Once again there’s not a whole lot to talk about. I could talk about wanting to add a certain feature ended up in forcing me to revise the way something worked in a significantly better way which then made it totally trivial to implement the feature. I could talk about how once you get down to implementing things you start to realize little details you hadn’t considered, like whether players should be allowed to use a node action again when they still haven’t finished its associated quest (the answer is: it depends!). But there’s not a whole lot of room for any significant discourse on this stuff. It’s all about filling in the blanks, like so much of programming after you’ve gained your legs. And I don’t have a whole lot of battle design to talk about. So I guess I’m just rambling this week?

As I’ve worked on these NodeActions I’ve started to get more hopeful that this is the right direction for the game to go in. Won’t know for sure until there’s pudding to get proof from. But the other day I rambled about roguelikes to someone. A roguelike’s random terrain actually isn’t that interesting- the only thing that matters most of the time are choke points. What matters about roguelike random generation are the objects placed within. The raw variety of each type, the variance in how a given object can react to different things, the increasing number of options an object gives to a player, etc. Ideally each object adds several new choices to a situation, and the resulting mixture of objects adds even more permutations of choice to the mix.

This game isn’t really a roguelike, but I’m hoping a similar principle applies to our maps. By giving each node more options we’re creating a more interesting play field, especially if we can get the options to interact together in interesting ways.