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…and the theme for the new upcoming adventure seeds would be Not Really What It Seems! Sometimes things are really that straightforward, but not this time! Hopefully I can get the first few of these themed seeds up in the week.

I have tried to restrict rants, soapbox-style speeches and stuff about personal life for this blog as it is meant to have a ‘professional’ slant. Just the facts, my analysis and good old ideas generation. For those who are interested in what’s going on in the back of my mind, here’s the Struggling Games Developer – a blog detailing my up and down struggle just to make a game…some games, whatever form it may take. Hopefully that would be of interest to some of you!

Sometimes as I put out adventure hooks, I have a nagging worry that I keep going to back to explore certain themes. I do not have the time to create a custom taxomony in WordPress that would allow me to categorise those hooks, so I am trying to set themes for a week or two and go by that. So the next series of theme would be environmental-based adventures.

Those hooks would be based on different type of exotic settings, such as desert (a tried and true staple in many JCRPG), arctic icelands, jungles and the such.  Any feedbacks on any particular trends you are observing and any fantasy staple I have been lacking in would be welcomed too!

Last time I mentioned that magic is often used as a clutch to explain all sort of plot devices and the week series of daily (okay, almost daily) plot seeds have nothing to do with magic whatsoever. So for this two weeks, I am going to try the other extreme. Really smashing epic high level of magic.

Do note that when it comes to magic, the magic level could be high, but uncommon throughout the world. So we’re not talking about having every town their own resident cleric and Deckard Cain, but rather stuff like an entire city popping out from nowhere and the adventurers got to figure out how to deal with it. In fact, that would be the very first upcoming seed…

It is the most anticipated game concert event for me – Video Games Live. It started in 2005 and began to tour the various states in USA, and it was a matter of time before it came to Singapore too on 19th July 2009. Recently, for this country with the nickname of “the little red dot”, there has been a series of concerts – PLAY, one for Final Fantasy and some time back, the Eminence Ensemble performed at the Victoria Concert Hall. So how does the legendary VGL @ Singapore matches up?

Read more…

Long ago, one of my friends (I forgot who) who explicitly told me that he hates fantasy and fantasy games. Where? Magic is often used as a crutch. Magic can be used for deus ex machina, to explain strange weathers – anything! Be it gods, unspeakable horror, faerie creatures and so on, they have been used to, sometimes carelessly, just to explain everything. “A wizard did it!” “An imp ate my homework”

The line between using magic effectively or carelessly is something that I have been thinking about. On one hand, it is good to use magic to preserve the mystery of a setting and the Meta Plot, but it get tiring when it’s always evil sorcerers, unhinged druids, mentioned unspeakable horrors, infernal demons and unexplained psionic manifestations behind the scene. So for this week, the usual daily adventure hooks would have no magic as its explanation whatsoever. That also includes faerie creatures and monsters which have magical abilities.

Consistent Magic or Mysterious Mysticism?

One of the thing I have been pondering over why D&D and Dragon Warriors are different in term of magic and the supernatural is because in D&D magic is fleshed out entirely. Schools of magic, meta-magic feats, what can be done, what not and so on. It’s limiting at first, and I find all the explanations suffocating, but on thinking through it, some people do like it. Magic cannot be used carelessly. It is possible to build a challenge revolving around the schools of Magic in D&D (or just see the speculation of who actually saved V and O-chul in the latest Order of the Stick comic).

I can now understand why some people prefer magic to have rules and to be a closed system, rather than an open system where are lots of unknown. I guess it’s no a matter of “this way is better”. In Dragon Warriors, the school of Sorcery and Elementalism are not the only form of magic there is. There are faeries, not documented and not detailed, and what they can do is entirely up to the GM’s imagination. Those holes allow the GM to challenge the magic-using players.

Yet this could get annoying when the GM keeps springing up “this is a new form of ancient magic which you have never encounterd before”. I have been guility of that. So how to you retain mystery and but not carelessly? I like to think of magic, like cooking and other disciplines, have basic fundamental. Work out the fundamental of magic for your setting and let the players know, but allow for variants and differences for different cultures, different ages and so on. For example, a very good fundamental would be the classic Five Elements, or Ars Magica’s arts and forms. Using those as fundamentals, even when a magic user comes across a mysterious form of magic, he would have some clue to proceed. The clues could either grant specific formal bonuses (which you need rules for) or a bargaining chip for certain rolls (agreed between the player and the GM).

Though said, I am intrigue now by how D&D handles magic. The game is not my cup of tea, but having a ’science of magic’ defined would help to remove the accusation that GMs and fantasy authors use magic as a crutch as an explanation for everything.

Over at SDLTutorials there is a competition going on. <cue dramatic music> And the theme ingredient? R-Type, the classic side-scrolling SHUMP game. Of course, as the site’s name implies, the game has to be created with SDL. Prizes include $200, chance to moderate the forum and your own personal SDLTutorial.com email. Maybe you would also win fame and honour as well too, if you ask for an email like “iron-gamecoder”

Incidentally, the site is also great to get tutorials on…..SDL (with a side-dish of C++). Also there is something called sdl.net for those who like to work with managed code.

This has been something that I wanted to do for some time – a Wuxia conversion for Fate/SoTC. In many senses, a Wuxia game is pretty much like pulp ficition (I hope to explain why in a later article) and I think the Fate system is perfect for such a genre. I will begin writing the game one page per day and am starting a designer journal for it. Please feel free to share suggestions, gives comments and etc.

One thing for now is that I think I would put the game out on as “donation-ware” with an optional “buy if you like it”. After all, this is just my first work

First chapter coming up tonight!

The role-playing section of GamesTopica.net is now part of the RPG Bloggers Network, and there are new stuff: adventure seeds (as usual), new items and a Flash AS3 resource. I leave it to the prudent reader to guess what I am working on that would involve Flash

• Adventure Seed: Ruining the Funeral: Feathered thieves take off with a coffin.
• Adventure Seed: The Singer of Storms: Treat he well lest he sings a song that wrecks the coastline with hail and lightning.
• Adventure Seed: Not all that which tastes bitter is poison: Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
• Adventure Seed: Where light was now darkness dwells. An ancient ruined lighthouse becomes the focus point of an adventure.
• Adventure Seed: The Questing Inn. A queer inn with a queer inn-keeper sending adventurers on strange quests.
• Adventure Seed: Dereus’ Paradox. Don’t think,  just look.
• Adventure Seed: Spear of the Conqueror. A spear imbued with the power of its original owner, a conqueror and emperor.
• New Item: Godwin’s Hurbis.
• Fate 3.0: Grim and Gritty Rules for Combat
• Games Dev: How do know a movie clip has reached the end

This should be all the important highlights. As usual, check out the New Stuff section to see daily updates!

Here are the new stuff put up for this week – ranging from new adventure seeds, a discussion on casual games and mathematics help for those who are doing simulation or sim-games. Here are the updates – I may have missed some, so check out the New Stuff page for all the additions!

• Adventure Seed: The Unexplored Lair – why are the noble lords forbidding entrance into the ruins of a pagan temple?
• Adventure Seed: An Ancient Coinage – A new type of coins which bears the symbol of a long destroyed kingdom begin to surface at the market square of a city…
• Adventure Seed: Magefire – A weapon employed by Emphdor in the ancient days of yore; it’s a liquid which burn upon exposure to air and naught but sorcery can put it out…the secret to its making is on the verge of being discovered.
• Adventure Seed: A Wedding in Crisis: An ordinary political marriage is more complicated than it seems to be.
• Adventure Seed: The Caller of the Winds – There’s a sudden change in the direction of winds along the coastline of the Shimmering Cape.
• New Item: Silk Cloak [Flowing Clouds]
• Resources on Normal Distributions: If you need a function to return a normal distribution and a diminishing (or increasing) graph, you can check out these posts on the subject.
• Tao of Games Dev: What is a professional game developer?
• Game Design: The Confusion about Casual Games

These might be all. Do check out the New Stuff link from time to time!