Slight Hiccup

I've been working on finishing up the look on the spellbook and the one thing that's hit me is that I wanted to have an icon for each of the spell types. There are currently 3 types: offensive, defensive, and miscellaneous. Offensive spells damage directly to your opponent. Defensive spells reduce offensive damage from your opponent. And miscellaneous spells reduce the number of casting points available to your opponent. They're like distractions - dancing lights, quicksand, etc. - that prevent your opponent from being able to use all of their casting points. The trouble is that I'm in a bit of quandary. I was trying to come up with an icon that would represent these miscellaneous/distractive spells. Or should I just lump them in with the defensive spells? For the icon at the moment I'm using just a question mark, but it seems both lame and ineffective at communicating what they are.

In this particular case, should "Dancing Lights" be a defensive spell or should I keep searching for a separate icon? If I remove the category there are some somewhat drastic consequences that I need to address, so I think I'd ideally like to find a way to iconify this concept.

Any thoughts?

Making Progress

Well, it's been a pretty good couple of days. Pretty productive, actually. Here's what's been going on with development.

With Trivia, I've been getting the view flow working the way I want, which has been great. I've been adding in some functionality as I go just to make sure that it works properly and it has been. Like I said before, this is a big "Yay" moment as I have been making good progress. All I can say is that I'm pretty stoked as I get moving with this stuff. It's been a long time coming, but as all developers can tell you, when you finally get something working and things start clicking it's hard to stop. :)

As for Samantha, I've been making some good progress on the game systems. I'm working on combat right now and trying to figure out how much some of the actions cost - it's been interesting seeing how tweaking elements change the dynamics. For instance, I increased the damage caused by an action by one point of damage and it completely altered how combat worked. I've been able to make some good progress on it, but there's a lot more to do still. I think I'm going to be able to start finalizing the systems in the next week and then start coding it up.

I think given the progress that I'm making on trivia, though, that I'll try to finish the coding for that by the end of next week and then it's just TONS and TONS and TONS of data entry trying to get the trivia questions in the database. I also need to make two versions of the game. One thing that I've seen again and again in the blogs I'm reading is that having a trial/lite version of the game, especially if it's free, really does a lot for sales. Owen at Streaming Colour is seeing about 2-3% conversion rate on lite-to-full version, which is just amazing (many companies are happy with 0.1% or 1/30th of what he's seeing). He has put his game on sale (it originally went for $4.99 and now it's being priced at $2.99). I think the $4.99 price was a mistake and the $2.99 price is a good price point. He's got a good game, but $4.99 was a bit of a put-off.

For Trivia, I'm thinking of pricing it at around $1.99 for the full version (lite will obviously be free). The lite version will also be locked so that it only asks for Kids questions (as opposed to the full version which will offer 7 more categories and a Miscellaneous category). I'm hoping that $1.99 is going to be competitive with other games in the market (when last I looked it was). I'm also hoping that the model I'm using where the questions are served from a central database will make it more interesting for people as the number of questions can be expanded. That, plus the online leader board that I'm going to do will separate it from several of the other offerings out there. So long as I can make the quality of the questions better, that may help differentiate. It's definitely not what I'm looking at for a huge cash cow long-term - it's a good way of getting Otto Von's name out there and generating some buzz for the other games (I hope). :)

We're supposed to get a major snow storm tonight (8+ inches), so I'm probably just going to hunker down and work on stuff as much as possible. We'll see how good conditions are in the morning as to whether I go in to work, but I'm actually planning on not going in right now and if I do, I will definitely be leaving early. And Susie's still planning on coming back Friday afternoon from her business trip, so it's a busy week and weekend.

On the Apple developer program front, still nothing. I emailed them on Monday and faxed the documents again, but still no word other than "Requested documents must be received". :( I'll post up more when I hear more from them.

That's it for now. Centennial, Colorado signing off. :)

Combat Systems

Originally written 23 March 2009.

For Samantha, I have a lot of different possible ways to implement combat. I've been debating the different systems now for a while as mentioned in a previous post - casting points and mana pool. What seems to be evolving right now is a combination of the two, but with some modifications.
The first is that Susie liked the idea of keeping the casting points, but not in the same way that I had originally considered it. One idea now is that a player would have CP and whatever they didn't use in a single round would carry over to the next round. An example would be if you have 10 CP per turn and cast something that costs 6, the next turn you'll have 14. If you only use 5 of that, you'd carry over 9 to the next turn and so on. OR, it could only carry over what you don't spend up to 10 CP (in the example above only 5 would carry over to the third round). That's a lot more convoluted, though. It's certainly possible that if you're not casting a lot that you could really leave yourself open to some major damage (which would still deduct from your MP), but you might have a LOT of CP to cast some pretty major spells. I need to ruminate on it further to decide what to do.
I'm still pretty enamored of the idea of your MP being both your energy reserve and your health. I think it really adds something to the game. So I don't think that will change. As for how much MP someone has and how much the coven's MP comes into play remain to be seen. The CP concept just limits the number of things that can be done in a turn (as opposed to just arbitrarily limiting it to 1 or something). It also figures into the Affinities concept.
In the game there are going to be 5 different affinities - Fire, Water, Earth, Air, and Void. Each of them is represented by an arm or segment of a pentacle/pentagrams. Upon each arm is a gemstone holder. As players advance in levels, they can choose to improve their affinity with a particular element. For each gemstone (and the levels get progressively further apart), the casting point cost of a spell is reduced (to a minimum of 1). An example of this would be the following. Say a spell normally costs 5 CP to cast. If you have 3 gemstones of affinity in the spell's element, the cost would be reduced to 2 CP. If you gained two more gemstones of affinity, the cost would be 1 and stay there indefinitely.
One final thing about combat is that players can use items during combat. It will cost some number of CP to use an item, but some of the artifacts are things like mana gems that will restore some or all of your MP. That could be a huge boost in a long battle. Plus, those are likely to be for sale in groups of 10 or something through the App Store.
I'm still working through some of the logistics of the whole CP/MP thing, but I think I'm starting to come to some decisions on the systems and will be able to document the whole thing in the not-too-distant future. At least, that's what I hope. :)