Ironwood Omnimedia

…but that is what happened. There was a serious hiccup in skill selection when it came to selecting racial skill affinities for your character. It seems simple enough: you have skill affinities for a race, therefore you automatically get that skill at that level. Everything worked fine except for my dwarf. My dwarf has a skill called Craft (Type). The character maker allows you to use these skills by filling in the text for (Type), replacing it. This function was the cause of a seemingly infinite amount of problems. I will spare you the details of the fix (which finally occurred today) and ramble about some new things that have been happening. Some are about development, one is not.

Aside from fixing the skill selections I finally went ahead and created some methods for saving and loading a character, and defining between creation of a PC or NPC. I am also creating an options panel. One option: cheating. Basically an NPC can be created with breaking the rules. By default, creating a PC is the same way with some notes telling you where you are cheating and how to fix it. For instance, if you choose to spend more points on attribute creation you can. However, your character sheet will tell you that you did this and how. You can disable this, and therefore negate the ability to cheat, by selecting the option to not cheat. In this way, only NPC characters can cheat.

I also started, on paper, a design for allowing the character creator to suggest items for your newly created character. The item purchase wizard in character creation opens on a “Suggested Items” tab. This tab suggests items for your character with the most expensive on top. It does not, however, determine the list of items by priority or by how much you can spend. However, as you spend items certain item tabs will turn red (or disable entirely depending on if you can cheat) when you can’t afford the items. Other tabs will be sorted based item types (Weapons, Armor, Tools, etc.).

Now, all of this fun and excitement has been marred by the frustration of the racial skill affinities. I have vented this frustration in my new video game purchase: Rainbow Six Vegas (1 &2). For crying out load this is a fantastic game. Thank God someone actually got tactical combat right. Perfect balance of strategy and fierce gun-play. Vegas 2 also has custom characters that gain exp to earn new gear. Not a full on RPG, but a great way to handle development in a shooter without allowing full time gamers to become overpowered with uber gear or skills.

I am looking forward to getting some X-Box live play on this game when I switch to gold. Btw, my gamer tag is ruelk, so feel free to send me PMs, or add me to a friends list. I will be looking for a good group to posse up with and go nuts.

BTW, send me your thoughts on a Rainbow Six RPG. Maybe Modern Sagas can do something in this direction?

Also, my gamer tag:

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Developer Blog, DPnP, My Gaming, Overall Development, Player Character Creator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.