The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

It's been a year since I've posted any updates for this project, so I'd like to give a quick signal that yes, it's still on my to-do list and I have every intention of completing it...eventually. X) It will probably take years more, maybe even decades, but I haven't forgotten it (no pun on the title intended).

Last time I posted, I said that I was back-burnering Forgotten Gates in order to focus on rebooting a role-playing community I was in charge of. That effort has been largely abandoned because it became clear that not enough people were interested in participating. It ultimately doesn't matter if you have a great role-playing system or a huge, detailed virtual world, what's most important for a role-playing community is PEOPLE, writing stories together. Besides, as it happens, some of the players from that community had already established an alternate version of it, so in a sense that's the reboot.

Despite what I say about the community of people being the most important thing and the fact that I've scrubbed the overall project, I'm still working on something that I started from it: a Unity application to implement a role-playing system I invented. I call it the Awesome-Sauce Conflict Resolution System, and it's a relatively small ruleset inspired by the Prose-Descriptive Qualities System by Atomic Sock Monkey Press. There are probably better frameworks than Unity for it, especially if you want to incorporate the story-writing along with the dice-rolling and have a persistent world instead of session-based, but I want to complete this application if only for what I'm learning by doing it. I got stuck for quite a while on the details of how to send network messages between game instances -- the networking tutorial on the Unity website is geared toward their automatic system for keeping elementary variables and physics objects synchronized for simple action games -- but I'm finally past that hurdle and building up steam again. I'll probably post the ASCRS app here on RMN when I'm done with it, if only for other game devs to have an example of how to do certain things (not that my work is a perfect standard to go by, but I do try to make it structured).

In news that is perhaps more relevant to FG, Triforce MUCK, the role-playing community from which the characters and setting of FG are drawn, has had a rebirth of its own! After a long period of being offline due to the expense of renting server space to run a MUCK, the person in charge hit upon the idea of using a Slack group instead, and renaming it Zelda RPG. Slack is actually a pretty good environment for a role-playing community. People can chat in real-time on one channel, post "poses" (the RP term for the bits of story showing each character's actions in the current situation) on another channel, and scenes can proceed either as rapidly as the players can write when all involved are present and paying attention, or a round of poses every day or so as players come home, catch up on what's happening, and respond with their character's reaction. And it's free. :) It's also capable of taking written commands through plugins, which some enterprising members have used to allow pulling of text information from a wiki where we write character pages and such, and doing dice rolls. I've actually run a couple of scenes there that made use of the ASCRS (just the ruleset, not the Unity application), and people seemed to enjoy it. If you're interested in checking it out, here's the Zelda RPG website.

One other thing I might as well mention: there was another project that grabbed my time for a bit last year. In October of 2017, RPG Maker Web ran the Indie Game Maker Contest 2017, and I decided to throw my hat in since I was between jobs at the time. The result was a teamwork action-puzzle game called The What-Iffers in: Final Fancy. In some ways it has a similar story premise to Forgotten Gates: a group of role-players weave a story in one of their favorite game worlds, and you come along to watch their shenanigans both in- and out-of-character. Whereas FG uses other players' characters (with permission), however, in The What-Iffers I exclusively star my own personal characters and portray them as if each has a separate player in real life. I have some vague hope of turning this into a commercially viable series of parody games, so of course I can't be using other folks' characters in it. ;) Check it out if you've got a free hour or so -- halibabica seemed to like it well enough for what it is.