nancygold's Journal

The Spell of Mastery Progress
I dislike the usual alchemy inspired magic systems.
And generally I borrow from Master of Magic in my design.
So there are no fire/water/earth/air.
Instead I have light/dark/chaos/order/cosmos system.

The character have affinity towards these.
Which dictate how the paths the character can develop.

Among other things these paths dictate how character look.
The characters don't have predefined classes.
Instead they have jobs, akin to Final Fantasy Tactics.
And various acquired titles, like lord or king.
So there is a "Lord Knight" implicit class.

The characters automatically shop for equipment,
according to their talents, wealth, social status and training.
The player has limited influence over it.
Since I hate games like Diablo,
where player spends half of the game managing inventory

That still requires large quantity of equipment sprites.
Which I'm slowly drawing myself.

This all looks superficially simple,
but it require many systems working together.
For example, the aforementioned
talents, wealth, social status and training
are already 4 separate systems,
depending on each other in multiple ways.

So again, game design is all about
dealing with such systems graphs.
And I have hard time seeing the integration.
So playtesting is required.

Current Mood: accomplished