[IF-RPG] Design Diary

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I'm working on a new Interactive Fiction project, which is going to be far larger than The Baron and Fate. It is, of course, going to be an ambitious literary project about violence, redemption and hope--but it is also going to feature RPG-style tactical combat. Why? Well, because tactical combat is fun, or at least can be fun if done right, and because the standard game-aspect of interactive fiction, puzzles, is just not my thing.

Okay. Now what I'm going to do is start a design blog, right here, because this thing is just too big for me to keep motivated unless I can show off what I'm doing to a couple of people now and then.

By the way, this is not just a game idea: the source code is already 45000+ words (bigger than Fate), and a working combat system is in place (though I'm sure it still requires substantial changes).

Oh, and it currently has no name. I used to call it Idols of War, but that was several iterations of the game idea ago, and it no longer fits the project. I've also thought about This Comedy's Inferno, but that's too self-conscious. So I'll just call it IF-RPG for now.

Comments

  1. George10 March 2008 at 22:55

    Good luck Victor, it's good to see this journal alive again.

    I quite liked the original title by the way, I take it the setting has changed?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Victor Gijsbers10 March 2008 at 23:34

    Originally, when I conceived of the game as a straightforward series of fights, Idols of War had a triple meaning:

    1. There are four Gods of War, whom one could refer to as Idols (since they are hardly the one true God).
    2. You actually find physical idols, that is, images of these gods, during the game. These idols allow you to learn skills.
    3. It would turn out at the end of the game that the whole frame story--you attempting to revenge yourself on some kind of evil guy--was actively set up by the Gods as a kind of television show in which they would choose a new 'Lord Death'; in other words, the war-version of that very bad television program Idols.

    But since the third element dropped out as the story grew into something else (and much more interesting), I felt that the name became less appropriate.

    But hey, I might return to it.

    ReplyDelete

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