Forgotten Lore

It’s become apparent to me that I will not be able to release The Occult Chronicles in June like I had hoped.  At the time it seemed like a reasonable goal but it seems that I have traded AI Hell for Data Entry Hell and I’m not sure at this point which is worse.  Making games is tough work.  Making games by yourself and not having henchmen to order around to do the myriad of menial tasks that are entailed in putting a game together sometimes seems impossible.   So in order to give myself some peace of mind and more importantly the time to really polish this thing off, I’m going to pin my new  semi official release date onto the 31st of October, 2012.  It’s a strategy horror survival adventure rogue like game so that seems like a fitting choice and it will hopefully motivate me to get to the finish line.

Right now I am slogging my way through testing out all the actions that the various weapons, heroic feats, spells and psychic talents offer to manipulate the tarot card game.  It’s so boring but so necessary.  I’ve returned to the main foyer with a generic “encounter” that I can run to test out the different actions.  The screen shot below shows how the game is looking at this point.  The icon for your O.D.D. agent is a place holder from Solium Infernum of course.  (Can’t seem to get word press to not distort these so click on them to enlarge if you are interested)

Here is a screenshot of the Tarot Card game that you play when you resolve an encounter.  Lot’s to explain there but I’ll leave that for a later date.  Coffee break is over.  Time to get back on my head.

I haven’t had any more bug reports from players using 1.08c Beta for a while so I’m going to put this out there with all the fixes and call it released.

Download the Update 1.08c  here

Instructions:

Download the .zip file and then overwrite 3 files and the GameData folder in the Program Files\Cryptic Comet\Solium Infernum folder.  Make sure you overwrite the GameData folder and its files.  You might need to delete the folder and then unzip the new one there to ensure that they are replaced.

IMPORTANT: It seems that windows 7 often creates another install location in AppData.  If you are copying over the 3 files and the GameData folder to the Program Files location but the version on the game is still not going to 1.08c then you will need to update the files and folder in the AppData location.  The easiest way to find this is to do a search for MainIFace.cxt and note the AppData location if it is returned.

I just saw this Kickstarter drive for Match & Magic and wanted to point it out to anybody who donates on the Kickstarter scene.  I had originally heard about this from from a post on Dubious Quality a while back and had wondered how it was progressing.  I’m a huge fan of Puzzle Quest myself.  It was definitely an inspiration for the design of my latest game.  I decided to transform the gem matching into a card matching (trick taking) mechanic built around tarot cards but the fundamental concept behind all these implementations is the same:  set up a rule set and allow the player to find ways to manipulate them by identifying certain patterns that are displayed on the board and how they can interact with your off board abilities. Enough design gibberish though.  Check out the drive and the video.  Man I wish my office was that clean.  I might be able to finish my game faster.

Download the Update 1.08c Beta here

I’ve put together a new update that fixes a host of bugs that went unnoticed in the Rectification expansion content as well as some that have hung around since the original release.   Some of the fixes required really mucking around in the code so I am going to release the update as a Beta and would ask any willing players (especially email game groups) to give this a try and let me know if any problems pop up.  I’m pretty confident that there will not be any major issues but I’d like to test it out as a beta first before I make it official.  Over 20 fixes….Some of the major fixes included:

Fixed Hellsculpt ritual

Fixed Curse of Diabolism ritual where an order to “seek out curiosities”  did not count as a tribute request NOTE:  Still having reports that some requests for tribute are not generating prestige loss when a player is cursed.  If anybody thinks they have an example of this please send me a save game file or pbem folder from the turn when this happens (before the tribute request order is executed)

Fixed the Angelic Host taking the lava terrain bonus instead of the defending player legion

Fixed problems with events cancelling Vendettas not clearing out pending Demands as well

Fixed AI problems with the manage resources goal objects that caused the AI to over pay tribute for some rituals

Fixed AI crash with Assertion of Weakness goal object

Instructions:

Download the .zip file and then overwrite 3 files and the GameData folder in the Program Files\Cryptic Comet\Solium Infernum folder.  Make sure you overwrite the GameData folder and its files.  You might need to delete the folder and then unzip the new one there to ensure that they are replaced.

IMPORTANT: Windows often creates another install location in AppData.  If you are copying over the 3 files and the GameData folder to the Program Files location but the version on the game is still not going to 1.08b then you will need to update the files and folder in the AppData location.  The easiest way to find this is to do a search for MainIFace.cxt and note the AppData location if it is returned.

The Occult Chronicles is a thinking man’s rogue like….. a “strategy rogue like” is the term being bandied about.  It’s focus is on the random generation of a large explorable game space. This means not only the map but all the things that can interact with it and each other.  I’ve pushed my art budget to the limit to pump up the item count in the game and also pushed my mind to come up with ways to get the elements to combine in unique and hopefully emergent ways.  150+ unique encounters, 60+ unique items, 40 spells, heroic actions and psychic abilities, 40+ edges (passive abilities), 22 Major Arcana, and over 100 unique room, basement, cave and dungeon-like tiles.  The game is huge.  And the fun is in each play through finding cool things and figuring out how they can help you to accomplish the specific mission that you are on.

The archives are a sorely missed part of my previous games that will serve to document in a meager way each unique story that is played out through the combination of all those previously listed elements. So after you have collected a lot of this “stuff” and with tense trepidation walked the many creaky corridors and pushed open a bunch of squeaky doors, and either emerged  alive with your mission accomplished or lie decomposing propped up against a moldy wall after having bled out, it will be fun to go back and see how far you got by examining your agent and all the things that he/she collected along the way.  I’ve also implemented an “achievement” system where medals are handed out based on your performance and the difficulty level that you chose at the beginning of the game.  I’m shying away at this point from adding a numerical score because of the many problems with getting the number to really match the quality of play for all the different styles that I’d like the game to accommodate.  If you sneak around and cleverly avoid some encounters that might have yielded large score points it’s difficult to adjust for that.  Right now I think the medal system will be enough to quantify how well you played the game.  Here is a rough mock up of what the Agent Archives will look like.

This is just a quick update on the status of my next game The Occult Chronicles.  Things are moving along well.  Not as fast as I would like but the ball is being advanced.  I had to go back and redesign some of the game systems because of an idea that struck me while I was doing design work for a more classic 2 player turn based strategy game for down the road.  I like to take breaks from the drudgery of doing UI work or data entry and work on designs in my notebooks.  I was playing around with dice this time and it struck me that it might be cool to add some type of customizable dice to the game that the player would acquire and manipulate like he did other items i.e. weapons, spells, special abilities etc.

So I came up with the idea of bones.  You can collect them and use them in a lot of instances where the game wants you to determine a random outcome.  The strategy aspect comes in the way you can pick which die you want to use from your collection and how you upgrade the dice.  Right now these are mostly triggered by using items in you inventory.  Say you have a pistol and you trigger its action during a challenge, then you might need to pick a bone or two from you collection and roll them.  If you get over a certain threshold number then the pistol’s action is successful and you can proceed to use it during the challenge.  That’s the general concept.  The bones don’t have pips though in general. They have swords, cups, wands, and pentacles.  You can also bump up the values on individual faces as you upgrade them.  You might start with or find a basic die with 3 blank faces and 3 faces with 1 sword on them.  Later you might change a blank face into another sword or bump a face up to 2 swords.  You can also upgrade the die by changing it from a d4 to a d6 (which means the max face value can now be 6). You will need to build your dice pool up to synergize with your character’s abilities and items.  Here are some of the dice you might come across in the game.  You can click on them in your inventory to see the layout of their face values.

OK.  I think I have solved this.  Some machines were not installing all of the files in the GameData folder.  This is the folder that has all the text files that contain all the “Game Data” naturally.  Certain key expansion files were being omitted.  I’ve remade the installer and uploaded it to BMT Micro and it looks like everything is working fine now.  If you are having a problem you can redownload the installer, uninstall the game and then reinstall it with the new installer.  OR you can go and grab the latest update zip and use it.  Go to the installation location i.e. Program Files\Cryptic Comet\Solium Infernum and delete the old GameData folder and then use the update to copy the new GameData folder to that location.   Please contact me if you are still having problems.

Download the Update 1.08b here

I’ve recently had a few people contact me with problems getting the SI: Rectification content to run with Windows 7.  I’d like to figure out what is going on here for my own piece of mind.  If you have experienced a problem starting a new game with the Rectification content box checked then could you send me an email (support@crypticcomet.com).  My hunch is that the new data text files are the culprit but one of the cases so far was on a machine with a fresh install.

Thanks,

Vic

This is an update that fixes some problems introduced in 1.08a.

Download the Update 1.08b here

Important Fixes:

Overhaul of the event timing system so that some events that were being shortchanged a turn got their full length of duration.

Fixed rare AI bugs dealing with special goals for Assertion of Weakness defense

Fixed AI bug where strategy pool for determining AI actions was not weighting all the “Bully Neighbor” goals appropriately

Fixed bug that sometimes prevented artifacts scavenged from the battlefield from appearing in players vault

Fixed problem with final prestige totals not being displayed above players at the end of the game

Instructions:

Download the .zip file and then overwrite 3 files and the GameData folder in the Program Files\Cryptic Comet\Solium Infernum folder.  Make sure you overwrite the GameData folder and its files.  You might need to delete the folder and then unzip the new one there to ensure that they are replaced.

IMPORTANT: It seems that windows 7 often creates another install location in AppData.  If you are copying over the 3 files and the GameData folder to the Program Files location but the version on the game is still not going to 1.08b then you will need to update the files and folder in the AppData location.  The easiest way to find this is to do a search for MainIFace.cxt and note the AppData location if it is returned.

There are a lot of things that give rogue likes their special character…turn based structure, random maps and loot, options galore in play styles, permadeath, etc.  and one of those key design aspects is how you create and develop your character.  The character that you “play” gives rogue likes an ancestral tether to the CRPG genre.  The idea that you have stats, skills, hit points etc. that define your ability to interact with the game environment comes directly from the CRPG lineage.  I’m not a video game historian so maybe my idea about rogue likes place on the family tree is a bit off…and I don’t want to get into a philosophical debate about any of this because I’m honestly not well informed enough to start discussing the history and development of rogue likes.  I’m a fan and not an expert.  I’m also pretty sure that this is the type of fertile ground in which sophists would thrive.  How many ascii characters can dance on the head of a pin?  But what I enjoy in rogue likes is that they generally require you to have some type of strategy in mind as you develop your character.  So with that thought in mind I set about trying to create a character system to serve as the foundation of my game’s mechanics.  Switch that.  I had the games mechanics in mind when I went to try and design the way a character would work.

What’s the ideal number of stats for a character to possess?  Too many and you start to get complexity problems.  Too little and the simplicity entices boredom. You can see the debt owed to D&D and Gary Gygax in the approach taken by a lot of rogue likes.  I remembered this article by John Harris at Game Set Watch on Incursion and was really surprised to see an explanation of how Vance’s Most Excellent Prismatic Spray ended up in D & D.  I’m a Vance fiend.  I was also doing a lot of reading on the genre at places like Ascii Dreams and Temple of the Roguelike.  Basically I had a challenge resolution mechanic (CRM)  that used a Tarot deck.  The 4 suites of Swords, Wands, Cups and Pentacles offered a perfect array of stats to give the characters who would be exploring my haunted mansions.  The stats would directly affect how the characters performed in the CRM.  The natural way to break these stats down seemed to me to as follows:

The Swords attribute corresponds to physical combat of any kind i.e. guns, swords, knives, hand to hand and even explosives.

The Wands attribute corresponds to any mental challenge i.e. deciphering an arcane text, figuring out the inner workings of some ancient artifice, negotiating with a demon, etc. Psychic abilities fall into this category as well.

The Cups attribute corresponds to any physical challenges that the character’s body might need to overcome i.e. quickness in evading a trap, running away from a problem, resisting the poison coursing through his veins etc.

The Pentacles attribute corresponds to any Arcane challenges i.e. the ability to cast spells, use sorcery, channel occult energies.

The final two attributes are entirely non-original but completely necessary to the genre.  Health is kept track via points as is Sanity.  I contemplated coming up with a more elaborate system of physical and mental states but after much hand wringing opted for the more conventional approach. My main concern is that since going to zero health or sanity is a game over state for the perma-death variant (what I am calling “Reaper” mode), you really need to be clear on these stats so that the correct risk levels can be gauged by the player.  I did abandon the whole concept of fixed health and sanity though.  You can accumulate as much as you are able with no “capping” attribute determining what your max level is in either category.  I liked this because in many instances during your game you need to decide on weather you want to spend health or sanity to use an ability, item, spell etc.

Here is what the character info pad looks like in the game.  You can see the display areas for the six main attributes.  Take special note of the six orange boxes below the attributes.  This is where the character stores any Talismans that he might acquire during the game.  As you can infer from the word, the Talismans are amulets and wards that protect your player when the punishment is being dished out.  I’ll describe them in a lot more detail later but like everything else in my design they are meant to provide the player with agonizing choices at various points in the game.

I’m really at a loss at where to start in trying to describe the game that I am currently working on.  As far as development goes, I’m actually stuck in the main entry creating encounters testing out all the different ways they can unfold.  The main entry room is just a convenience because it’s where your O.D.D. agent/investigator starts the game.  So I hand edit the map with the encounter id and the part of the room that I want it to trigger and then proceed to move my character into the space and follow the rabbit down the hole.  I often end up at this point stuck somewhere with a “script error” message that many of you have encountered in my games….that’s the way Director let’s  you know something isn’t working like Davis tried to divide some number by zero !!!??!!

But let’s take a step back.  A room tile is the basic map element in the game.  I showed you a rather nondescript version a couple of weeks ago.  It’s the one I’m stuck in right now where I test out all the encounters.  But each room is divided into sub locations that are represented by small circles.  Here is a mock up of what they will look like in the game.  I don’t have the final circle art icons yet so I have just placed small white circles on the tile to give you an idea.  In the final game they will look a lot nicer and there are different symbol types to indicate whether you have explored the sub location yet or there is an encounter still there that you somehow had to leave…i.e. you fled, got knocked away, got a quest from it and need to come back etc.

So that’s the servant’s meeting room/kitchen.  You would open a door from an adjacent room and immediately be presented with the room tile and your adjacent sub locations.  If you haven’t been to the room before  you will need to enter the first sub location to reveal where you can move to next from there. The above image with all the location circles visible would only be like that if you had completely explored the room. Not all sub locations are accessible from every adjacent location. In this room you won’t be able to walk across the tables going from one of the middle locations to the one across from it for example.

So as you can see most of the stuff in this game is going to sneak up on you…or more precisely you are going to bump into it.  This is a lot different from your typical rogue-like.  You won’t ever see monster icons moving around from location to location as you “run away.”  The feel is much more like a board game.  You enter a location and draw a card, although the “Nothing of Interest” card is never shown to you.  You just keep moving instead. Let’s say you moved into the space next to the butcher’s table. If an encounter is triggered you would get a dialogue box that pops up that shows you an image of what you see and a text description.  Maybe it’s some severed fingers scattered across the table or an odd blood stained dagger lying between the cleavers.  You will also get some options that you can choose from…i.e. inspect the dagger or fingers, leave it alone, etc.  I’ll go into the whole options mechanic in much more detail later on because it’s really the heart of the game along with how you resolve the choice you make  from the presented options.  The resolution of any “challenge” as I like to call them is through a trick taking Tarot card game that I made up.  More on that later.

That’s the central idea behind exploring the game locations and encountering the “scary” things that you will need to overcome to accomplish your mission.  In addition to the fixed encounters you will also have random encounters.  Some locations have a chance of generating an encounter when you move into it.  I’ll describe that system later as well.

What does the non-tile artwork look like?  I’ve been very hesitant to display that because it feels like a spoiler for so many of them.  I have over 150 illustrations for fixed encounters and I hate to give any of them away.  I’ve gone with a comic book type look. Errrrr, I mean graphic novel look.  I’m a big B.P.R.D. and Hellboy fan so I wanted to lean in that direction a bit visually. So since  you know you will be bumping into ghosts at some point I will reveal this one without any text spoilers as to what might happen when you are walking down a corridor and turn around to see this.