So, after spending a good 4 hours trying to make Game maker work (It has worked before, but all the exe’s it compiles…don’t run on Windows 7), I decided to quit.  But soon, I couldn’t stand doing nothing, so instead of doing a graphical game…mine is all text based.  It was very late by then, so I decided that some sleep would be good for me.  While laying in bed, I decided how the game would work.

First of all, every character (even yours) has a different personality that is randomly decided by the game.  (If I need to, I can manually add a personality), and every character in the game responds differently according to his major personality traits, and how well he knows you.  Yep…giant project right there.

Secondly, you have no control over what your character/party does besides how he levels up/what he does when.  For example, lets say you wake him up at 9, and then you pick one activity.  You could have him eat/get ready.  That takes us to 10.  At 10, you send him off to go exploring.  Now you can watch him explore, see what he finds (everything he finds adds exploration points), watch him fight (you can’t tell him how to fight), and at some point along the way, you can tell him to head back to camp.  Lets say he gets back at 5.   I tried to make the game…as strategical as possible while being minimalistic.  I decided to be minimalistic because: it is easier for me AND you don’t have to type “go east” over and over.

Now about leveling up.  Every character has a list of abilities, and he actually levels up those abilities by using them…not by you pressing the + button.  However, you can take items away (preventing him from using certain abilities), and at every level, teach him a new ability.  That’s it.

Now what I have done:  (I have 9ish more hours to code/debug)

Creation and development of my idea/flowchart

Character personalities/creation.  (A giant project)  I still need to do the NPC text/tests to see if they join/give missions

Coding of the reader (grabs names and stats of areas/locations/items/monsters)

Now what I have to do:

Name every area/location within that area/items within that location/monsters within that location, and each of them stats.  (all will be stored in text files)

Code the general engine for time/telling what the character to do (shouldn’t be too hard)

Code the engine for what the character/party decides to do.

Debug

Release it to the website

…Like I said.  I’m going to die 😛