Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

Telling a story; Creating a Compelling Narrative. In this blog I will talk about my own recent brush with story telling and go on to talk about how tools from creative wring can help you to better author the narrative in your games, whether they have a traditional linear narrative or a procedurally generated interactive narrative. Narrative and structure in traditional fiction    last week I started writing a story set in the world I'm developing for my game Vinland: 1936. I hope the story will help me to flesh out my game world and develop my own expanded universe which will be a good place to set my games in the future. After about a week of work, on and off I've progressed the story to outline stage. For each character thread I have half a dozen chapters which plot a course through the events of the story. Each thread is told from the perspective of a different character. Actually I started writing as soon as I had my outline, but I've since gone back an...

S7alker117 asked me today on Deviant art: What's the story behind this project, if I may ask? To try to lay it out as briefly as possible: It's an alternative history "... if Alfred the Great had been defeated and England had become The Daneland". From this base, using Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Slaves, Viking settlers were able to colonize North America . However, the little ice age which brought viking occupation to an end in our own history left this fledgling civilization isolated from Europe for around 300 years. During that time Christianity developed differently, partly merging with the pagan beliefs of the viking settlers and partly being subverted by the Vinlanders as means of controlling their slaves and lower classes. There are some other departures from our own history; The Eastern Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne were (re)united by the political marriage of Charlemagne of the F...

I've been working on a number of side projects recently, so no actual work on Treasures of the Deep Dwellers. However all but one of those side projects have been aimed at testing some ideas with a view to restructuring the project or developing key components which were missing. When I finished working on the most recent version, it felt like I was nearly ready to put out a demo... but after trying it out for a while I wasn't satisfied. Movement calculation was too slow, the characters and AI were too complicated and not well designed. Adding to them was becoming too much of a chore. And there was something wrong with the pathfinding... I took part in a game jam and had the opportunity to work on an FSM ( Finite State Machine ) for character management. The version I designed for the competition was a little limited because I didn't use classes , I had to define all properties for all states at initialization of the game. The result was pretty messy, but it worked m...

Some of the new small monsters. Every RPG has different stages of character development, or acts; Act I the noobs.  Act II the experienced party.  Act III the epic characters. Act IV the demigods. My own favorite stage is the first one. Everything can be dangerous to your party, every piece of treasure is potentially useful, every roleplaying quest seems worth doing just to try and grab some XP without fighting. After that the experienced party part is still pretty fun, as you try to tweak your characters' skills and equipment, trying to get the most from your team or single character if you're playing a solo game. Epic characters are only fun if you got them to that point yourself. Being dumped in to a campaign with a pre-written high level character is a pain (There are so many things about the character that just don't fit your "style") and even so I often end up restarting once I get to this point just to see if I can do "better" at m...

Sometimes part of game development is comparing your game with others in the same genre. Today I tried out a newly released roguelike, "The Ground Gives Way" . Level 1 I like this game. It's quite fun and the procedural parts fit together well to create a game which feels scripted, like there's a kind of evolving narrative. That's an important part of effective procedural generation, that it doesn't seem totally random. For example I got to level 4 and there were 4 exits to the next level, but all but one of them was an empty room with no access to the rest of level 5. I also found a grill, so I could cook some food if I had some meat (I didn't have any). Level 4 and my death. It's a pretty difficult game, but there isn't quite the steep learning curve you get with many roguelikes. It starts difficult and stays difficult. That's because advancement isn't handled through XP and levels, but through getting better equipment. Th...

Although I've tried to focus only on making content, not on fleshing out the game word yet I have had to make some decisions about fluff and flavor. For one thing, priests need some kind of allegiance, until now I had just been using an ankh as a kind of universal holy symbol as many early graphical RPGs did. The Ankh is instantly recognizable as a holy symbol, but old enough to not be part of a current world religion. No one is going to accuse you of blasphemy or anything like that for using it. However, I am trying to add a lot of items to the game right now and I'd rather not have to come back later and add more stuff bit by bit. So I added 5 basic religions. The Ankh of Shishi. The first religious item is the Ankh of the goddess Shishi. It is the key of life, and priests which follow this religion are devoted to life, healing, farming and the Sun. Shishi is widely worshiped in the hot regions of the south and east, but little followed until recently in the temp...

As I go on with the project I try to do a little bit of coding or asset creation every day. Today I made some new helmets for barbarians: Grimdark Helmets. As well as revisiting the potions in 3D: Lovely low poly potions. I also spend some time everyday rethinking aspects of the game which have not been decided, such as combat, stats, character creation and role-playing. A few days ago I had a brainstorm about Social Status. As it stood, the idea was good, but in a fantasy game there are many different factions, some of them totally incompatible. I decided it would be best if characters could take ranks in different factions at character creation, just the same way as they spend points on skills or attributes, they could lose points of gain them through role-playing. You might become a knight after completing a particularly hard quest, or a high level character might gain control of the council of wizards. A very high level character might become king in a paper and penc...