning strikes the mainmast, blinding both friend and foe!" And everybody would be inflicted with the Blind status. A narrator with a sadistic streak might say, "Whoops, Link just slipped on the wet deck, he's stunned for a round!" A narrator who likes doing wild and crazy things might say, "A giant octorok just climbed aboard and ate all the pirates, now you have to fight that instead!" >8D All sorts of possibilities.

The current narrator could have more subtle effects as well. One narrator could make enemies attack in a very simple, straight-forward fashion, while another would be fond of trying to inflict status conditions. One narrator could be generous with the loot found in chests, while another would be very sparing about giving the party useful gear. A narrator could change the rules, like increasing critical hit likelihood, doubling experience but halving money drops, or requiring players to use a certain ability at least once every so many turns. It's a way of changing the flavor of the game. I plan to give more and more choice over who is narrating as the game progresses, although I'll also require them to be changed out fairly often. ;9 And just maybe, the final challenge will involve playing under a nightmare narrator. >D

So when will the interactive narrator system actually be a playable part of the game? Not for quite some time, I fear. X) There's a looooot of stuff I need to reimplement now that I know about DynRPG -- it should make things more efficient in the long run, but for now it means little visible progress. I hope I don't run out of interesting stuff to blog about before the next actual game update. XD