A Good Week For Aeges Road

This week has been a good week. I finally got some other work caught up and decided to put artwork on hold this week in favor of developing the sub systems. On a really good note, I pulled my expired 30 day demo out of the ditch this week by purchasing Torsion, and it is money well worth it. Up until a couple months ago, I have been fighting with Code Weaver. Code Weaver has some good functionality, but it is pretty helpless in finding syntax errors. I can't count the times I have spent hours debugging just to find out I had spelled something wrong, or the syntax was a bit off. Very frustrating, especially when working with complex data structures. Torsion sped me up greatly, and I have been counting the days until I could purchase it.

Back to the game. Yesterday and today have been spent doing a little bit of artwork, but mainly gui building. Soon stats, inventory, skills, modifications, and in gui character switching will be fully functional. While I fought with mouse placement and some other gui oddities, I have finally come up with a solution that should be very thorough and offer the user the best experience I possibly can with the UI.

I have always enjoyed UI design, I have done it for several applications and for some reason thought that I would avoid it with this game in favor of in game menus and systems. After a while of playing with these in game systems, I had a change of heart and decided that it was time to get on the ball and design. The result are passable right now, and with a little profile polish should exceed my own expectations. In the next few weeks I hope to offer some new screenshots of these sub-systems.

The other major cause of these changes has to do with comments from gamers. Random Gamer had this excellent comment to make.

While we're not opposites, we certainly have a different perspective. Mechanics and fights and leveling up are, to me, things that keep me from the story and the immersive world that hopefully are they. I don't care about stats and levels - I dislike min-maxing and looking for advantages in the system. An RPG for me better be easy enough that I don't have to worry about that stuff. I'm supposed to be a hero - I don't want to do paperwork!

After chewing on this for a while, I decided to review the rules system of my game one more time. The results are better than they have ever been. The base rules, stats, and professions remain the same as before. The big change is how they are handled at character creation and at level up. Another big change is how skills are handled. I have two prototypes in testing, and will pick the winner after I have a thorough chance to review them both. The skills system basically makes it possible to either rush through level up and character creation, or take your time and get picky with the character without making sacrifices to your character. While this theory has yet to be proven, it has a lot of potential, and I look forward to unveiling it in the future.

On some other notes of interest, if you are a torque developer or interested in getting started in game development, Torque School has just been launched. Also, if you haven't seen the newly redesigned site at Rampant Games you should go have a look.