Game Design Proposal

Damion Schubert * 7 Feb 1996 last updated 27 Mar 1996

[backstory] [tentative artlist]

Provide 'more'

The players have spoken, and uniformly, they want more. More spells, more skills, more items, more monsters, more new areas. Fortunately, with additional personnel, these are things that we can add relatively easily. If we worry less about adding new functionality and more about building things with existing functionality, we can add a lot. This is particularly true for areas, monsters and spells.

• Add Konima's Island area.
• Konima's Island is a jungle area, of about 8-10 rooms It has one multiple person puzzle in it. It is inhabited by avars, a race of aboriginal, flightless birds with simple tool-making ability. The monsters here are extremely high level, and are not to be taken lightly.
• Monsters:
• Avar, Avar Chieftain, Avar Shaman, Kriipa (Monster X), DragonFly
• NPCs:
• Trader, Bone priestess, Mad Scientist, Bowmaker/Huntress
• Art:
• jungle textures, avar dwellings and personal effects, others.
• Clothing:
• ivy circlet.
• Weapons:
• Riija's sword (4 parts)
• Items:
• Riija's staff (4 parts)
• Add Riija Temple
  Riija's Temple is only solved after completing the quest, which shows the path across the bridge of faith. Once across, you see a grandiose temple, but if someone casts Jala's 'Truth' spell or Kraanan's 'Dispel Illusion' spell, you will see the temple is in reality a simple mud hut.
• Client:
• Bridge of faith.
• NPCs: Riija monk.
• Add Konima's City area (backstory).
• Konima's City is the place where the warriors of Tos were forced to flee after the raid into the Orc Warrens. Konima's City has survived by mining the green mineral Nerudite, which they use to forge superior weaponry.
• NPCs:
• weaponsmith, innkeeper, tavernkeeper, banker, vaultman, healer., good captain of the guard, evil captain of the guard, herbalist, linguist/scholar, bowmaster, junk salesman, tailor
• Clothing:
• robes, long skirt, sari
• Atmospherics
• floor torches.
• Missile weapons.
• Bow (including firing animation), Normal arrows, Nerudite arrows.
• Weapons
• Nerudite sword
• Add Orc Warrens.
• The orc warrens are a very difficult area which newbies will have a very hard time getting through at all, and the hardest of the hard-core games will need a group merely to do the simple puzzles getting through, much less survive.
• Monsters
• Orc, Cave Orc, Orc Chieftain, Orc Wizard, Shadowbeast
• Clothes and armor
• Bone Shield
• New textures and atmospherics
• orc walls, archways, carvings, skull piles, light sources
• Puzzle
• Random element puzzle, TBD
• Add Lupogg King
• A simple puzzle opens up the room connecting the two sewers together in the center, and inside is the Lupogg King, an extremely high level supermonster.
• Monster
• Lupogg King.
• Puzzle
• 2 man puzzle, connecting JAS_SEWER3 and BAR_SEWER3, TBD
• Add item/weapon attributes
• We can fuzz generate a buzzword and a power and add it to all of the six main weapon types, thus infinitely expanding our item choices and breathing new life into our economy.
• art
• make weapons XLATable. Be sure they're hotspotted.
• make scale and plate XLATAble.
• make knight and round shield XLATable.
• kod: polish attribute definitions and code
• training weapon, poisoned weapon, fiery weapon., splintering weapon, mystic weapon, weapon of the duke, expert's weapon, weapon of the just, ceremonial weapon, bonded weapon
• Add mend penalty
• make current weapon enchantments short-term
• kod to put these in the game
• quest prizes
• monster kills
• Add new spells (many of these would be done by a theoretical junior programmer)
• Shal'ille
• Detect Evil, Martyr's Battleground, QorBane, Spirit Hammer, Raise Dead, Identify, Reveal
• Kraanan
• Resist Poison, Detect Invisible, Haste, Silence, Dispel Illusion, Shroud
• Riija
• Anonymous, Flash, Distract, Foresight, Illusionary Wounds, Apparition, Counterfeit, Wall of Illusion, Vertigo, Forget, Denial, Mirror Image, Personal Apparition, Morph, Artifice
• Faren
• Fumble, Wall of Thorns, Fog, Wall of Flame, Spore Cloud
• Qor
• Detect Good, Animate, ShalilleBane, Deathlink, Paralyze, Curse Weapon
• Jala
• Warp Time, Truth, SpellBane
• Add new warrior skills.
• Add UI for activatable skills.
• Add Different warrior strokes or strategies.
• Add a couple thief skills.
• Add stat sensitive clothing and armor
• guild shields
• school sensitive robes
• helms, both unadorned and adorned.

Plug percieved holes and design flaws

There are things that we have done that we can do better. One example is the quest engine, which was never expected to make it into the game in it's current incarnation, but was forced to due to time and resource constraints. There are other things that players have habitually asked for that are relatively easy to add. Missile weapons are an excellent example of this.

• Upgrade Quest Engine
• Make Quests changeable and addable at runtime.
• Use web page so that same quest can be added to multiple servers at one time.
• Update Quests
• Change 'message quest' to messages that make sense.
• Players are couriers for recipes, love letters, threats, chess moves, troop movements, and 'secret messages'.
• Generalize so a new type of message quest can be added easily and quickly.
• Change 'item quests' to ask for a certain item for a purpose.
• Make NPC have a reason for wanting an item: needed for recipe, needed to win love, needed to outfit an adventurer, or other mystery reasons.
• Generalize so a new reason can be added easily.
• Add 'Courier quests', i.e. a player carries an NPC created item from one place to another.
• Wedding proposals, rings, jewels, etc.
• Generalize so a new courier quest can be added easily.
• Add 'Rogue Monster' quests.
• NPC tells player that Monster is terrorizing place X. That monster is loaded immediately, but is unkillable until that player takes a try at it.
• NPCs can also put a bounty on the head of a PC who's particularly obnoxious.
• Improve 'Quest Eggs'.
• Add different lost items, with different graphics and 'found messages'.
• Make it generalizable.
• Make multiple questnode quests
• Add 'quest stacking', where an NPC will give you a quest after you complete the first.
• Add 'quest webbing', where a player must have two flags to even get assigned a third.
• Add 'personal' quests, which only one player gets, so he doesn't have to compete.
• Add additional NPCs
• Konima's Island NPCs: monk, healer, blacksmith, innkeeper, tavernkeeper, tailor
• Add Healer to Barloque and Marion.
• Add Tailor to Cor Noth and Jasper.
• Add Blacksmith to Jasper and Barloque.
• Add Vaultman to Jasper.
• Add Banker and Vaultman to Barloque
• Add wandering (teleporting) NPCs, which go from bar to bar.
• General
• Bard
• Heretic
• Evil wizard
• Make 'buyers' able to be quest nodes too.
• Add NPC 'personalities'
• Give NPCs a baseline mood, and a rate of change.
• Give NPCs a mood, with ways to make them happy and ways to make them upset. Have those moods have effects.
• Have NPCs get mad and ignore spammers.
• Make prize value depend on the depth and difficulty of the quest.
• Make time a problem (do the quest in X days).
• Have NPCs give quests dependant on who you are and who they are
• Newbie only quests for novices.
• Expbie only quests for high-levels (must be above some threshold).
• Good and evil only quests.
• Must have X level in this spell/ be a master in this school.
• Add NPC advertisements, so a player can ask around for work (thus adding a psuedo quest layer).
• Add 'information points'. Parts of a quest might be random, but you always need to go to a certain person to understand that random element (i.e. only one person who understands a certain language).
• Add player history to NPC speech
• Quest completion.
• Guild shenanigans
• Princess/Duke gossip
• Spell/skill school mastery.
• Assassin game gossip.
• Update speech
• Add new backstory to update.
• Add new features to update.
• Get rid of old crud.
• Make Rook's advice relative to other monsters, instead of your own power.
• Make Rook respond to 'mutant ant' and 'baby spider' correctly.
• Add advice about susceptibilities and resistances.
• Explore possibility of using alternate hints (Tos Blacksmith instead of Colhorr)
• Maintenance and error-checking
• Things to do:
• Convert 'completed list' flags to a bitvector stored on the player. Write conversion function.
• Add 'self-cleaning' functionality to code.'
• Use name-matching to avoid problems with duplicate and recently deleted NPCs.
• Doublecheck that Recreate works.
• Doublecheck that deleting an NPC and/or deleting a player at runtime has no ill effects.
• Things to remember
• Don't let anything be ruined by death or suicide.
• Don't let anything be ruined by botting.
• Don't let a DM/guide abuse the quest engine.
• Don't let a player do anything that would create a quest.
• Allow teamwork to work only when you want it to.
• New NPC UI
• New buy/sell dialogue, allowing at least for multiple items.
• New 'learn' command, seperating it from 'buy'.
• New blacksmith, which repairs things.
• New 'vaultmen' AI, for item storage.
• Room rental at inn (so players can get a private place to... talk).
• Make advancement & Stats easier to understand.
• Add an Experience gauge.
• Add an Encumbrance gauge.
• Check the formulae for overly 'fast areas' and 'slow areas'. Smooth the curve so there are no longer abrupt stops.
• Have the formula better deal with 'rare cast' spells and skills.
• Have the formula seamlessly deal with adding new spells or skills of any level to any school.
• Add missile weapons.
• Add bow and crossbow proficiency skills.
• Add actual hit percentages and damage numbers.
• Add graphics, 1st and 3rd person.
• Improve targetting for both missile weapons and spells.
• Add item storage.
• Add 'Vaultman' NPC, who will hold 1000 stones of weight.
• Add compass item
• Improve monster AI.
• Pets, which follow a 'friend' PC or monster
• Bodyguards, which protect a 'friend' PC or monster
• Guards, who attack anyone fitting a certain profile.
• Wimps, who flee when wounded to a certain level.
• Pathwalkers, which walk on a predetermined path.
• Faux Combat, so faeries can pretend to fight each other.
• Readjust spells
• Make spell power more inline with their strength.
• Make all spells strengths vary based on a number from 1-100.
• Affected by world conditions (time, weather)
• Affected by shrines
• Affected by eq wearing (worn encumbrance or aversion to metal).
• Make room effect spells not effect newbies instead of being thwarted by them.
• Re-examine 'damage' spells, so they have appropriate but not insurmountable downsides.
• Re-examine all spells, to determine that players feel that they are worthwhile.
• Improve spell failure, so there are minor failures and extreme failures.
• Revisit karma
• Re-examine logoff penalty.
• Improve combat (from text/spam point of view).
• Remove repetitive text.
• Add blood spurts.
• Adjust Duke/Princess stats.
• See if players on all servers prefer duke or princess. If there is a clear winner, give the other one more of an edge.
• Move modifiers out of player and into system.
• Add 'insignia', a badge of their allegiance that they can choose whether or not to wear.
• Add official marriages and divorces
• Some way to auto splice names?
• tied to Justicar?
• Make yell go to surrounding zones.

Reduce load on customer service

There are ways that we can reduce load on customer service. Largely, this coincides with goal #2, since these problem areas are things that players request frequently.

• Improved CS dialogue
• Include appropriation of power based on different ranks of CS people
• bards
• guides
• senior guides
• guardians
• loremasters
• creators
• Improve 'newbie friendliness'.
• Add more 'backstory' waiting to be found - statues, books, NPC dialogue.
• Add help buttons.
• Make character creation more user friendly.
• Add 'automated events'.
• Automate blood sky chaos.
• Add 'Day of Tranquility' - no PK day.
• Add Orc Raids.
• Add Town Curse.
• Add Spider Infestations
• Add justicar system to reduce load on Customer Service.
• See this link.
• Make advancement easier to understand.
• See above.
• Make some 'bard tools', so guides can run mini-events at their own discretion.
• Feathered Totems, which are not autodeleted.
• Inscribable signs, which guides can drop messages.
• Inscribable paper.
• Random number generator for lotteries.

Things other groups should do

While these groups are not under my control, this is what I would suggest the other groups do (keeping an eye on my own priorities). Your mileage may vary.

Room design

• Konima's City
• Riija Monastery
• Konima's Island.
• Orc Warrens.
• Lupogg King Room.
• Revisit existing rooms to put in sloped floors where applicable.
• Revisit Tos, to give it a better look and feel.
• Hall of Heroes (statues of the game's top ten players).

Client team

• Improve UI.
• Improve obvious engine flaws, such as being stuck on corners.
• Improve sound functionality.
• Make stats, spells, skills and inventory different pages.
• Make stats/spells/skills window and inventory window togglable.
• Create room editor and improved BBGun.
• Animation queueing

Server team

• Add 'log player' functionality.
• Add 'service log' functionality for guardians.
• Add way for admins to view logs online.

Tools

• Room Editor
• Sloped floors
• Y alignment
• Remove obvious instabilities
• BBGun
• Sound library
• Revisit all sound
• Revisit all music.