Focusing In

Quite a bit of progress has been made on the game that I am working on. I have been feverishly trying to capture my thoughts into a wiki. The magnitude of the task at hand is really beginning to reveal its self. There are so many intricacies of various systems that all have to flow together. I knew that this was going to be a long, drawn out, process, but the reality of it is really starting to sink in. All of that to say, it is not a bad thing. I am really excited about the journey ahead.

I am thinking about focusing on the character development, skills and battle system, while the other pieces continue to bubble and percolate in background processes. The design of these areas seem to be coming along faster than the others. This will also give me a chance to take some first stabs at balancing combat and some of the skills.

The general idea is to start building the character generation, and battle systems. Build various characters, have them fight one another, tweak settings, fight some more, etc. This should also give me the opportunity to test a couple of different architectures out, plus it just sounds like a lot of fun. :)

I want the battles in this game to be more epic in nature. One of the major goals of the game is to avoid the "grind" that most games have today. Battles will occur, but you will not be doing it all the time just to get to the next level. I want the battles to be unique and a story in themselves. I don't want the standard "You chop rat for 2 HPs of damage." I want things like, "You deftly knock the bandit's sword away as he lunges for your throat." I want variety and just a tad bit of unpredictability. I don't want characters with gazillions of hit points that do zillions of hitpoints damage to each other. I want it to be almost like a dance, as the players entangle with their adversaries.

As these first stages progress, I am looking forward to seeing some initial fruits of these labors, even though that may still be a ways off.