Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Adventures in Amateur Game Design, part 1: Introduction



This was originally going to be "Adventures in Amateur Game Design: Part 1: Introduction: How I got started: Fun with subtitles" but Sarah told me that was stupid. The idea, however, remains the same. Why did I decide to start making a game and what is it?

The idea began to develop after watching How to Train Your Dragon. I really thought that movie established a credible basis upon which to design a game. It's even something that gets poked fun at in the movie.  So I really liked the vikings versus dragons setting.

As far as classes go, there were four: defender, warrior, archer, and geomancer. The defender was a shield using, defensive class. Warrior and archer are self-explanatory. The geomancer would be the mage-type class with an emphasis on some Avatar-esque elemental magic. All the classes would have some magic that would go with their particular niche. They would have attack magics as well as support oriented magic. The defender had personal and party defense magic. The warrior had attack and party buff magic. The archer had attack and enemy debuff magic. The geomancer was just plain magical.

For the system, it would have been a d10, White Wolf-type, system that would use the other dice for damage. I wanted abilities to be of the D&D 4th edition type where they have a certain number of uses per a period of time. I also wanted an initiative system that would allow for dynamic turn ordering, where a character could be 'faster' and have their turn come around more often. Furthermore, I wanted a character to be able to abstain from action to have their next turn come around faster.

That was pretty much all I had before I ran out of ideas and steam roughly a year ago. The idea has since returned to me in full force and I'll be talking about the things that I've changed since then and the inspirations for where they came from. I'll be talking in depth about how I'm going to capture each of these ideas that I've had. Stay tuned, because I think this will get pretty interesting.