Underworld

I got a new job, so I was overwhelmed by tidal wave of new information.

Plus, of course, I was working on Fallen. 

Gameplay:

I have to find out what to do with vast and empty plains, forests and peaceful looking plains. 

Game start has moved to the catacombs.  At first, I thought to make surface rather safe place and catacombs was planned to be zones of immense danger.

It turns out to be great handicap and gave a lot of game play troubles.

For example, we have open list of game creatures and no idea, which would populate these valleys and how we can implement postapocaliptic plot..

Alas then.

Surface is the most dangerous place over all fallen now, condemned by Wild Mana blight, rogue automatons and necromutants.

I have written the draft of the game world main plot story. Yeah, we had the concept, but didn’t have a plot story, that’s embarrassing.

Now we have full view of starting location, gameplay, items and creatures.

I wouldn’t bother you with this draft. IT needs proofreading and polishing, but the main idea:

After the wild mana catastrophe, humanity fled into huge underground natural catacombs.

The only real chance for low classed person to have a better live at the Deep Heaven is get reaches and fame at Upper frontier and ‘no man’s layers’.

You start at the new frontier, series of big catacombs, which works as borderland between humanity and chaos of the surface and also used as hunting ground for valuable artifacts, that can’t be produced nowadays.

You would have two big layers to investigate and goal to collect required amount of valuable artifacts.

The most important, we have formed list of all creatures we have to add to the first release and their abilities.

Technical:

It is odd, but I discovered that naming notation issue was the biggest troublemaker during the development of the skill a skill tables.

For some strange reason, I didn’t used ‘units’ naming notation I set, when wrote ‘Fallen development paradigm’.

I pulled my leg for all that time. I managed to fix ALL skill table issues in an hour or two, after I have changed names of units and couple of classes. Surprise!

Right, it was bothering me for a couple of months!

Don’t cheat your notation ^_^, it was made to keep you out of troubles.

Minimap is on the row.

Also, I got really interesting situations. Random generator places groups of creatures around the world in a special manner, which allowed these groups to contact each other (read fight, for most of them) from time to time. It looks surprisingly cool! So, I decided to expand this system. Right, I planned something like this before, but it was rather tricky and ‘heavy’ algorithms. Expanding this system would give lot of nice game experience with a little effort. Sounds like a good deal.