LoSt this month: Petrichor

Fame is the worst thing that could happen to your reputation.

   – Kate Tempest, «These things I know»

LoSt's loyal fanbase never lost faith.

When May turned to June, I decided to push my so-called monthly update ahead of me, just a few days, to make some progress that I could report (May had been another slow month). Well, here we are squarely in the middle of July already!

Since last, I did sink some hours into character advancement (≈leveling up). It's hard to fit it into the game at this moment, since it would rely on some more content to get the right scope. At the moment, I scrapped the original idea (described in an earlier post) of letting the player influence skill advancement by presenting them with story options (à la «choose your own adventure» books, reminiscent to how they did it in Shattered Planet). A system like this may come at a later date ;) What I did keep, was the idea of tying up character advancement with a resting mechanism, that also encompasses healing long-term wounds and amassing reputation. I got in place a very rough system, that just looks at the player's recent conduct tracker and decides how/if to modify character traits. The current design will need a lot of refinement, but the bare bones may still be deemed enough to cut it for release #12.

Goals and Achievements

A long term plan I've been having for LoSt, is to have a rather involved system for renown and faction relations. I have now added a reputation stat, which is a step in the right direction. The new mechanism builds on an existing framework of «causes», data plugins dictating critter behavior, which I've also been using to simulate a faction system, by giving each cause a list of other causes and flags that they have a particular bias towards. Favor between critters is a simple positive or negative integer that's set randomly each time a critter sees another critter for the first time, and the cause-related modifiers work by simply adjusting the (min,max) range. Thus, predatory animals attack prey more or less on sight, because the «predator mentality» cause has a (-2,-2) favor modifier to any critter tagged as «prey». Likewise, shticks like «Animal friend» and «Musky» work by flagging the player so that animals get an extra modifier of (0,+1) or (-1,0), respectively.

The main addition to this in #12 is that individual critters can now have a dynamic reputation stat. It works by listing a set of causes and assigning each cause a modifier. Reputation is modified between missions, whenever the player rests at the saloon (or other resting hubs that will appear). The game tracks and stores the player's conduct as «karma», so I have info about who @ has interacted with and how, which tools/shticks have been used, success/failure at missions, places visited, etc. Reputation is currently modified by looking up the causes of critters @ has pleased or annoyed, and making a few random checks to see if @'s reputation should be modified with one or more causes. It can be fleshed out later, especially as I'll want to flesh out a more detailed system for factions, which could be much more than just glorified AI plugins, as is currently the case.

Related, a sketchy system has cropped up for something I call «boons», tangible achievements and missions the player can fulfill. Currently, the main mission is to bring down a wanted bandit, and I'm testing with some minor boons, including collecting the bounty on any random mudfaced goon, visiting a new place, or drinking milk (perhaps the first in a series of boons related to abstinence, for careers like ascetics and abolitionists). At the moment, boons cheesily yield a kind of experience points, which at certain intervals trigger a «levelup» function that improves the player's stats upon resting. It's at least fun to test, since we now get characters that scale up and gain new shticks (skills) as time passes.

Defining boons as the source of coveted experience points may be hard to balance, in that it could easily encourage grinding to collect'em all. I might offset this by tying shtick acquisition more directly to what you do on the map: as instantaneous rewards for collecting particular boons, through books or paid tutoring, etc. Another system I've been thinking about, is to introduce a stat like decrepitude. (The term is ripped from Ars Magica, where wizards become slowly more old and gnarly and in danger of drifting away from the world). In LoSt, decrepitude, or whatchammacallit, would work to impose a soft time limit by amassing over time as new foibles and negative stats (trauma, wounds, addictions, bad reputations, etc). I think a system like that might work well, especially in conjuncture with some other long term ideas about the option to retire your character, and other ways characters' legacies can have an effect across several playthroughs.

Be that as it may, I'm trying to restrain the todo-list for the upcoming release #12. It's better to put out some crude implementations, and hopefully getting player feedback that can inform further development. It's really high time for the new version to come out, and it's going to be a meaty one, even though it may end up as a short interim before #13, if I can quickly turn around and fine tune some of the bugs that will undoubtedly become apparent upon release. There are some minor things I will definitely (hope to) fix before #12 is ready, but nothing too big, mostly just tying up loose ends.

Ugly bugly.

☞ Fix flickering text bubbles when the map scrolls. In fact, there are a bunch of graphical glitches that I'm loathe to fix one by one, simply because the whole display engine needs an overhaul; small patches now would be a waste of time in the long run, but this exact bug is so disturbing that it's probably right to label it release critical.

☞ Brush up AI: This is another topic I don't want to do too much with at the moment, but changing the combat system around did leave a few bugs. In particular, I need to fix some causes/beings that won't enter their attacking states properly.

☞ Make boon system release ready: To get some more to test with, I might define a few more minor boons. And although I am happy to leave the character advancement system as a prototype, some fine-tuning would still be in order there. I may also have to look into the UI department, for instance whether the player should receive a notification when they collect a boon. It's tempting to start adding more places and missions, of course, but I'll try to save that for later versions. Regarding the prototype boss fight/starting quest, I have it working from a technical perspective, but the actual fight/encounter is a bit uninspired, so maybe I should fire up my content editor to give that particular challenge a bit more zazz.

… breeding lilacs out of the dead land

There will be another short update this month. After March, April was really the kind of month where the project went from running on the backburner to more or less coming to a pause. There have been more urgent matters to see to in my life (mostly good things), so it felt natural for LoSt to come into the background for a bit. I'm not too worried about taking a short break, it's how LoSt have always been developed, and I've found one can often benefit from leaving a project for a short while, and returning with new energy and perspectives later. Technically, LoSt is very close to a new release, so I do hope to get in the saddle again shortly to make the last few adjustments. Then again, there's no gain in rushing a release, and I would ideally also like to add a least a bit of content to go with the new engine features. Precisely when it comes to finalizing changes and coming up with new content, taking a step back to gain an overview is the kind of technique I like to employ.

Oh, and in case anyone wondered, the title of this post is only to provide context for the half-assed pun in last month's title. I'll make another update by the beginning of next month, at the latest. Let's see what I have for you then.

As always,

Minotauros

March is the coolest month

(At least it's been pretty friggin' cold up here.) March has also been a rather slow month for LoSt. I'm chugging away at the short term todo list, and have been sinking some hours into a system for passing time and learning from your experience. I'm not too concerned about balancing character development or making any final decisions at the moment, just getting a prototype for the kind of system I have been envisioning.

The system merges current skills and perks into one pool of special abilities (shticks), mostly for simplicity's sake. I have to make some small changes to character creation to reflect this. Once that's in place, I should have all features that are necessary for the planned #12 release. I anticipate April to bring bug squashing as well as authoring content, to make use of the various additions since the last release.

Making time

Last month, I wrote about reimplementing wounds, and some of the changes that prompted. This month, I've mainly been working on time systems.

Sometimes, incremental changes to a project come in a surprising order, at least to an inexperienced developer like me. For instance: LoSt is designed with a simple interface in mind, and has no separate commands to use objects in different ways, like so many genre classics, with their mappings for "q"uaffing and "z"apping and whatnot (and to be fair – these interfaces are difficult to learn, but quite snappy once you do). LoSt's interface, instead, requires you to always wield an item before you can use it. Problems arose with props like cigars and syringes (consumables, really like those "q"uaffables and "z"appables of yore). The fact that they couldn't be used directly from the backpack meant it took too long to use them to be worth it in most situations.

I try to circumvent the problem by making inventory handling not taking any time. This change ups the tempo and gives the player more options, so I'm generally happy about it. It does change the value of some skills and props, like pistolknives (whose main selling point was that they could be used for melee or ranged combat). One scummy tactic that became apparent with the new system, was to keep a stack of loaded guns in your pack and fire them in succession, to save the time of cocking between each shot. So be it. To penalize the behavior, I instead added the rule that moving a cocked gun around in your inventory has a small chance of the gun going off. I don't know how realistic this is in terms of gun engineering (as a European pacifist, my personal relation to guns is limited ;) Should it be grossly inaccurate, I guess my last defense would be that LoSt plays out in a fantasy world, where many small things are different, so there, and in any case, nothing is funnier than shooting yourself in the foot, and I do think the system retains the sense of the basic motif: the rhythm of drawing, cocking, and firing a gun.

On the topic of short time spans: One thing that has baffled some players of LoSt, is the turn order. One reason is undoubtedly that a bug caused the system to behave weirdly, which I've finally gotten around to fix. But the system itself is a bit unusual for a crpg, and not really well documented. I'm taking steps to fix this, to make it easier to understand what's going on. If I can solicit some feedback for the next release, I'll hopefully manage to finalize the rules for combat some time soon-ish ;)

Rest for the wicked

One important feature that's missing in #11, is healing. This month, I've been implementing the bare bones, by adding the option to rest for a prolonged time and going back to full health, so it's now officially in. At the time of writing, the local saloon is the only resting hub, but other options will come later. Before that, I'm facing a chunk of work just to get the basic mechanics in place.

In addition to healing, the passage of time is planned to include systems for advancing the player character, as well as story lines/world events. The basic idea is to make resting a big deal, something that affects strategy. You currently pay for healing by paying rent for your room, but I'd like to further underline the importance of time by letting (potentially) "something happen" when the player rests. The nature of the changes imposed on the game world should reflect the player's recent behavior. Character development will include modifying reputation and the opportunity to gain new shticks. Furthering the "world story" will, I think, pertain mostly to world factions and bounties/quests (this last bit not planned for #12, so I honestly try to disregard it for the time being).

Modifying reputation: The engine already has a pretty detailed conduct tracker. For instance, if you massacred everyone at the saloon, you will have a lot of hostile karma in relation to the villagers. I think I might just try to take this data and generate reputation procedurally. If I manage to do it right, it should be more flexible and unpredictable than simply stating, "doing X modifies your standing with faction Y by N points". Although there should be systems for such corner cases, as well. The "proto-bounty" I'm working on now, which involves capturing a specific, named criminal, is a good example and a testing ground for this. Resolving the conflict by collecting the bounty on said criminal's head in Arken, flags the player with a special achievement, which amongst other things should be weighed extra when reputation is calculated between missions. In short, I must start out with a simple and open ended system, that I can expand on later.

Getting shticks: My current vision of how this should be implemented, involves quite a bit of foot work, and I'm still not sure if it's going to be any good. I hope to get in a kind of prototype for the next release. What I'm envisioning is basically for the engine to pick three options for the player and let them choose one. But I had an idea to make the interface less gamey by presenting the options as flavor text. Instead of: "You rest at the saloon for two weeks. 1) Get pistol shtick, 2) Get science shtick, 3) Increase local reputation", it could say something like: "You spend two weeks recovering from your wounds at the saloon in Arken Town. You eat a lot of soup, but at the end of the stay, you start to get back on your feet. 1) Go target practicing in the wilds, 2) Read a book, 3) Hang out with the locals" The place you're resting, and special NPCs stationed as the player's neighbors, should affect the available options, as well as the pseudo-randomized outcome of choosing each option. The end-result as I'm envisioning it, would be a bit like choose-your-own-adventure books, where the outcome is not given. So you won't get to cherry pick the shtick you want, but are allowed to nudge the system. If you opt to practice gunmanship, you might get a random pistoleering shtick, or a reputation bonus related to guns, or if you've used a particular pistol a lot on your latest mission, that particular gun may turn into an "artifact" with a random prefix. Likewise, "spending time with the locals" could have many outcomes, from a simple reputation boost, to learning certain rumors/plot hooks for new quests, or maybe your plan backfires and the villagers end up lynching you (especially if their bias towards you is negative in the first place, of course). It's a system that certainly has its hurdles and slopes, but I believe it has potential.

Story advancement: As noted, this lies even further in future, since I'd rather release #12 in not too long to get a better idea of how the current changes work out on their own. Suffice to say, everything will be tangled together with world factions, their relations and current objectives. Some questlines and bounties may have time limits and random outcomes, depending on player agency. Using my protobounty with the wanted-poster in Arken Town as an example, there might be a window of opportunity to get the bandit. The actual plot could be tested by querying the game world for the bandit's status. Maybe, at the end of each week, there is a chance of the bandit making a move. World events could be almost as Markov chains, with possible continuations depending on the actor's state. For a fugitive criminal, follow-ups could include a raid on a certain place, or fleeing the game world, or switching base to a small fortress somewhere on the map. From the new situation, the options would change again – if the bandit settles in a fortress, it probably means they're not "fugitive" any longer (although they are still wanted by the law), so the option to flee the Land might go away. It will probably have to be more involved than Markov chains, maybe more like a behavior tree. The different states should be abstract enough to be applicable to differently flavored scenarios. For instance, there are many kinds of shootouts and raid scenarios, which share a lot of similarities, especially on a tactical level. You basically drop a bunch of units in a hostile place and give them a certain objective (free the prisoner, find the macguffin, kill the enemy), and if then the player comes walking along, the units will become active and havoc ensue. I think it would be possible with a system where each faction and NPC of interest can have pretty simple flags regarding their narrative status and relations to other factions. The "fugitive/persecutor" conflict is archetypical, and will have a similar narrative dynamic if the story is about a political figure in exile/hiding, or someone fleeing the wrath of a mafia boss. As I'm working now on the ramifications of capturing the bandit in the protobounty, it should be possible to leverage the same rules to make it possible for the player to do stuff like joining the bandit's side by offering them the head of someone they are out to get. How you build reputation will inform who are more likely to chat to you about their lore and objectives and even actively hire you, and who are likely to attack you on sight. And yet, reputation needn't be an end in itself, in any technical term. There could be objectives generated on the map that are better performed incognito or require other maneuvers, like finding a hidden treasure.

Oh, the dreams one has. If only I could make time.

As always,
Minotauros

LoSt this month

“How’s it look to you?” Bill said. He was handling the reins, sitting tall and handsome, nodding at voices when somebody called to him from the street. The word of who it was in the wagon got through town before Charley and Bill made a hundred yards. 

“Like something out of the Bible,” Charley said.

[…]

“What part of the Bible?” Bill said, when they were alone again. 

“Where God got angry,” Charley said.

   —Pete Dexter, Deadwood

Full speed ahead!

Last year saw some sporadic updates under the header of "LoSt this week". They weren't exactly the most ambitious posts on this blog, but still a way to document progress, at least. I figured I'd try a model of more reliable monthly updates this year. We'll see how reliable I manage to keep'em.

Back to the Meat

January saw some slow, steady development. Most notably, perhaps, I've reimplemented wounds in accordance with some old plans. I'm now testing with a flat counter à la hit points, although I call it "grit" rather than hp. The player will probably start with about 9-12 grit (a bit more than your average neighbor, owing to the natural determination and character that sets a wannabe frontier hero apart). Grit is marked out when an actor gets wounded. Currently, there are markers for bruises and grievous wounds. Wounds are semi-permanent, and typically only heal between missions, whilst Bruises regenerate every turn that is passed without taking any action or receiving any damage.

That's the gist of it, but I'm still ironing out the details and making related changes. The idea is to make bruises "inexpensive" (in that there is no food clock), so the player can freely gambit their grit in any local situation – if they feel confident on winning the fight. Wounds, on the other hand, will force the player to touch base every now and then, and some bounties and other story related content will certainly have time limits and thresholds; the world should not stand still if the player spends two weeks at the saloon to recover from a bear attack.

Expanding on the current implementation, I'll test using grit for status ailments and buffs in addition to wounds. For instance, being temporarily blinded or confused might occupy a grit marker. Likewise, positive modifiers from skills/props could tap your grit when active. I think this can work well as "payment" for certain skills, having decided early on that I don't want skills with cooldown periods, as that may encourage techniques like pillar dancing. Instead, each effect should be designed with built-in weaknesses. For example, the "fan gun" skill allows you to cock and fire in one turn, but at the cost of reduced accuracy. Another available effect is sprinting (move at double speed for some turns), and I hadn't been able to come up with a good penalty for that. Now I'm thinking grit may offer a solution. Let's say you accumulate "out of breath" markers the longer you sprint, meaning that you must spend turns to recover, or else come into the next encounter at a disadvantage. That should cap the amount of running around it's feasible to do, without nerfing it too much as a defensive strategy. I don't mind if running away is an effective "panic button" for many situations. Knowing RL players, each and one will die by the dozen, anyway; and it bears mentioning that I'm hoping to add non-lethal combat: in particular the option to surrender – so why not an option to run away? The villain should really just stand back and shout insults then, all the while depleting the player's reputation as a valiant hero.

UI Overhauls

Testing #12: «Wanted» poster in Arken Town
Note random truism in the bandit's generated name :)   

Changing the combat system has many ripples. For one thing, the tactical menu had to be rearranged. Working with visual interface design is something I find at once painful and strangely compelling (a bit like masturbating with a branding iron). There's a lot of relative coordinates to keep track of, especially if you take into account varying resolutions and font sizes, and more often than not I'll stumble over cryptic pieces of algebra in the existing code, that my previous self sucessfully used to put things where they belong on the screen, but which my present self is utterly unable to understand.

The new UI puts some info in a top panel. I've kept the right hand menu for inventory, actions and message log, but I was thinking it might be nice to add a "wide screen" mode as well. You'll notice the new interface has flashy menu buttons. I added these since LoSt now has basic mouse support. Yay. The icons in this screenshot are place holder art, by the way. They are more or less hand made, but some are direct ripoffs of Mayan glyphs that actually mean something completely different. So I may or may not keep the visual style, but I'll want the designs used to be original, in any case.

Fonts: Before…

While I was at it, I did some font work. Earlier versions used (and embedded) a few fonts with restrictive "freeware" licenses. I've been wanting to clean up that whole mess: reduce the amount of embedded fonts and make sure everything is open software. So I went font hunting, and found 1001 Fonts quite usable, especially as the site has the option to filter for only open source fonts. I also used Fontforge for the first time, making a very basic Frankenstein font by merging some glyphs into Linux Biolinum. I pulled the glyphs from various free sources, but was especially thrilled to discover Quivira, a font with pretty good Unicode support. In fact, that's where I got the glyph ♄ for lead, arguably the most important letter in the LoSt alphabet.

Fonts: After!

I also redid the logo, using Gimp to draw the letters with filled rectangles, that I then ran over with a bunch of filters. The new menu font IM Fell was just added for being pretty great and having probably the second most fantastic license I ever read (donated to the Oxford University by its creator upon his death in 1686). It may be too old fashioned for LoSt in the long run, but here and now it's quite functional.

Questin' fer Bounties

Since I need to test out the new wounds system, as well as the basic content for defeating the bandit scourge of Arken Town, I had to zoom back in on tactical aspects of the game, which has been refreshing after mostly doing macro-level world building stuff for the last period. I had completely "turned off" encounters (houses, animals, and even plants), but now switched them back on to get a trajectory back and forth to the bandit to slay him/her and bring back the head to the sheriff in Arken. If I do that (currently not trivial, but there's always the cheat options in the main menu :) it raises a little "karma flag" that I plan to use later, to influence reputation and skill advancement, whenever the player passes time between missions at one of the game world's resting hubs (eg. saloons, oases, hospices, cloisters).

I want you kids to get ahead

The infrastructure for implementing this basic kill/fetch quest, where the parameters are ultimately written in the human readable data files, can be used to track smaller achievements as well. There will probably be other "little karma flags" for conduct like giving to beggars, (not) shooting someone in the back, flaunting your pistol in church, and just generally pleasing/offending members of this or that faction/group in one way or the other. In the long run, I hope that the life time of more accomplished characters will span several years of game time, with slowly developing reputation, skill set, as well as global faction relations and story lines. If the game should come to that point, the "original bounty" I'm working on now will probably just be folded into a repertoire of random situations, that can be repeated, omitted and randomized over many replays.

So I'm walking a bit in the desert, getting killed some on the way, trying to imagine what the game will be like a few iterations down the road…

As always,
Minotauros

Gif of the month looks decent, but there's a lot of
graphical glitches too, as when simultaneously
scrolling the map and fading out dialogue bubbles!

LoSt this week (yearning for Arken)

An easy bug fix, which I still
struggled to get just right. 

I'm still working on Arken Town (the settlement where the game is set to start), and making lots of small engine tweaks along the way. I've been refactoring the world generation routines for a while, and even if the changes don't make a huge visible difference, I spend quite some time just thinking the designs through. Organizing the data associated with the settlement, for instance, had me setting up some infrastructure to handle other important places on the map.

I've also changed to the climate map generator, so I can access more detailed info pertaining to regions and landscapes later. It's mostly stuff I need to generate bounties and story lines (ie. at the sheriff's/post office in Arken hangs a wanted poster, and the game must generate details regarding the fugitive's whereabouts).

The map generator just needs a few finishing touches before I can leave it for now, I think. So I'm zooming in again on the minutia of Arken to get this baby up in the air.

The gunsmith

Since I don't have a lot of time to muck about with LoSt these days, I'm trying to divide development into small chunks that can be handled in short, sporadic sessions. (In that light, it may be detrimental to the project that I take a few hours to write a blog post like this, but I hope it's part of the fun to some people at least who might drop by here from time to time :)

Now that I'm starting on Arken in earnest, I've decided to do it house by house. Each of the planned "places of interest" that can be generated, will demand that I fine tune the engine a bit. First out is the gunsmith, a pretty inconspicuous kid that offers some services. In addition to selling guns (and possibly special ammo), the smith can repair or enhance guns you already own (by adding a prefix, basically imbuing the gun with a special shtick).

Bittner lever action repeater, by a German gunsmith

Regarding engine tweaks needed to get this in the game, it's mostly AI-related. I have been working up to this, and already implemented the basic interface for giving items to NPCs. Now, I just need to make the gunsmith react appropriately if someone offers them a gun. It could be done by adding some states to the content database, but looking at practical solutions, it strikes me that the current AI module is very shaky. It may be a good time to go in and do some basic changes, since I'll only be facing increasingly complex NPC behavior as development continues. It's honestly something I've been mulling about in my brain for a while, so I have some ideas…

Adding the gunsmith will entail another addition to the engine, again quite moderate, but with possibly wide reaching consequences. When you offer the gunsmith a gun, I decided I'll have to pop up a window with a prompt to the player, like: <"I can fix this for 30♄." (Y/N)?> I already have <more>-prompts, so making it happen won't be a big deal (just get the confirmation, pay the bill and upgrade the gun). But it's something I might need later for popups connected to other game changing events. For instance, when resting at a saloon, the player may just see: <You rest for a week. Press Space to continue.> But the game should do a lot of things, like healing the player's longterm wounds, passing game time, and (if appropriate) grant the player new reputations and shticks, just to mention a few things. So, even this silly little popup becomes an issue to ponder on the metro after I've delivered the kids to school (whether I should compare that to a calligrapher meditating for hours before executing a simple stroke, or just admit analysis paralysis). In any case, it would be meaningless to hack my way through this to the benefit of the gunsmith, just to have to redo the whole thing when I come to the saloon a few houses down the road.

As always,
Minotauros

(1 hex ≈ 1 screen) A last change I must do before #12, is to make
the world larger with "bulkier" regions. The Land isn't supposed
to be huge, but the current scaling makes it feel too small.

Breaking habits

Seeking fresh ideas … Hum!

Accomplished creators will sometimes say something to the effect that one needs to master the formal conventions in order to bend them and innovate. (In the arts, I suspect there is some deeper truth about the historical transition from Romanticism to Modernism, but I digress as always).

When I first started making LoSt, the idea was for a small 7DRL shooter with card based mechanics and no hit points (getting hit was game over). That didn't scale well, however, and was gradually transformed into the current combat system.

Wounds UI

Health: Actors have a number of health levels (HLs), each with a number of bruise levels (BLs). If an actor spends a turn not getting hit, they regenerate one BL. Once a HL reaches zero, however, it won't heal naturally, and the player needs to rest at a saloon or hospice.

Initiative: All events have a speed value, with actions performed in a fixed order each turn. Melee precedes missile attacks, which in turn precede movement. If you're next to an enemy, you can back away, but giving your enemy a free attack. Also, actions can be "interrupted" by incoming attacks. The idea was to give melee an edge in close quarters: If you're wielding a knife and facing a shooter, your best bet should be to get up close and stab your foe before they get a chance to shoot you.

Randomness: The system is mostly deterministic. Attacks have fixed damage, and there is no probability "to hit". Instead, melee sometimes deal grazes (half damage) or critical hits (effect depending on weapon). Firearms have a chance of going wild, depending on conditions like cover and skills.

Game changer

This may sound good on paper, but I've been vexed by the fact that melee in particular doesn't work well in practice. There was a problem of getting ganged up on, since taking more than one hit in a single turn almost invariably depletes a whole HL, something that should be avoidable with clever tactics. On the other hand, the rapid bruise regeneration means the player often has to land successive blows to properly wound the enemy, in turn taking as many hits himself. Likewise, it doesn't make any sense for instance to stab once and then spend some turns to wield and cock a gun, since the stab wound will be fully healed by the time you pull the trigger.

There's also been a problem with balancing damage. Comparing a club and a knife, they both deal 2 BLs, but the club spreads the damage over several HLs, whilst the knife puts all of it in a single HL. At the end of the day, the knife is almost unambiguously better, since it has the chance of depleting HLs more quickly.

However unbearable I find the current states of affairs, this system has been in place for years now, and me stumped as to how to fix it. Should I try to make something different altogether? Introduce a standard hit points system? God forbid! I'm giving the current rules another chance, and started by just tweaking the existing values.

Here are some of the changes I'm trying out currently:

Damage output: I made mostly everything deal a little less damage. I figured the lower tier weapons (bowie knives, tools, whips) can deal just a single BL in damage, and still be better than unarmed fighting, since unarmed fighters are unable to score critical hits. Increasing the player's health might also be an option here.

Bruise regeneration: Bruises now regenerate every second turn, and healing the last BL of a HL takes another extra turn.

Interrupted actions: I've disabled this almost completely. If an actor gets hit right before carrying out an attack, that attack is no longer blocked, but rather guaranteed to be a graze/wildshot. At point blank range, a wildshot will hit the target about 50% of the time.

This already works better than before, even if it's basically the same rules. For one thing, a couple of angry animals won't kill you in a single turn, even though it's still bad to get surrounded. The slowed regeneration rate means that there is more time to apply actual tactics, like spending a turn to reposition, without all bruises being reset. The fact that the last bruise in a HL takes an extra turn to heal also gives an advantage to weapons which deal damage over several HLs. A weapon dealing 2 BLs to a single HL still has an edge when it comes to quickly whittling down your enemies HLs, whilst a weapon dealing 1 BL to two separate HLs is less of an immediate threat, but will give an advantage a few game turns down the road.

I may still have to make some more fundamental changes to how combat works, but it's refreshing just to see the game work slightly different from what I've grown accustomed to.

Props unbound

Burro!

Inspired by the moderate success with switching around combat rules, I'm also trying some changes to the inventory system. Again, some pretty arbitrary principles had grown out of the original game (some of them outlined in an earlier post). For instance, I felt that limiting actors to carry only six items at any time was pretty neat, since dead dudes would just drop all their loot in a nice circle around themselves.

Now, I've upped the inventory cap to 12 items, which really just lets the player carry more trash around (although balance issues may arise later). Secondly, props are now dropped and picked up from adjacent hexes rather than the one you're currently occupying.

The effect on gameplay is minimal, but I may keep it this way, just because it offers a solution to a problem I've been having: how to give props to NPCs? I didn't want a separate "give" command, so instead I implementing a heavy-handed system for offering NPCs stuff by dropping it in their field of vision. This is how you currently collect bounties from judges, by plopping the severed head of a goon in their vicinity. God only knows if a single player has yet picked up on the fact that this is a thing, as it's only vaguely hinted at in the dialogue. But if props are dropped onto the hex right in front of to you, the system pretty much gives itself: Simply invoking the "drop" command when facing an NPC should make for a pretty intuitive and smooth interface.

Current shop layout, and more spacious mockup
D=door, s=shopkeep, c=counter, p=props

I'm slightly concerned that some veteran RL players may find this counterintuitive. It's still possible to pick up items you're standing on, but that has the disadvantage of not properly teaching how it "should" be done. Players who fall into the habit of walking on stuff to pick it up, will in effect be wasting a turn as opposed to players who fall naturally into using the new system. There are some possible ways to fix that, either by making it a free action to pick something up, or even let props on the ground block movement. This last solution would mean some pretty drastic changes to tactics, but might even work when I start making everything a bit more spacious, which is something I've planned in any case.

Come what may, it's always good to break habitual thinking by changing the rules around a bit. Every dead end explored is a step in the right direction.

As always,

Minotauros

LoSt this week (2 steps ahead, 1 step back)

It's been a while since I found the time to anything substantial with LoSt, but this week I managed to put in a few coding sessions and implemented some features that I've long been wanting to have. 

So I fired up old trusty byzanz to make a gif, which came
out slightly discolored, but I kind of liked that crusty feel. 

First, I got in a basic function to zoom in and out of the map. This will provide the framework for waypoints/travel, a logbook, etc. later on. Even in its current bare-bone condition, it provides me with a nice tool to examine my maps. It is an example of something which it is perfectly lovely to make. Since it'll help me as a developer, I'll of course be furnishing that map with icons to represent waypoints and other points of interest. And I probably won't be able to resist adding some ornament, like a compass rose or a smooth transition animation. All of this will only enhance the play experience.

Coming soon to a GUI near you?

Today I sat down and wrote the outline of an editor for place themes/blueprints. It's been cumbersome to use a text editor to make these, and the simple little application I hobbled together this afternoon is already more comfortable. It just makes the blueprints, so I still have to write the map legend by hand (rules like eg. fill hexes marked "E" with walls, put 1-3 shooters at "s", pick and put features/loot at "a", "b", and/or "c"). But it might make sense to add the function to set those parameters straight from the blueprint editor. It would have to be able to write blueprints as well as regular kits, which are the data syntax I use to store almost everything in the game. A few releases down the road, the actual game might even ship with a full fledged content editor that can be used to add/mod places, critters, props, bounties, skills, etc. :)

I hope to use these tools to do a rather extensive overhaul of the world building routines, that I've been dreading on the horizon for quite a while. The thing is that the current Python class used to build places is very all over the place. So I want to go through it and remove crud, as well as adding some tweaks and variables that I'm going to need to implement the next big thing in LoSt, namely bounties (random quest lines). Let's hope I manage to be clever about it, not leaving too many traps for myself later on. There are details I would like to get right sooner rather than later. For instance, I've been feeling that the game world is a bit too constrained. To amend this, I must above all make some inspired changes to the combat system, but I want to try to tailor them to fit a world with more space. Ideally, a house should have room for a table with some chairs that several people can comfortably walk around. For this alone, I only need some minor tweaks to the code, but when the time comes to remake all the old blueprints, I'm pretty hopeful that my little editor will be a nice tool to have. I've been digging up some maps of Western towns, thinking it should be possible to generate something similar, using map chunks. Typing out big map segments in a text editor was a great hassle, though, and is going to be much easier now.

A sleepy settlement

Nail Soup

I mentioned that bounties are the next major feature to show up. They introduce a whole new feature to design, and it's a feature that touches on practically every other part of the game. From the world map, to dialogue, to props, to combat, to the skill system, everything seems to come together around bounties. It's also a point where the setting is bound to become much more defined, which is a Good Thing™. Although I've always liked that early stage of creative development where everything is still lying quite open, I'm also looking forward to getting some meat on the bones with a starting settlement to provide the player with plot hooks, a place to rest, important NPCs, etc. 

Long term readers will note that I've already touted the coming of bounties as a feature for quite a while already. But it feels now as if I have to deliver at least a rudimentary fun game within the next few releases, or I might as well abandon the whole thing. Not said in a pessimistic note, rather hopeful that I might manage to reach the next stage of development in not too long a time.

Bounties will provide some sense of purpose and direction to the game, by stating explicit goals and pacing healing and advancement of skills/reputation between missions. But as I mentioned earlier, I also have to fix the combat system somehow, to make melee a more interesting option. As is, fighting happens too fast and is too deadly. There is usually no time to do any fancy footwork before you're dead, even if the game points in that direction with "fancy footwork" skills like Tumble and Feint. I may test "slowing down" combat a bit, giving everyone (at least the player) a tick more health, and making most weapons deal a bit less damage. Maybe even natural regeneration of bruises should be slowed, as long as the system stays transparent. The player should be able to take a hit or two as he spends a turn repositioning, switching weapons or using a skill. If I start with gentle tweaks of what I have, it's hard to say in advance if I will stumble upon something that works, or get some completely other idea for how to do it.

And really, it's not just a question of rebalancing the actual combat system. Other planned features will have an effect. For instance, there will be more ways to gather posses to aid you in battle (currently doable with the Populist shtick), and I am planning AI templates that will allow non-lethal battle, in particular surrendering (by dropping your weapon) and capturing (using rope or chain). And so maybe it will be okay for the combat system to be on the lethal side, if the player can (un)reliably hope to solicit the aid of NPCs or let himself be captured by the bad kids rather than outright killed (leading to possible interesting escape scenarios).

It feels a bit like I would want to do all the changes at once, just to be able to see how they interact. But I guess it's more like cooking. You start by frying the garlic and then the onions before getting on to the saucy parts. And a good saucier can predict how a sauce will turn out in advance, when it still only tastes like flour and salt. Me, not so much. I have this floury soupy slop, for sure, but no inkling of how it's going to turn out in the end.

As always,

Minotauros

PS. The current working title of LoSt is "Nail Soup", which is obviously an allusion to Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, although the allusion itself may be less obvious: "Stone Soup" is (so I've heard) a Portuguese fairytale about a vagrant who fools some villagers into believing that he can teach them how to make soup out of nothing but stones and water. They gather round, and the vagrant starts cooking, after a while remarking how the soup would be even better if they added a few carrots, perhaps. One of villagers happens be in possession of that precise vegetable, and so they add a few. After a while, the vagrant says this is gonna be good, but it would be even better if they added some chopped potatoes, and so it goes. In the end, the soup turns out pretty awesome of course, since everyone chipped in, which is the morale of the story. "Nail Soup", on the other hand, is the Norwegian variety of that same fairytale. Here, the protagonist vagrant meets with a single old crone in a house, asking to spend the night if he promises to teach her how to make soup just from nails. The story proceeds more or less as its Continental cousin, except here the hero is just ripping off a single person, so that the productive/social morale of the story is flipped. When a Norwegian speaker talks about making nail soup, that means rather to make something with no or meager resources.

And there was much rejoicing

Released: LoSt #11 (Mercury Bubblegum)

Catch of the day

This is an interim release, preceding a hefty rewrite of some of the systems. I wanted to start refactoring from a clean cut, so to speak, so I'm publishing what I have to date.

In other words, LoSt is still in alpha. Compared to #10, this version contains some bug fixes and a bit of content. The most spectacular feature is perhaps that you can now gain followers by choosing the "Populist" shtick.

I'm about to redesign big chunks of the world generation algorithm, in part to fix problems which have become apparent in testing, in part to accomodate plans I have for bounties (quests) and other features. Bounties will also be tied up to a system for the passage of time (including healing and skill advancement), so there may be some exciting prospects on the horizon, even though I as a developer will have to do some untangling to get there.

Comments are always appreciated, on appropriate forum threads, per email, or you can fill out the in-game survey that I added as an experimental feature in this version. It'll be interesting to see whether that garners any response, and if I can use it to guide and motivate further development.

As always,
Minotauros

CHANGELOG

BUG: Couldn't pick up lead slugs when pockets were full
BUG: Buggy inventory interface if pockets were empty
BUG: Critters turned invisible when spending props
BUG: Could see through walls at certain angles
BUG: (Serious) bug that made game pick invalid kits
BUG: Bug that printed nonexisting plants and obstacles
BUG: Spitting bush had forgot how to spit
BUG: Some instances of NPCs getting stuck repeating one action
BUG: Crashed because game tried to draw outside the screen
GAME: Player can now start with up to two shticks
GAME: Some props can be used directly from inventory (experimental)
GAME: Prompt to abort extended actions when hostiles enter line of sight
GAME: Commandline options to set world seed
GAME: Scrollable menus (needs polish, but should work ;)
GAME: Cleaned up the log area a bit
GAME: Can save multiple characters in the same world
GAME: Default field of vision now set to 11
CONTENT: Renamed "derringer" as "pepperbox gun"
CONTENT: Fleshed out animal species a bit
CONTENT: Weapon prefixes
CONTENT: Added some skills, props, places and critters
CONTENT: Backstory generator now spits out terser texts
AI: Added more bias switches: annoy, please, exalt
AI: Action calculation for fields of battle plants should be quicker
AI: Gain followers (experimental)
AI: Most beings now set to stay at home or roam their native region
AI: Toolwielders now better at choosing their weapon
VAR: Added an in-game survey
VAR: Various tweaks and fixes

Idea that will never be a 7DRL

Please excuse this quite silly rant about my old idea for a 7 Day Roguelike.
TL;DR: In the end, it's practically randomized, anyway :P

#DogmeRL 7DRL

A Dogme 95-inspired Roguelike, featuring:

No ASCII!
No message log!
No keyboard interface!
No random maps!
No permadeath!
No grid-based tactics!
No item identification!
No MacGyvering your way out!
No resource management (consumables, healing, food clock)!
No hack'n'slash!
No rpg system!
No dungeons!
Modular gameplay!
Emphasis on story!
Play as a party!
The full Roguelitelike experience in one package!

Check and mate, suckers!

I've long wanted to make an Anti-RL that "breaks all the rules" for what a RL is. It struck me now that it would be ideal to combine with two other things I've been wanting to do, namely learning a bit of Godot, and making a game for my kids (targeted age around 6-9).

In the end, I would aim to make something that doesn't fit the genre definition by any stretch, while retaining that good ol'e RL feeling.

Tail of Eugor

For the actual game, I figured the basic interface is a touchscreen Roguelite with minimal text and easily graspable (hopefully deep/fun) gameplay.

The scourge of elephants

The setting rips off various sources. Take a silly mangaish/fantasy universe like Mario, Sonic or Lego: Ninjago, throw in some White Wolf's Exalted, mix with Tove Jansson's Moomin (and more obscure references) ... I decided to just go ahead and make the heroes furries :D So you have this magic stone age world inhabited by tribes of biped animals wielding magic just cooling it with gods and spirits who still tread the earth of this young world. In the rivers and wetlands dwell frogs and hippos, striking secretive deals with daemons of the depths; whilst elephants rule the plainlands from their walled cities of byzanthine bureaucracy, but fear the wild mice who roam the woods. You get the general drift.

On the list of anti-features, some almost give themselves, some merit more consideration.

EUGOR: Featuring
Modular Gameplay™

INTERFACE: We're on a touch screen with graphics, so no ascii or keyboard. We don't want turnbased, gridbased tactics, but we do want modular gameplay. So let's make it a bit like a jrpg (bear with me). There is a walk/explore mode where you tap wherever you want to go on the map. NPCs walk around in real time. If you bump into an NPC or feature (or if an NPC bumps into you), you engange that being (bump a person to speak, bump a monster to fight). This engagement can be handled in a separate mode with alternating turns for combat/actions. Put on top: an overworld mode to travel between the different maps, designed like an overworld in a typical Nintendo console game, with each place a node, and paths between those nodes.

NO HACK'N'SLASH: Since it's for kids, I don't want combat to be the main way to solve everything. Sure, some spectacular fighting scenes with earthquake hammers and the like, but it might be better to give the hungry lion a pancake to make it happy. Maybe it will even join you on your quest!

NO IVENTORY HANDLING: Instead of inventory, the player collects "gifts" (objects, skills or characters who join your party). Your gifts determine what you can do, depicted as icons in a menu. You can always try to use any gift in any encounter? If you have Icarus Wings, you can use them to fly over the river or escape from a fight. If you have Persuation as a gift, use it to calm your enemies or get special favors from friendly NPCs, etc. Gifts may sometimes not work (angry bees won't be persuaded, troll immune to sleeping magic), and gifts are not comsumable. The gift Itching Powder would have infinite charges, it's just a thing your toon can do. Throughout any one game, you'll just get a handful of gifts, so there's no looting and no identification subgame. While there is leeway for some "easter egg effects", there should be no "complex interactions" like dipping, throwing or collateral demolition.

Uh … Follow the
dotted brick road?

NO RANDOM CONTENT GENERATION: The biggie. I'm actually planning to cheat on this one :) I would venture to replace random content generation with (drum roll) stochastic content generation! It would be deterministic, but provide replayability akin to randomness, by dynamically generating the world based upon the player's choices :P

First of all, each level/node you visit is prefabricated. If "elemental temple" is a place, you always get the same layout, with the same designated spots for your acolytes and abbess, your braziers and you vortex of elemental doom. Each place should be a small screen, so the "temple" is really just a little shrine that your avatar can cross in less than ten strides..

Second, the overworld map is predetermined, divided into four zones to visit. From the starting zone are borders you can breach to enter Zone A or Zone B, the midgame zones. Here you need to prepare and to find the key to enter the fourth and last zone, where the endgame takes place. It could be structured a bit like one of those exemplary analyses of Zelda levels, with bombs to breach weak walls, branches to make you feel like you're choosing your own way while carefully guiding you past mandatory choke points, etc. The midgame zone you choose to enter first should be set as the main branch, with the remaining midgame zone tagged to remain as an optional bonus branch.

Third, the player gets to choose some parameters at the start of the game. This is where it starts getting stochastic, as we're doing the equivalent of setting a random seed. Consider the following:

«Just send me the money»

"Eugor was a young …
    1) frog 2) mouse 3) elephant 4) fox 5) chicken

… who lived in a …
    1) cabin 2) town 3) shrine 

… by a …
    1) river 2) ravine 3) mountain 4) great wall. 

… Eugor's neighbor tribe were …
    1) frogs 2) mice 3) elephants 4) foxes."

That gives a little more than 4^4=256, a fine, round number of starting positions. Your choice of species will set a starting gift, like frogs can swim, mice are fast, whatever. Your starting map ("cabin", "town" etc.) has its predetermined follow-ups, so if you choose "cabin" it has paths to "woods" and "town", and if you choose "town", you get "shrine" and "ferryman" as followups. Choosing to start in the town means you won't get the shrine or ferryman later in the game, but are guaranteed to come across the woods and the cabin. A level like "natural source" will play out differently if you're sent there to talk with a guardian, or to steal a treasure, and whether that happens in the early or late game. Also, factors like climate and player race may affect which species inhabits a particular place (facing slow, mighty elephants or quick, crafy mice makes a difference).

Off to see the wizard, biatch!

Visiting the swamp or the desert first might become a strategic choice, since it determines if you'll be facing salamanders and scorpions or spiders and platypuses.

Envisioned on this scale, with 4 zones, I'd probably need around a dozen locations. The game should be scaled to a small proof-of-concept, taking less than an hour to win. Still sounds more like a 7 Month Roguelike to me. It can be done, though. The hard part would be to get the design just right.

I might actually give it a shot (but probably not as a 7drl) if the right conditions arise, as I've really been wanting to check out Godot for mobile games, and I would love to make something silly like that, that my kids (and other random peeps) might enjoy playing.

As always,
Minotauros

In the works

Pick up smithereens

I'm hoping to get #11 out of the door within (quite) a few weeks. Since the release of #10, I've been trudging along, adding fixes, tweaks and content. I'm currently wrapping my head around two major additions for the next version: A proper starting settlement, and a basic system for bounties ("quests"). Both of these complex tasks imply various changes and additions that need to be done to the system, and they are tangled into each other as well, since the starting settlement will naturally be where you pick up your first bounty. Development is still at an early enough stage that fairly important parts of the engine are missing or incomplete. Once I manage to pump out some interesting settlements, for instance, it should be trivial (system-wise) to add more content and variation to them. Trivial, I say, knowing that the really time-consuming part of development is often designing and balancing content.

I put road generation on halt when
it started throwing swastikas at me.

Regarding settlement generation, I've been trying out different strategies: Settlements as blobs containing houses and points of interest, settlements starting from a single point and spawning outwards, or popping up along random roads, or as climate templates … The results have been unsatisfactory. Given the current map digging routines, really made for wilderness generation, it's been difficult to achieve the kind of division of space that a settlement should have. What's more, the settlements have to be tactically interesting, as they will set the stage for duels, robberies and other events later on. At the moment, I'm considering using prefabricated blueprints to a large extent. It would break my heart to see the same starting settlement again and again, but something quite static might provide a spring board for more testing.

Adding bounties is also a tough nut to crack. I want to get it as right as I can from the outset, to avoid having to come back and make too many major changes afterwards. Thus spake the optimist. Bounties touch upon many other aspects of the game, from map generation to skill advancement. I'm talking about proper story lines here, not just dumping some goon's head at the local tribunal to collect the cash reward (you can already do that in #10). As with settlements, I'll probably add something very simplistic for now, just to sort out the basics, like how the game world should spawn and know about bounty-related places, having villagers disperse rumors about active bounties, getting an interface for rewards/resting/experience, and so forth.

Hunted by kerebears

A detail I'm currently pondering, is simply how to present a bounty to the player. I hope to avoid dialogue trees, and have been envisioning a game with the player as "the silent type", and NPCs shouting out chat lines as appropriate. If that's going to work, it's pertinent to avoid the typical trope of NPCs just throwing random quests at the player upon arrival. It might just be a question of writing the right pieces of dialogue. For instance, a bounty to join a hunters' club could be presented by way of a kid sitting outside, proclaiming how he'd like to be a member, if he could fulfill the membership requirements (bringing in a random named animal, for instance). It's not Ibsen, perhaps, but I guess it would be acceptable in a crpg, as a way to inform the player of a certain possibility space.

Here and now, I may sidestep the issue, slap a Wanted-poster up on the wall of the jailhouse or post office and see where it takes me.

Also in the works is a travelogue mode, that zooms out on the map and gives the player access to various utilities (setting waypoints, logging rumors and bounties, etc). I may not need this for #11, but it's going to be a boon as the game world gets more involved.

As always, Minotauros

Fragments of principles of prop design in LoSt

Abstraction

Props (and skills) are slightly stylized representations of a characters resources. This stems from back when LoSt (Boot Hill RL, at the time) was a cardgame/RL hybrid. I didn't want the player to become too much like a "paper doll" with assorted inventory. Some learnable skills may assume you to have the necessary tools at hand, as some props assume you possess the necessary skills to use them.
 

Encumbrance, inventory space

All the dead dudes …

I never much cared for detailed weight systems. Instead, LoSt sets a fixed limit to how many props a critter is allowed to carry. Inventory is capped at six slots, which is just enough to get by. To simulate encumbrance, some items are tagged as "heavy" or "stackable" (light). Heavy items impose a penalty on your initiative, making them practically impossible to carry during combat. Stackable items are consumables and commodities: If you're holding a stick of dynamite, you might as well be holding five. Stackable items only take up one inventory slot (per item type), regardless of how many you are carrying.

I'd rather a sledge-pick.

Wearables, containers, more tools and actions …

… building houses, skinning animals, modifying items and mailing them to your future incarnations, gambling, rail laying, light landscape gardening … Who can tell if and how they will appear?

Lead slugs

Lead (♄) is the most important prop in LoSt, doubling as money and ammo. As a symbol of prosperity, it could even be used as a stat akin to karma. Instead of a food clock, a system where the player spends 1♄to rest each night?

Current list of props in LoSt

Glogious death awaits!

Salt crystals, emeralds, rubies, corpses, heads, lead slugs, spirit stones, dynamite, bricks, barb wire, smoke bombs, adrenaline shots, the beads of poverty, prayer books, ladders, lynchers' marks, dice, loaded dice, sledge picks, bowie knives, kiri knives, swords, whips, chainhooks, cats o' nine tails, javelins, spear throwers, sixshooters, pepperbox guns, pistolknives, triguns, game rifles, sniper guns, periscopes, field glasses, rubble, gravel, smithereens, dust, timber, splinters, shards, cigars.

Wishlist and ideas

Shotguns (fire several buckshot i randomized directions), punt guns (like a shotgun, but ten feet long; perhaps for crowd control or safaris), gatling guns (mounted mayhem), stockmarkers (burnmark cattle and people), tripwire and fuses (detonate dynamite from a safe distance), booze and drugs (it all starts with an innocently puffing cigar; fancy becoming an amphetamine addict or ingesting the poison seeds of holy plants), chloroform, tonics, poisons and antidotes, sandbags (why not?), ropes and lassos (for sure!), badges, books, lanterns, pliers, lead ore, caltrops, instruments, stilts, bear traps, nets, eggs, mummies, letters, mirrors, chain and tackle.

All that stuff.

As always,
Minotauros

Released: LoSt #10 (Bloodshot Vista)

All hope was not lost!

Development is snailing along. LoSt#10 is the interrim release I had hoped to achieve before summer. It will probably be the last alpha release, before the meat of the game will start appearing. I'm still getting all basic systems in place, but #10 is still a big step forward from #9. NPCs have started to speak, and there are shops dispersed across the land, as well as a very basic bounty system (finding it can be considered a kind of an easter egg at present). There are also world building routines that will place the occational settlement, although these culture centers are still very flimsy, with not much to really see or do.

In any case, please try it out if you are interested. All and any comments are welcome.

Upcoming ...

Some features I hope to work on for the next few releases:

Perform steps in random order

* AI: I need to settle some basic AI needs. Proper pathfinding will be in place, letting people use doors, walk around ponds. They'll also be picking up stuff, objecting to theft, and adhering to other defined causes and states of beings.

* UI: Tidbits of UI are planned, and will become necessary. Scrolling menus is one thing, but also some kind of game log to track your character's progress. Also in the works is a zoomed-out view of the map to allow quick travel in explored areas. If I get inspired, I might start working on a mouse interface, but I think it's better to focus on gameplay at the moment.

* Settlements: The big thing in LoSt #11 will be to breathe some life into the settlements. It ties into several features that need to be finished. First of all, I need to streamline the map generation a bit, and define some good settlement blueprints/templates. Second, there must be places of interest, and the locals should feel a bit more alive. In addition to at least a few plot hooks (available bounties/questlines), there must be some shops and etstablishments (randomly including gunsmiths, pharmacists/medics, oracles, assassins, pawnshops). Also, something like a saloon where you can rest, furnished with a bar and perhaps a self-playing piano (depending on how complex the bias/reputation system becomes, we can whistle for features like emergent bar brawls down the road). The town can be seasoned with interesting places and encounters. There might be a village green with a park or pond, a church/shrine, a post/mining/police office, soldiers in barracks, gardens and animal pens, animal baiters who take bets, maybe even baiting animals against humans, (mad?) scientists/naturalists who want rare specimens, landscape photographers who stray into the wild, some random person has a treasure map, or is a junkie, or secretly wants to kill someone else in town, or has the habit of entering empty houses to burgle them, or loves dogs, or hates children.

* Factions/reputation: The Land in #10 is pretty war-strifed. Goons and settlers skrimish. One task ahead will be to make the map a bit more settled, with settlers mostly staying in their towns, and bandits camping in the wild. It will be possible to interact and gain reputation with any factions. If you gain a positive reputation with mudfaced goons, the settlers and law-kids might want to lynch you, but you can still get trade, healing etc. in scattered bandit camps across the land. Further down the road, more factions will come. Law and crime factions will have more organized structures, in addition to various societies, from scientists to monks to queers to carnies to cults. The current AI supports factions quite well: recognizing which factions another being belongs to, liking/disliking beings which belong to certain factions or act in a certain way. As I add more sophisticated behaviour patterns, I should be able to model some interesting semblances of drama and tidbits of story. Engine-wise, I still have to add a detailed system for fluctuating reputation. More time-consuming will be to write the content, defining and balancing achievements/bounties and other trickeries hidden behind the rosepot.

* Bounties: There must be a few bounties to be had in the starting settlement, and some others spread across The Land. They range from petty (templates "my <puppy> got lost in the <cave>", "100Pb for the head of Luci Borges") to more involved stuff later on (kill the four desert masters to become the undisputed champion of The Land, prevent/perpetrate genocide on a group of humans or animals, discover what really lives beneath the lead mines, act as a mediator/monger between settlers and natives …) I'll have to start with something simpler, basic fetch/bring/escort quests, and all that. Some bounties can be pretty open ended, with many moving parts (randomly mix elements like locations, NPC templates, and other special conditions: "Defeat the mad barber in the abandoned sawmill, who has kidnapped the mayor's uncle"). Others may be more handcrafted, but allowing for story emergence. You may get hired to protect an establishment against an awaited attack, and might solve the task by barricading and waiting out the attack, or sneaking into the enemy camp. Hell, you should even be allowed switch and aid the bandits in the robbery, triggering a favorable (or backstabbing) response, with many interesting adjustments to your reputation. To provide reward/encouragement, I've been thinking about tying up bounties with skill/character advancement, instead of a traditional system with experience points. Different types of quests and quest givers yield different rewards (more "moving part" that can be randomized on each playthrough). A hermit might tell you about herbs, or a banker gift you with a very fine pistol, or a master duelist teach you the art if you just prove your worth first. I have been thinking about modeling this around a time system that I believe to be pretty unusual.

* Time: An important feature in LoSt is that wounds tend to be very deadly, and with no available source of healing. I want to add a system for resting, for which the basic template will be "staying in a saloon". In a way, resting is my idea of something instead of a food clock. To rest, you have to pay a certain amount of cash (or fulfill some other criteria, depending on where you're trying to lodge), and the game world fast forwards several days, at the end of which you start out with all wounds healed. Depending on how grievous your wounds are, and the status of all pending bounties, the game might calculate an effect/event that occurs during the period you spend resting. The event could be just a simple string, and could often just gloss over a period of quiet, or provide the player with options to advance the plot or character. If you come back triumphant with barely a scratch, you might be rewarded with a skill advancement of your choice. But if you come back with 0Pb and a gun wound, you might develop a bad reputation or foible. What's worse, the guy you set out to kill in act I might come back in act II, with a plan for vengeance. Since the player must rest to heal, they'll want to make each rest count. The yardstick pace for a starting character should be to win one bounty, then rest, and then head out for a new adventure. Longer streches of time could also be passed doing seasonal work, training with a master or living in the underground city of fools.

If you think this sounds convoluted, you haven't heard the half of it. The art will be to keep the story suggestive and the system open ended, connected with factions and all the other "moving parts", to achieve a semblance of direction action/plot.

As always,
Minotauros