Cataloging the Detritus of my Life
You get them by reading the books being put out now by Fantasy Flight Press! You can find my reviews for the two books here and here. At the back of the books is a little sheet you can mail in with $2 or so for shipping to get cards for Arkham Horror. I sent in the forms from the back of Ghouls of Miskatonic and Dance of the Damned. Weeks passed and I forgot all about the forms, until last week an envelope arrived!
Now I just need to round up some vict, I mean friends to play with!
Making rooms is the easiest thing you can do in Inform 7. the code consists of nothing more than: “The Castle is a room.” That single short sentence after being compiled will create a single room in a very simple and very boring IF game. Add this to the end of that sentence: “”Your view is dominated by a large, weather-beaten castle.”” and now your room has a description. Add “It is north of the Road. It is east of the Mountain Pass” and now your IF has three rooms and if you were playing it you could freely move between the them. The entire program would look like this:
The Castle is a room. “Your view is dominated by a large, weather-beaten castle.” It is north of the Road. It is east of the Mountain Pass.”
Since making maps was the simplest part of designing the game I decided to start there with the KQ de-make (KQD). I printed out a copy of the the map for KQ1:
I figured I’d just make a copy of the map and be done. It’d be super easy because I didn’t have to do anything but cut and paste. As I started to do so though and I as I looked at my map in Inform. It didn’t make a lot of sense. The map for KQ has a lot of unused space in it. Daventry is a 6 x 8 grid with 48 screens in it. Of those 48 at least 20 of them have nothing in them that the character can pick-up or interact with. In some of them random creatures might pop up but there is nothing for the player to do but admire the primitive computer art and read a couple of boxes of short, descriptive text. While this seems like bad game design, and it is, at the time what KQ was doing was completely new. This was the first PC adventure game that allowed players to walk through a world and just look at the surroundings with their eyes. Before KQ you had nothing but descriptive text. If I did copy the map as is, I’d be creating rooms in which there was nothing for the player to do. Some empty rooms make sense to create atmosphere, but having nearly half of them was too much.
Another thing you’ll notice is that the maps consists of screen capture each area of the map consists of a single image that filled the computer screen. The player moved from screen to screen traveling left, right, up, or down. This makes a lot of sense for a grid-like world. IF though doesn’t have screens and therefore is not based on a grid, the convention in IF is that the player can move in not only the four cardinal directions (N,S,E,W) but also the four ordinal directions (NE, NW, SE, SW.) If I were to use the original map in IF and add in the ordinal directions nearly every place would be accessible from the other and mapping as well as memorizing routes would become overly complicated.
I’d like to say I noticed this almost immediately and quickly corrected the problem… I was done with about 1/4 of the map before I realized I was making useless rooms and over-connecting them before I realized that this wasn’t a “good” idea. I took out the printed copy of the KQ map and started mashing rooms together, deleting others, and incorporating some rooms into larger regions (important for things later.) I went through four of five iterations of the map before I settled on the one below. As I move forward though there is no guarantee that further changes won’t be made.
The second level up is the Cloud Kingdom, the first is the mountain stairway between Daventry and the Cloud Kingdom (as well as the upper reaches of a single tree) The starting level is Daventry. CS is the Castle where the player starts. The Castle and the tan colored tiles around it were where I started making the map and still have the cardinal directions as the means of passage, this is the “developed” part of Daventry and have the right-angled roads would show that. The blue and pink regions are the two rivers in Daventry (here named Leams and Nene) the river in the east is where the gnome is located the one in the west is where the hole to the Leprechauns. GH is the witches’ gingerbread house, GP is the Goat Pen, and CF is the clover field. That should be enough to orient you. While the original game contained 48 rooms (not including interiors and the cloud kingdom) KQD only contains 34, a reduction of 31%.
With the map done the next step will be adding descriptive text to each room. I plan on ripping much of it from the original and then populating the rooms with objects and characters. Once that is done, and that is a lot. I need to create the code that will allow for the solving of puzzles, the interaction of various objects, NPCS,and the ability for the players to interact with said NPCs.
I got a lot of work ahead of me.
If you have any questions, comments, criticism, help, etc. Please do leave them in the comments I’m very new at this and I’m interested in whatever you have to say.
Fast forward 13 years and I now find myself playing the game again. It was a slow process of hanging out in a forum and IRC room with people who played, finding out one of my friends here used to play (and kept many of his cards), and the release of Magic 2012 for Xbox Live Arcade. I first picked up the XBLA game (that is a single purchase and comes with all the decks/cards you (or anyone) will be able to play with, you can unlock various cards for the various decks by playing with them. This is a nice way to play MtG without having to worry about purchasing cards or constructing decks. I’ve been playing about two or three games a week against the computer and am having fun.
I also went into a hobby store looking to pick up a couple of starter decks to teach D how to play the game. I some how lucked out and managed to enter a hobby store when someone working there actual cared that I was a potential customer and he sat down and answered a number of questions about MtG and then handed me two free 30 card decks to play with. D and I have played a couple of times with these and I’m hopeful that she’ll get into it enough that we can sit down with some real decks (pre-constructeds, probably) and play.
One of the first things I noticed is that they’ve simplified the game by removing interrupts and other card types, everything is either an instant or a sorcery, as well as reformating the phases in a turn. The game doesn’t play that differently but it is easier to explain.
So, just a heads up you might be seeing some MtG related posts in the future.
PS – If you have MtG:2012 on XBLA look me up and we’ll play! I’m xnosophorosx
Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 is a tabletop war game. Actually, for all intent and purposes, it is THE tabletop war game. Other war games exist, historic and otherwise, but people outside the hobby? If they know about tabletop war gaming at all they probably know about Games Workshop’s Warhammer (Fantasy or 40k). I started playing 40k over a decade ago and I love it. I love the hobby, the models, the fluff, etc. I wouldn’t call myself a fanboy (I own their competitor’s products and have some complaints).
As fun as a table top game is to play, after the game is over and you’re packing your models up and collecting stray dice, you have to admit that tiny metal and plastic models pushed up against each other and hundreds of dice roles doesn’t quite convey the frenetic pulpy action of the fluff:
…The attack was defeated, but there was no doubt there would be many more before the day was out. Less than a fifth of the Ultramarines who had begun the operation were still alive and Idaeus knew that one more push would see them defeated. He ignored the pleas of his sergeants and set off alone in a suicidal attempt to blow the bridge.
Sprinting through the bullet-chased and smoke huanted rubble, Idaeus reached the first of the demolition charges just as the retrieval Thunderhawk touched down beyond the bridge’s western approach and out of range of the enemy’s anti-aircraft positions. Triggering the commes-net Idaeus ordered the remaining Ultramarines to retreat under the command of Sergeant Uriel Ventris as the Night Lords began yet another assault. The surviving Ultramarines withdrew under fire to the Thunderhawk and Idaeus waited until the last possible second before detonating the first charge. In a catastrophic chain reaction, the remaining charges exploded, destroying Idaeus, the briddge, and much of the Night Lords’ oncoming assulat wave in a searing blast that shook the earth for Leagues around.
Excerpt from Idaeus’ Last Charge, Codex Space Marines
I have plenty of imagination and that is generally what I use when playing 40k, but now thanks to Relic and THQ I don’t have to always imagine and I don’t have to rustle up a table, and opponent and three to four spare hours. Instead, I can play Space Marine:
Space Marine is a middling action title, it isn’t great and it isn’t bad. The game does a decent job of delivering fast paced, violent action set in the 40k universe. For people who don’t know anything else about the 40k world that is all the game can be. For players of Warhammer 40,000 and fans of the world Space Marine is quite a bit more. It takes all those static images of models on a table and brings them to life! Here we can experience the destructive power of a Lascannon or the tremendous might of a single Space Marine against Xenos hordes. I especially appreciate how faithfully they portrayed the weaponry in the game. I kind of understood how a plasma gun differed from a melta gun; I understand the basics of a bolter (standard, heavy, and storm.) Space Marine, just as it does for the titular characters, brings this aspect of the 40k universe to life.
The best sections of the game are when you have access to a assault jet pack. I wish they had used the pack more or simply designed the game around it. Every jet pack level adds a vertical component to the game that is much more complex and compelling than the standard horizontal lay out of the rest of the game. I enjoy going from kill room to kill room as much as the next guy. But, in a 10 or so hour campaign it can get boring. The Jet pack allows for much more creative level design as well as giving the player an out when they are outnumbered. Hopefully, if there is a sequel the assault pack can play an integral part of it.
The only complaint I have with the game is how it handles your character’s life bar. While your Space Marine has a regenerating shield his life force is static and can only be regained by performing an “execution” against an enemy (canned animation kill) this would be fine except for the fact that some of these kills can last 3 or 4 seconds and you take damage while performing them!? I lost count of how many times I died while being stuck in the execution animation that would have healed me had it not gone on for so long…
Space Marine is a fun game, I hear the multiplayer is especially exciting, (and allows for creating your own Space Marine chapter!) for those looking for a shooter and aren’t already occupied with Gears of War 3 (I will never understand why this game was released a mere week before the most anticipated third person shooter of the year.) If you are a 40k fan though this game is indispensable!