Feature Update (0.1.10)

This week, a lot of interesting work and discussion has been had in the community surrounding our attributes & skills system. We also made notable progress in the attributes & skills system!

Rolls

In most games there is always a way to get some randomness into the outcome of different actions. Be it when a character attempts to use a skill, or simply to determine the weather in that day.

We spent some time this week making a roll system, which allows us to input a roll such as 3d6, 4d6, 4d20, 2d100, or any common combination used in tabletop games, and executes the roll.

We also have a different roll type which is for actions, which will return other conditions such as critical success or failure, normal success or failure, etcetera. This more nuanced system also allows one to do difficulty for various actions.

With the whole team, we spent an evening testing the results a hundred by a hundred and were happy with the spread and outcomes; this is quite critical, since this roll system is going to be used in virtually every system that depends on character skills, attributes or randomness (in a text-based game, it's a lot).

Attributes

We have implemented basic attributes. This list is in no way final, but for now these are the ones we have (and the score / stats / profile command):

Staff is also able to set this dynamically, which will be useful in the case of critical bugs or when setting NPCs. This also has guard-rails to make sure the values don't go over or under. Here is an example.

Skills

This weekend we also started the implementation of skills. Skills start, by default, controlled by an attribute. For instance, mining depends on dexterity (starts at dexterity -4). This represents the 'default' knowledge someone would have at it.

Here is an screenshot of the full stats sheet as shown above, but now with skills:

What's Next?

We're starting our work into our first skill, mining. This is a very exciting moment in the development of Untold Dawn, and we have many exciting things in the works in this regard.

As you might be able to guess, based on the last few blog posts, this will likely be tied to the economy and making credits – but we have a lot of surprises in the works in that regard.

We had briefly considered starting from the get-go with origin stories, but ended deciding it required more time of discussion – while mining gives us a lot to stay busy.

If you enjoy our vision and progress and would like to help us field the costs of our growing list of services, please consider becoming our Patreon. It helps us infinitely to be able to develop this project without worrying about server costs!

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Reading List

Based on a suggestion, I'm going to consider adding some useful links both for the community and personally that I have found interesting or are useful for the development of Untold Dawn or while I work on the game design on our game.

If you have not checked out the various discussions in our forums, here are some of the most notable ones:

We've been having discussion around foraging. With the work we've done this week, this might be one of the first skills that we develop in game. Come and take part in the discussion!

Foraging - What do YOU want?

I like the idea of having a limited shelf life on gathered materials. In Accursed Lands, gathered items would eventually wither away, but it only worked if you were present in the room. Meaning, storing everything in a building and only ever opening the door to drop things off or take things out gave them a near infinite timer. Some nice things about the gathering system in that game were that you could “forage” and have a chance to pull up any random forageable the tile had to offer. But, if y…

Untold DawnOracle

There's also been discussion around an idea that Rune has had for a while on progression through perma-death. Take a look at it!

Progression Through Perma-Death

Hey, thanks for your thoughts. So there’s a few things to define on this system that your post has made me think about. Obviously, one of the key requirements of such a system is that the questions or stages are able to represent in a meaningful way scenarios in a way that makes sense. What do I mean by that? If you have a question that is your birth place, and you pick nation X, and then a question about your childhood says you are an astronaut, but said nation doesn’t even have a space prog…

Untold Dawnrune

One of the favorite authors of interactive fiction of Rune, Emily Short, was on a podcast of The Game Design Round Table this January. Emily Short is one of the most famous authors of interactive fiction, which is a genre that is intrinsically tied to MUDs (they are basically single-player MUDs). She has now evolved into professional game writing, however her podcast is quite interesting.