Unblocking the Drain

I'm not sure what to do.

I mean, I know I still have to find the time to play and review LambdaRogue, but in terms of my own project.

It's probably a bit like completing a story, or concluding a screenplay, but the 'easy' thing about those is that you can be enigmatic with the ending and be satisfied that you have wrapped things up okay. I actually LIKE stories that leave you hurtling down a path and catapult you off the end, leaving the reader to decide what happens after the conclusion. Perhaps those Raptor eggs are infertile because Richard Attenborough had the foresight to genetically engineer it to be the case, and we don't subsequently need to worry about them getting out in to the wild five years from now. More likely, we fear the worst, and the little tikes have actually started breeding in order to put tourists in mild peril before eating them.

Whatever, we don't need to be explicit, we just need to set up the prior part of the story so that the consumer of the piece is left sufficiently interested to care in the slightest about what happens after the end.

But in a game with an open sort of narrative typical of many roguelikes, every decision needs to lead to interesting, meaningful moments within the context of the game mechanics. A decision the player makes can't lead meaninglessly to a point outside the narrative of the game, it should be interactive - and it should feed back.

100 Heroes is a bunch of dice rolls at the minute, with limited interlinked mechanics that gives the impression that certain things are happening because the Heroes want them to. They take up contracts because they have a sense of adventure, they buy a scroll because they have a lust for arcane knowledge. None of this is true, they just happen to do things because I designed a little system that comes up with random occurrences of similar events at the sorts of frequencies which nearly look convincing, at a sort of balance that approximately works to produce a mildly fun game.

But this isn't the game I set out to make, and it isn't where I want to leave it. So I have to make things a little bit more complicated to give the Heroes a set of needs, wants, traits and personalities that lead to real motivations. And the player needs to be able to witness these things happening and intervene with their retail know-how to sate those needs. Outside this the player needs to build reputations, both individually and throughout the game world, so that a first-time-visiting Hero who knows nothing about the shops in the town (apart from their own Guild-house) should be able to make value judgements on each establishment to decide what they should do, once they evaluate their position in the world.

They SHOULD lust for arcane knowledge, and some of them should have a wild streak that means they take contracts without knowing whether they are capable of meeting the terms of a contract. A conniving summoner who takes money down on a contract and leaves town, after stealing the scrolls from the player's shop amongst the commotion of reading out loud a 'Summon Imp' scroll that he has just bought from the same shop.

And of course the player should be able to recoup their losses by taking out a contract on that Hero, at a significant cost to the relationship with all Summoners, one presumes. Lawful, chaotic, good and evil. And all meaning something in the behaviour that they engage the player with.

I can't easily rationalise how to integrate all this in to working game mechanics. I know it is achievable within (or just outside) the bounds of my current knowledge of the Libtcod library and Python, and if not, I am sure that I can find the gaps in my knowledge via various reputable search engines.

I just don't have the confidence to start doing it.

I just don't know whether the paths I choose to go down will be ones that lead to any greater sense of implied narrative, complexity or realism beyond the silly little dice-roll functions that are already there.

So my hope is, by furtling around under the grate - nudging a few loose bits of information this way and that, perhaps bringing to order some of those grandiose, stringy thoughts that have got intertwined together at the trap disallowing the bilge to exit the sink, we can finally get this drain unblocked and move on with this thing.