I now have 3 somewhat fleshed out trees (at least fleshed out for a tech demo) and one token tree. SP are earned for killing monsters, and spent in the tree. Dependency information and skill point costs will show up in red on cursor over if they can not be met.
I've determined that in the short term at least, I'm going to have magecrawl use a pure skill approach, with no "character levels". As players get SP, they can level up in both new spells and abilities to improve existing ones. Right now the skill tree is filled out just for showing that it works, but in the future I expect each tree to have 30+ nodes. If you want a glass cannon, you spend points just in the elemental trees and none in the martial trees. If you want a "mystic knight" you spend half your points or more in the martial tree, earning armor and improved stats, and cherry picking the light or elemental spells you need.
Balancing everything is going to be painful in the short term, but with SP being the cost skills, I hope it is manageable. Much play testing and feedback from early players will be needed.
FogBugz says I have about seven hours of work left right now.
Assuming that keeps somewhat on schedule, I should have a tech demo out by my new-self imposed deadline of middle of next week.
5 comments:
Great stuff ! my only concern : with 5x5 graph nodes, you'll be quickly limited in the skill names. Otoh, this constraint might force creativity..
Also i'll have a look at fogbugz. I need something to replace my bedridden flyspray...
FogBugz is great. The only major problem is that it's not free for projects that have > 2 people working in the database. For me right now that hasn't been a problem. More people can create issues however.
I'm going to contact them to see if they have any "open source" licensing I can snag. I'll let you know.
Strange. From their site, I see only a 45 days trial option, no free option for <=2 projects...
ok, my bad. it was well hidden ;)
http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/StudentAndStartup.html
Jice left two comments about having trouble finding the student and startup option and then finding it for fogbugz.
I talked to the people at fogbugz and the short of it is that they'd like to have licenses available for open source projects, but they aren't ready to yet. It was something they were looking into, and the guy would get back to me in 4 months time.
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