So, to anyone who might be curious about how this is coming along. I'm probably picking this up again, but I might be rewriting the thing from scratch, aiming at a more traditional RL. The card-based mechanics probably would work best either in a really confined tactical space, or else in a game where you control something like an entire civilization. I considered making the game bimodal, with an overworld-mode to organize your deck in between concentrated shootout scenarios. But that doesn't really fit the bill for me. If I'm to make this, I'd much rather aim for a feeling of a vast prairie/desert world with small settlements, mines, etc. to explore seamlessly.
Right now, I'm considering whether or not to keep the hex grid or to situate it on a regular grid of squares. I love the kind of tactical space offered by a hex grid, but hobbling together a good interface for navigating it is just damn hard, and stuff like houses do undoubtedly fit better on a square grid. I think hexes can work well in a game aimed to be played with a mouse or touchscreen, but I loves my keyboard, so ... I haven't really decided upon this, though, still rattling my brain with arguments for and against.
I'm doing sketches for a general design, where speed/initiative might play an important part. I envision the player acting simultaneously as other actors, with each turn divided into several ticks, which are qualitative rather than quantitative: Acts of pure thought go first, followed by melee, followed by missiles, followed by movement, followed by tool use, or something along those lines. This would be fitted into an otherwise simplistic system: You get to wield one item and wear one or just a few. In addition, I might keep the system with stances that you can toggle, and I'll definitely keep a system of special actions, that will rather have penalties/constraints instead of mana/cooldown – say, stuff like: pass one turn to fire with increased accuracy; fire faster with lower accuracy; do double melee damage at the cost of speed; spend one turn soaking X damage instead of acting.
As far as health and wounds go, I'm probably landing on a system with Body Levels. A typical human would have two BLs, visualized as hearts, or something. Suffering a single melee attack would "bruise" you, causing your "top" BL to blink in the next turn. Being hit again while in this state costs you the entire BL, but if you manage to stay out of harms way, the bruise is regenerated. So being slapped in the face every other turn leaves you unharmed at the end of the fight, but if you get ganged up on or struck repeatedly, you risk losing your precious BLs, which will only regenerate under special circumstances. Firefights should be deadly, so taking a bullet probably pops one or two BLs immediately. Of course, there should be stuff like bullet proof vests (granting perhaps an extra "bruise" tick to your BLs), and intrinsics like "fat" or "tough", that may grant a whole extra BL.
While thinking about all this stuff, I'm also fiddling with some random generation. The currency generator may have to go (if lead bullets are to be the gold standard), but I consoled myself with a random world name generator. I'm also picking up notes for random genotypes that I did for Squirm, originally. So there'll be some kinds of herds for the cowboys to deal with, but they may turn up in different worlds as six-legged bovines herded for meat, or wild ostrich-like fowls whose eggs nomads poach, or underground reptiles who secrete a poisonous oil also precious to the industries back in The Old World. Similarly, I might write up some culture generators to decide upon things like writing technology (do they use paper and ink, stone tablets, or something more esoteric, like quipu or nkisi nkondi?) But here I'm getting ahead of myself. I hope for a more modest release within a few months – I'm going to try out "7 Session RL" as a devel method, trying to finish something within seven coding sessions, but allowing for breaks in between.
(I have no blog, and I must rant. Might as well instead of working today, as I have to pop by the embassy to cast a vote for the Norwegian Communist Party (farting in the wind, it seems, the Conservatives are ganging up with the racist neo-con party FRP to take over parliament this fall) before attending a children's birthday party in the afternoon.)
As always,
Minotauros
