Getting Things Done vs Getting Things Decided

Well, I guess it's time to make a report of what has progressed since my last post. I have been working on both graphics and the stats system. So far, I have a fully working character creation screen, still needs some UI tweaks and character graphics, but for now, done. I have had to add one stat since turning in my design doc, and made a few other changes as I began to realize just how boring the system plan was. I discussed it on another blog, http://www.rampantgames.com/blog/ and felt pretty good afterwards about the consequences of a design doc change.

The biggest change was going from having no character professions, to having 19 character professions. While I still have not finished balancing each class, I have gotten the starting 3 professions like I want them for creation and level up. I am very excited by what I was able to achieve, and a friend of mine told me that he had never seen a class tree quite like this one, so I hope it might be different enough just to have the appearance of being something new. :-) That would be cool!

Unfortunately, this is the only thing I have made fully functional. I have made a semi-working inventory and equipment system, a semi working level up system, a semi working character screen, and 3 partial test levels with 3 different partial sets of test graphic styles that I have been working on. I also have one character semi-finished on paper, she still needs some work, but I am getting closer. Art was not my strong suit, but hopefully my hands and eyes will quickly learn to get along better. I have been drawing characters out of how-to books for the good part of a month in my free time.

There are two new graphics applications that I am testing out right now that may speed graphics development considerably. If I decide to use them I will be posting them soon. They both have free versions, but I would want to use the updated commercial versions if I use them for the game.