Garcon wakes up pretty early and seeing how late he was getting to bed it doesn’t appear as if the poor guy got much sleep at all. First things first he rushes to the Money Changers office to sell his hot goods, only to find that she sleeps in late. Well he does have some money still from the exchange so he might as well spend it. He heads to Laffin’s Magic Shop and asks hims what spells he is carrying:
Perseii already has three of those spells (he bought Detect in Spielburg, ‘Enry gave him trigger, and he won Dazzle by defeating Erasmus at the Mage game, remember?) Force Bolt and Levitate are new though! He picks them up:
Hopefully that burned enough time cause it certainly burned through our Jackson’s wallet! Back to the Money Changers:
After we hand over the Tea set she wanted so badly she let’s us in on another job, well more like an opportunity:
Outside in the Fighter’s Plaza Perseii stops at the leatherworkers stall to pick up another waterbag, just cause.
Besides the Guild Hall the only other thing in the Plaza is the Weapon shop. (BTW don’t I have to steal that bellows, there?):
buy dagggers
“Ten is a nice round number and bodies look so lovely with the hilts of ten daggers sticking out of them…”
We won’t be spending a lot of time with Issur, if we were a fighter we might, cause IIRC he’s the Eternal Order of Fighters contact in Shapier.
After that Danar returns to the lightless corridors of Shapier and once again gets lost (I spent most of day 1 being lost) I wanted to get back to the Gate Plaza so I could pick up a map and compass. Finally, he made it back to the Fountain Plaza and did some shopping: Continue reading “Let’s Play Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire Part Three”
I used to love first person shooters (FPSs). I think there was a stretch of a few years in my life where there were the only type of game I was playing: Qauke 2, Unreal, Half-life, Unreal Tournament , Quake 3. Even before FPSs went 3d I routinely played through DOOM, DOOM 2, and Heretic. At some point though FPSs started changing, they started taking themselves too seriously, perhaps? This is probably Half-Life’s fault, with the the Call of Duty and Halo franchises being responsible for carrying it forward, poorly. Too much focus on (a crappy) story line and attempting to portray a real world-setting didn’t set well with me. Neither did all the limitations designers started putting on the player: two weapons only, generic ammo, a non-numeric life-bar now accompanied by a non-numeric recharging energy or shield bar. The move towards recharging health and limits on weapons also meant that managing health and ammo was no longer part of the game. Ammo was picked up from fallen enemies and levels changed so that ammo dumps and arsenals were no longer part of the game, some how this also translated into the removal of secret areas on the map as well. Levels were no longer part of the puzzle to be solved merely the background canvas on which the player painted murder. As these changes were implemented and the focus moved increasingly from single player to on-line multi-player I found myself wandering away from the genre… *rant off*
I don’t quite recall how Borderlands caught my attention in 2009. Perhaps, it was the touted ‘loot’ system so similar to how Diablo and Diablo 2 distributed weapons and armor? Or maybe I picked it up on the recommendation of friends over at Talking Time (I’m sure it was the latter.) I picked the game up hopeful that my fondness for the genre could be rekindled but prepared to be disappointed. As I had been with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (a franchise that now embodies everything I’m not looking for in an FPS.) Borderlands is a delightfully dark and playful FPS, much as its early progenitors were, in which you explore an alien planet with a Western ethic. This world is large populated by monsters, thugs, bandits, frontiersmen and contains a surprising number of secrets. Tasked with finding and unlocking a legendary treasure trove, players will have at their disposal an near infinite variety of small and large arms. There are seven types of guns one can use but they all have modifiers of quality and elemental damage, as well as stat and to-hit bonuses. I’ve been playing for 20+ hours and I don’t think I’ve seen the same gun twice.
The game succeeds by successfully marrying fast-paced FPS game-play with an inventory/loot system that kept me opening every crate, chest, and locker in the game looking for the next amazing gun. The game does keep many of the now “standard” elements of FPSs, despite them I find myself smiling and looking forward to the sequel that is coming later this year.
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:
Daventry as designed by Roberta Williams
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.
King's Quest De-make map
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.
