Hello

Giving this small post to let people know progress on Asteria Rising. This post is not an update on game mechanics, but those have been worked on. A test of the combat system was done 27 February 2018. The test revealed an issue with the combat, which has been fixed.

The game has also expanded character creation to have visual examples. Each subsection in character creation gives the basic information one needs on how to make a character, followed by detailed tasks with examples.

My plan has been to employ software documentation techniques, like those seen in instruction manuals for computer software. The character creation has been tested by one person, and the tasks worked very well. The only issue the person had was not knowing how valuable the skills they were rolling for were; thus, they were not sure what skills should be prioritized.

I am in a game designer group on Facebook. I plan to release the character creation information to them with a form to fill out. This will give me much needed data on the character creation section. I want character creation to be easy on users because it will be the first thing players encounter with the game. If the character creation is difficult, people will not want to give the game a chance.

My desire, is for the next true update on Asteria Rising to state the data I collect on my character creation section. That is all I have for the blog for now; I'm rather busy with school and continual revisions of Asteria Rising.

Thanks for reading.

Was Bored

Was bored yesterday and did some doodles for a joke anime/webcomic idea me and a friend had. The joke was simply that she would be the heroine, but win through dumb luck with a shield called Plot (Plot Armor). I would have a character based off me as a bumbling villain.

All the drawings were done in pen, no construction lines. It was mainly practice for human figures; I need more practice. Still, the general concepts are there. Lo is the savior of Writeland, a pun of how we both are Technical Writers. Her shield Plot is made to look like an art palette, and her spear to look like a paint brush. I image she has meta powers, like painting new things onto the comic page.

Our savior's best friend would be based off her real life best friend. Mo's inspiration loves playing elven mages, especially in Dragon Age Inquisition. She would always be around to help Lo, but would act as a good emotional rock and friend when around. Mo is probably a part of some Mage Guild or other organization.

Using the nick name my buddy gives me, the villain would be G. The Dark Lord would actually just be doing it as an internship that got out of hand quick. The outfit is made to be someone in a business suit with some armor pieces placed on top of it. The power of the Dark Lord would also be meta, rolling dice to alter events. Essentially, the power of randomness.

The pizza clan is a joke because both are based off people with almost a decade of experience in pizza chains. Quen is based off my buddy's husband, bug burly gentle giant. Mat-kun's inspiration is an anime enthusiast. His ninja character probably talks about nerdy things with Mo when they meet.

Nate is based off a boyfriend Mo's inspiration has. His inspiration knows a fair bit about computers, so I made him have electric base powers. Nate and Mo would both be in the Mage Guild, but Nate is more hermit like and wouldn't show up much.

That's the silliness I've gotten up to. Next post should be an updates on Asteria Rising. I've started working on it more.

Asteria Rising: Update 10

Asteria Rising has work being done on it again. I ran it by my local game designer group, Little Rock Game Designers (L.R.G.D.). The main issue I found was people thinking the game needed to either incentivize the narrative elements of the game, alter the wording of the attributes, or completely remove them.

Attributes

The attributes are leftovers from when Asteria Rising was a science-fiction homebrew [custom] setting for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). As rules changed over time, so did the amount and importance of these attributes. At the last biweekly game design meeting (07 February 2018), I was given suggestions on my game. The people suggesting could only judge based off what I explained and the character sheet for Asteria Rising.

Person	Suggestion
B	Remove attributes
R	Incentivize using narrative
J	Use different attributes

To make people focus more on creating fun narratives and less on numbers for combat, power players/ murder hobo antics in D&D, the attributes were focused on. The person who suggested to remove the attributes entirely [B.] had been playing D&D since he was a child. He disliked the attribute system because he had seen all problems with people playing the table-top-game purely for numbers start with the attributes.

R. simply believed the narrative aspects of the game should be incentivized some how. Either by moving the attributes to another portion of the character sheet, making them less prominent, or to increase the incentive to focus on narrative based games for the Game Master (G.M.).

Character Sheet 1 for Asteria Rising v0.15

Now, J. thought it might be better to change what the attributes are. Nothing specific, but to simply offer something new for players to work with. Say strength, constitution, and dexterity were combined into a single attribute, Body; something related to a character's mental abilities, Psyche; so on.

Moving forward I want to try removing attributes. The reason for this is that none of the skills, even those for combat, are tied to attributes. Within the current version [0.15] of Asteria Rising the attributes have little use. Constitution lost its usefulness once poison resistance, fatigue resistance, and disease resistance were placed into combat skills. Strength mainly affects carrying capacity, which could be a passive based on class instead. Dexterity is used for avoiding attacks, yet something else could take its place.

Removing these attributes will require me reworking both the classes and equipment sections of the Asteria Rising document. I'll save the current version [0.15] incase I need to revert back to using attributes. I'm hoping that their removal will simplify the game further, without taking away from its depth. Once I've made progress on this I'll post again.

Have a great week.

Apus: Global Game Jam 2018

Over the course of 48 hours, I worked on a team to create a digital game [Apus] for Micro Soft Windows. The game was created in the Unity software. There were three artists on the team: Jzak, lmsnow, and me. I also did sound for the game. Our coder was marchov, who had experience in C++ but not Unity. Erica Roy was an initial team member and contributed to the game idea, but was ill and had to leave the event.

Here are more specifics on the art. Jzak made icons, found the sun image, and space background. lmsnow made two asteroids, two planets, and  the title screen. I made the initial form of the figure of Apus (our title screen character), two planets, two asteroids, the browser icon, and the win screen.

Left: lmsnow's title screen. Right: The initial character I made.

Our most difficult thing to figure out was how to incorporate sound into the Unity engine, and tie it to a system of triggers. The music could easily be made by placing a single Audio Source gameobject in Unity, and attaching an audio clip to it. We had to type in the code itself to allow an array of audio clips to be attached to the Audio Source.

Beyond placing the title screen audio, most of my sound work involved watching videos of coding sound in Unity and combing through free audio clips online. Originally I had played on my Viola and made random sounds in the event space for the game. Eventually though I wasn't sleep deprived and thought to look for free audio clips online. From personal experience, I suggest using FreeSound.org.

How to Play screen

The game itself is simple, when planets charge up, send asteroids from them to another planet in need of that element. For instance, a planet that is too cold needs fire. There are also randomized events, such as a plague occurring on a life planet. We tested the game by playing it with various difficulties by changing the speed planets charged and the speed War and Plague events happened.

Spreading Life around the solar system.

Oh no, with technology war broke out.

I stopped the war with cold, but not the ice planet has plague.

Download the executable and play. Try to figure out all the ways you can save planets and win the game.

Global Game Jam 2018

Global Game Jam is an event to bring talented individuals within a community together to create a game based on an announced theme within 48 hours. I'm making this post while on a break, yet I've joined a team attempting to incorporate the theme [Transmission] into changing the states of planets in a solar system.

I'll post what the team managed to complete at the end of the jam. For now, here are some art assets I've made. For more information on the Global Game Jam, visit their website.

 
 

Making a Spellbook part 2

The first thing I did was begin writing on one of the back pages. That was a mistakes as I soon found out that it's much harder to clean up graphite lines on the lokta plant pages. The upper layer of fibers are scrapped away by the act of erasing, meaning clean ink lines aren't possible. With a 2H pencil it does not require much erasing, yet the lines will look poor anyway.

First drawing attempt in the book.

I rifled through the trash and found a piece of lokta paper that came with the journal. I took out several of my writing utensils and began scribbling marks on it. I found that a basic sharpie bled through too much. A sharpie pen however did not. My graphite pencils wrote, but shading looked blotchy from the paper's fibers. The same effect was caused by charcoal. Water bled through the paper easily, so water based painting would not work well. My V5 ink pen seemed to mark the best.
A break from art was needed, so I began to free write ideas for the page content. If erasing was so difficult, I would be using pens to turn the journal into a spellbook. Some sense of forethought and planning was needed. First I asked a Facebook D&D 5E community if they had any experiences or suggestions on making spellbooks. While waiting on response, I used Microsoft Word to write down a general outline and slowly filled in some basic content.

Testing calligraphy.

The person is just getting into D&D, so a book to narrow down early level spells could also have a practical use for them. The journal had about 92 pages but D&D had almost 79 (much larger) pages of spells. I decided it would be a beginner's spell book, and burrow cantrips and first level spells from the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Player's Hand Book. To help narrow the information down, I found a website called D&D-Spells.

Left: Concept Sketches Right: Practice page.

I used their best friend (they've had since middle school) as my insider to figure out what the recipient would like. My friend likes to make jokes, so they will most likely comment on the "wiki-how" type diagrams in the spells first. I still took the time to give a healthy amount of lore to tie in to both D&D and our real world, to keep the book versatile.

A magic language I invented.

 Part of the work came with creating a magic language to give a unique feel. I asked questions on a Facebook D&D community and go good answers. I had already made for a forum game a unique phonetic group, and decided to use that as the base. The phonetics were made with a mixture of Pictish, Ogham, Asomtavruli, and Attican Greek symbols as references. The alphabet was based off Welsh, yet random sounds like rh and ar were left out to keep it unique.

The numbers were made up specifically for this spellbook gift. I played with a few ideas, but settled on each number up to 5, having an equal number of lines in their symbol. Once I reached 5, the symbols were too cluttered, so I flipped 2 to make it 6 and continued the process from there. I used a dot for zero because unlike the whole numbers in the sequence, it has no line. One cannot draw zero lines. The grammatical structure was initially meant to be like Basque, for it is the most unique make ups of the European languages. I only kept the articles being suffixes for the sentence subject; I made up rules for everything else.

I slowly pieced together information after the fact, not the most efficient manner to be honest, on what lore could support this magical language existing. I got lucky, when I saw that many the language mixed came into contact on Anatolia. The Celtic (pictich/ ogham) borrowings could have come from Galatia, the Asomtavruli possibly from Armenia or Georgia, and the Greek style from anywhere. They weren't perfect copies, so it could simply have been mixed before or over time. For the weird grammar, I found that one of the groups that could have used this fictitious language [the Lukka] were part of the mysterious Sea People.

A spell page for Fire Mote.

To finalize the language for later spell names, I put what I want their name in English was into two translators: Google Translate's Finnish, and FreeLang's Nahuatl translator. I would get as close to a translate as possible, then mix the words, and match the phonetics with the alphabet I created. For spells I would then type into my search engine various words for their International Phonetic Alphabet, so my friend would know how to pronounce the crazy word I made up.

I only used the cantrips, due to a lack of pages, but each of the 27 level 0 spells in the Dungeons and Dragons Player's Hand Book, averaged at two pages within the journal. The reason is because they had a definition, some flavor text, and elaborated with diagrams on the spell components: verbal, somatic, material.

Lore pages on the power of magic words.

21/71 of the pages were my made up lore. The majority of it expanded on the Player's Hand Book about where magic comes from and how it is manipulated. I kept the idea of the Weave of magic, and even measuring spell durations in terms of rounds to help give synergy between spell flavor text and game mechanics. Each spell has considerable thought put in. As an example, somatic components for Conjuration spells require hand gestures, Evocation more powerful full body movements, and Abjuration simple sigil tracing in the air.

It has been a worthwhile project for me to undertake. The book has a unique feel in terms of content and material. I also spent a large amount of time creating it and am anxious to see their reaction. Remember, this whole ordeal started when they joked I should get them a spell book for their birthday.

They'll appreciate this.

Making a Spellbook

I'm going to start working on a special present for a friend. They joked that I should give them a spell book for their birthday. By January 22, 2017 I want to have a book full of spells and other such things in it. The journal itself was bought at Barnes and Noble for 10 USD. The books is apparently handcrafted in Nepal and made of lokta plant, with a hemp cover. I got it because the pages have a unique look and feel to them, which will help give the aged tome effect. I'm still working out how best to format the book, but I will give an update on my progress next week.