Getting back into it and starting transcription.

The sky?

Yes I’m on a plane headed to New Zealand for a family visit. It has been too long.

The last week

I’ve had two sessions with some friends over the past week, digging in to the design of their game and mine. With heavy focus on trying to explain, in deteail, exact how the combat experience of the game works. The idea of “twin stick” control, where one is for position intent and the other is for facing.

Notebook is filling up

I’ve written about 5 pages of notes over the last few days, really digging in to the specifics of how each of the intent, action, facing, and positioning components are going to effect combat.

I’m really enjoying finding more and more things to round off in order to restrict what is possible inside the design.

Constraints and shrinking the sandbox is really important to me, because in my opinion it allows the design of a far more digestible game.

I’ve been processing this for a few days now. Writing in my notebook as well as in this repo. I have a decent draft of the First Circle of Combat written, and I’m about 4 hours in to a new draft of the Second Circle.

Currently I am focusing on designing a good mechanism for positioning, and an associated “facing” mechanism. I don’t want the complexity to get overwhelming, so I am minimizing the number of facing options available during combat.

For example, I’m brainstorming about “average” facing direction for when two entities are adjacent to you and to each other. Your entity would then face both of them, and be able to block or parry attacks from either. Attacking and intent would need to have specific targets, but at least this solution would simplify battlefield awareness. (Having to guard against two enemies next to each other would be very challenging.)

You can check out my current progress at Combat.

Today I’m creating this website to better organize and track my work in the design process. It also grants a great benefit when presenting this to others.

Check out Overview for a quick start for how to understand each page.