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« on: 2 May 2013, 11:00:07 »
I am slowly chugging away at the character creation screen. I've added a new folder to techs to hold specialization files. It will probably contain several other files as well. I'm am debating moving this to the faction folder but I am not sure.
I am going to post something I posted to rpg codex here to describe sovereign creation more in depth:
So I'm currently working on the character creator for my project. The game isn't a straight RPG, its more of an RTS/citybuilder with a simulation of important characters used by you to run a fantasy society. You can only directly create your Sovereign, the other characters with individual skills are randomly generated from your educated populace.
I want to divide the game into 5 spheres:
Magic
Military
Economics
History/Linguist/Research
Diplomacy
Currently I plan to set it up this way:
You choose a specialization in one of the 5 spheres, this gives you a significant boost to the skills and abilities and stats of that sphere upon game start.
H/L/R gives a boost to research speed. Researching is done using books gathered by various means. History allows you to find more books generally, linguist allows you to recognize what these books are for, and research allows you to turn their knowledge into knowledge you can use. You will have more options and better ability to make use of them with this specialization.
Diplomacy is pretty much what it says and it applies to be inter and intra society interactions. It lets you make better deals and pacts with other societies. It lets you do better with major characters in your own society as well. They might take pay cuts, offer you books, agree to work together better with other major characters and you, and do various other such things. This is important because you can't do everything yourself. You can't lead all the armies, in so far as armies can be led at all given that most military characters are agents in and of themselves. You cannot organize all the economic stuff yourself. You can't do all the research yourself and so forth.
Economics is concerned with trade and production. As a citybuilder type game you have to gather and process a lot of materials to produce a wide variety of goods both to placate the citizens and raise their education and economic level and to give to heroes and soldiers to defend the kingdom. These are mostly buffs to production rate and various other things.
Military is pretty obvious. Leadership of guards and the ability to lead a group of the AI heroes or at least possibly convince some to follow you. It also gives bonuses to your personal combat skills and stats.
Magic is perhaps more complex. It ties in to several areas. Magic has some bonuses to research. Magic has skills that influence the economy, magical production and also products that are more magical. There is a bit of a trade here as well. You can focus on magical goods or magical power. Basically if you invest in magic and economics properly you can mass produce all sorts of low level magical enchanted military equipment and production facilities. If you focus on magic and H/L/R you can get magical spells for casters that are more powerful and buff magical research in general to be faster and also be able to hold more spells at once and so forth.
Then we get to what I'll call the free allocation. Basically you have a number of points you can assign anywhere, with some prerequisites but those are mostly general. 1 Point in some broad skill compared to having 8 points in specific ones like floggoflopr and 4 in schtupersnock.
I will probably make certain skills only available in the specialization or perhaps it can just be that if you get 10 points in bladesmithing from economics and 5 from military than economics is necessary to max blade smithing and military is better than the other 3 but only second best.
Aside from that you will be able to allocate points in any skills you like, either focusing on your specialization or going down the economics route so that your magic specialization is used for magitech production and not mastery of arcane knowledge.
I'm trying to think of the best way to organize points to meet these goals. For instance if I don't cap the points you can add to a skill in free allocation, and I don't make the number quite small, you could subvert the Specialization to the point of being useless. I'd think its better to cap single skill allocation so that I can still have a ton of points to assign to make really specialized builds. You can of course level your Sovereign's skills during the actual game, possibly even above specialization, presuming you get the proper books and items and choose the right answer in events. But I feel some options should only be viable or available if you specialized right.
I also need to deal with the event system. Different non-default options are available based on your character. I don't want to use % chance too much. I think it just leads to save scumming. I would rather assign static values and then display the choices you qualify for with a 100% chance. Is this a good idea? Your choice in a few events won't decide the outcome of your game, so if I went random you wouldn't lose to a dice roll. But it might be pretty disappointing to see an amazing option and miss it because you got unlucky with a 90% chance.
Part of free allocation is spells/classes. I am wondering how much control to give the player. Should they be able to select individual spells? Should they only be able to spell schools?
So many decisions...
Anyways I am planning to have a text box where you choose a specialization and it displays what you get for that, maybe in a tool tip, not sure. Then you will move on to the free allocation. I decided to go ahead with schools of magic/spells/skills that you can select from. Then you will be able to pick some traits that give unique bonuses. Traits cost more points and may not be exactly as you like them, but you get a lot from a trait so you need to decide if the bonuses are worth it, especially since some may be unique. Then you can add points to various skills/stats individually. I hope to make many many possible combinations viable. We will see how that goes. Personally my first character is going to max out on languages, history, and research stats plus magic and then dump the rest into economics for magitech purposes. I'm probably going to totally ignore military and diplomacy.
Ever since my first academagia character specializing in history and language turned out to be useless cause those skills were only good for later game years I have wanted to be a magical linguist/historian.
Anyways I expect to have some good work done by the end of the weekend, possibly all the engine stuff will be done and only the XML to define the specialization will be left, to be completed later when I move from engine to game work.
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