#a decent possibility is also the characters simply possess me when i rp and my writing is merely a vessel with which they communicate-

[eleuclipse]

the thing about these guys is. they will have serious internal monologues of 4+ paragraphs. about the past, the present, their companions, the things that scare them and things they hope for, the meaning of life and the universe itself, at someone asking how their day is

and then their response dialogue will just be like 2 words

then i have to stare at it and fix it

[lukparkeru5]

Final Evaluation

Overall, I believe this project was a great learning experience, but admittedly disappointing. While not having a completed game isn’t inherently a bad thing, my game is not quite in a playable state, not even having a single level. The lack of art assets and low amount of audio assets is simply a cherry on top. My plan of an RPG with two distinct endings didn’t even get to the RP, let alone the G.

Despite the disastrous result I got, the project itself was still quite fruitful. The large variety of new concepts was highly helpful, and will definitely improve any games I work on in the future. From horizontal/ vertical boxes in widgets, to actually using functions (I was aware of them prior, but never have I used them as much as I did in this project), using possession actively, rather than having a single actor that did everything, getting a player to input their name, as well as having reactions for specific names via substring. I also learnt plenty about how to implement graphs into unreal engine by downloading the file as a CSV and making a struct to tell unreal engine what all the values mean. While my story concept did not reach anywhere near the point I’d have liked it to, there is certainly a possibility of reusing it

By far the best thing I did this project however was the text engine, using for loops of a string turned into an array, proceeding to add each letter one at a time with a delay, along with sfx. The way of handling portraits and different sound effects was there is I wanted it too, I just needed to actually have the assets to set it up. The way I handled writing the players name in the engine (using a $ sign, since I’d be using £ to represent money anyways) was also quite satisfying, letting me use a single character to represent a much larger set of characters, whilst also not overlapping with anything else I’d potentially want to write. Should I attempt to do this project again, I think I would have the enemy and allies just two seperate blueprints, rather than using child classes. This would let me have all their stats actually in their blueprints, rather than just on tags, and would make things so much easier to calculate. In addition, it would be much easier to cast to them, since it would always be the same blueprint. Should I do this again, I would also like to improve the dialogue engine, making it so that the player’s name is printed one letter at a time (by making the $ actually add onto the array, rather than printing at once) and remove the delay and sfx for spaces, which could be done by checking the contents of each character, and skipping the delay and sfx when a space is detected In the end, while the product for this project was arguable one of the worst I’ve ever made, the knowledge I’ve learned made this a fruitful project regardless. Next project, I’d like to reuse the concepts I made storywise, perhaps keeping the player being able to switch between three distinct characters with their own abilities, maybe a 2d top down game like zelda, where you can switch characters on the fly to suit the situation? This would mesh well with my plan for corrupting the player’s healer friend kendall too, since they could eventually change from having healing abilities and medium damage resistances to low damage resistances and high damage, like a glass cannon. Potentially, the trio could be: Player, tank with defensive abilities Sharle (or any other name) mage with long ranged attacking abilities and crowd control Kendall (or other), a healer with abilities to heal the player, along with buffs . Or a low range high damage glass cannon if the player makes them kill many enemies. The player’s three characters would share a health bar, but their inherent resistances to damage would be different. This concept seems slightly easier than the turn based game, but would still allow me to use much of what I learned.  Overall, this project was a decent stepping stone to new projects, what I learned about text engines and scripts will be highly useful for future projects, and the concepts of multiple characters played by the same player is always a fun idea to play around with.

[zydrateacademy]

Current Activities - Conan Exiles #4

So I just posted my latest story “Assassination at the Summit”, and while I am proud of its contents, it has some background information. Basically starting at  "Her outside clanmates had been navigating..." was practically written in a blind fury. I’ve calmed down now but this is my blog and I feel like ranting. First off, the character depicted in that story, Dey Yin, is an actual player. She’s an excellent writer and I strive to reach to her level of para-posting, as they give excellent opportunities to reply and react and I want to offer the same to other players when they interact with me. Also, she loves the story.

I am happy with the results as there was some effort put into it. Even in my blind fury, the last few parts turned out well. I’ve also been trying to work on my verb tense. Either I missed that class in school or over a decade of roleplaying has completely rewritten how my brain perceives verb tense. You might notice that my tenses swap between past and present, sometimes within the same line. This is why writers have editors, people. Anyway it was mostly a background plot, like many of my stories are. Basically I like to lay some groundwork before I claim things. I do not simply want to claim to be a whiskey baroness, I want to actually show it. I want people to see, through a narrative, the effort put in importing a whiskey from the outside world. The server is too small for specific events to surround these kinds of things, so I compensate by writing short stories instead. Quick aside; I actually did host an RP event with my character announcing the existence of her clan. It went very well with around ~9 attendees.

Whiskey and fun were had by all. Anyway.  I spoke of this plot in-character with others and another player on the server, someone I’ve been trying to arrange RP with for... years, I think, across a few MMO’s. We’ve met on an ERP gathering website (ya’ll know the one) but our interactions could never quite get sexual. They’re a good writer and roleplayer and they definitely value quality over fluff. I can respect that. We had some meetups in GW2 but maybe we just don’t make characters that gel well because we just couldn’t quite get to the fluffy stuff. Anyway she happens to follow me on CE. Fair enough. No prompting, she just saw that I was playing a lot and figured she’d hop on the ship. She’s doing well on the server, has a whole clan, etc. Good for her. But upon hearing about this plot of mine, her character offers some... assistance. Instead of being a simple assassination, she wants it to be poison. She insists, having an IC personal stake against Khitan generals. Fair enough, but then she hands Livia an actual quest. Get three specific items. The items in question are in fact part of the several artifacts you need to remove your bracelet and “win” the game (which deletes your save file by the way). Not the whole thing, just three of them. The scourgestone was probably the easiest, and I had some IC help from a guy. It was all great fun. Admittedly I was salty at first, adding extra steps to a straightforward plotline. Then I got to writing it out and I enjoyed the idea of dungeon delving being written into it. It started to feel like an actual epic on the likes of Beowulf, Clash of the Titans, and indeed, actual Conan books and lore. Sword and sorcery. I’m not claiming to write as well as any of those (though I’m pretty sure the Conan movies didn’t have any writers, holy shit), but it started to FEEL like an epic RPG story. I didn’t have it completely written out but it had about three full paragraphs worth. Might have eked out an extra two before... bullshit happens. The salt starts to come back when the player drags their feet about getting the last item for the poison crafting. They are focusing on their clan base and that looks fine and all, but a boss hunt only needed to be asked in global “anyone want to help?”, 3-4 people would have done fine and we had 3 at any given moment, each of us with powerful weapons and armor. We could have gotten it at any time. Again, fair on them to a certain extent. I’m sure they have a job and when they were online, she was likely wrangling her clanmates and building assignments. I get that, but... again, we could have had this wrapped up in 15 minutes at any given point. Eventually my character tries to meet with another newbie on the server (as she does) but finds them already at this person’s clan base. Figure it’d be a good time for Livia to check in on the poison and see when we can go hunting but... Well. Let me give you quick context on this person’s character. John Mulaney has a comedy set talking about his father and how straight-laced he tends to be. He recalls a story (true or not, who can tell?) where John himself and some siblings (I think? Other kids?) were screaming for McDonalds. The father pulls into the drive through, orders a single black coffee, and drives away. John states something to the effect of “in retrospect, that was the funniest thing I’ve seen in my entire life”. Well, this person’s character is basically that guy. But a woman. Livia already has stated that she’s got quite the stick up her ass. Anyway they’ve traded barbs as you might expect, Livia being more of a carefree roll-with-punches and make-money kind of woman. Livia drops an offhanded line about “Maybe I’ll just get my people to slit the general’s throat and save me a headache [in dealing with this character]”. All we get in response is “So be it” and are then soon banned from her stronghold. That’s when I lowkey lose it. I don’t explode, I don’t rant, I don’t PM them. In fact, there’s almost no OOC communication between me and this person and I think it worked against us. She never once asked me permission to force a poison subplot in my story. The character just “strongly insisted” and Livia was like “fine, let’s make the thing” and I went off to get two of the three items THAT DAY. A week goes by, then that bullshit happens. What a waste of my time. I keep thinking back to a roleplaying guide I posted on this server’s website. It’s the same one I’ve copied and pasted across many MMO’s I’ve roleplayed on. There’s a section in there that talks about IC drama having no affect on OOC, or it shouldn’t. I’ve spent many years separating IC and OOC, often times whispering people after an OOC argument of like “That was fun, thanks for the RP!” That kind of thing.  Unfortunately, this whole thing did have OOC consequences. The entire plot and story was essentially a gift to the player for being active, friendly, fun to interact with and being a good writer. I wanted to give the player and character something they would appreciate, but instead was delayed by a player insisting on adding a step. And then never stepped forward. It wasted my time and theirs and got in the way of that RP. Thus, I feel like my anger while perhaps not entirely justified, still makes sense in this context. My time was wasted, and now I’m possibly barred from RP with that person and their clan, or at least by going to their base. Not a single word OOCly was spoken between us throughout this. I remember PMing them the paragraph that featured them, asking if there was anything that needed to be changed. They said no, it was fine for the context and remaining an enigma. Fair enough.  That was it. She never asked me permission to bullrush into our plot, nor did I outwardly refuse it. I thought nothing of it, and indeed as I mentioned earlier I did have some fun writing out dungeon adventures and Livia’s general hatred of the jungle biome. There was fun stuff there, class adventuring that I don’t write nearly enough about. Then it was all just negated because the other character absolutely refused to meet mine halfway in terms of diplomacy. Livia tried. I tried. So starting from “Her outside clanmates had been navigating the unknown country...” in that story, it was actually a rush job in fuming rage, so much rage my chest actually hurt for a few minutes. I do think it turned out well but I do believe I could have padded more with describing the architecture, culture, the nuances of Livia’s clan navigating the cities, dodging police and bribing informants. There’s a lot I could have done there but the story could have been done a week ago and instead I was left hanging because one player bullrushed into my plot and didn’t want to go kill a boss. I’m angry. I’m annoyed. Heavy sigh. Now, I still have two more stories to write. I have asked and received a new patron item (you can get some cosmetics if you donate to the server), a glowing polearm.

It looks very badass, especially at night. Actually hurts if you look at it too long. It’s great. I have it named “Imbued Polearm” and I have no idea why or how Livia would be in possession of it. I just saw someone having glowing purple daggers and thought “...I still haven’t requested a weapon decal for my patron perks. I want that a lot.” Was thinking of a Ymir ritual but white and blue is his motif so I’m not sure that’d work. Derketo is the goddess of sex, not weapons, and would sooner imbue Livia was a penis to properly spread seed long before she’d give her followers a badass weapon. Next story will be a little easier to write. I discovered with some proper dying the reptile armor does not look half bad at all. The aforementioned guy friend says it looks better on females than males, and I believe it;

Not sure why Tumblr blows that way the fuck up but there you go. Due to quality loss, it does look decent in-game. Definitely a “demon dragon slayer” type story to be had there. Was brainstorming that an alpha got tired of some adventurer killing all their babies at the spawning grounds... Next time Livia goes hunting she’d be in for quite the surprise.

All that and I didn’t even get into my clan growing and even having someone build me a proper stronghold.

Currently can house 6 clanmates with a master bedroom for myself. I plan on adding another floor to make way for 4 more rooms as I tend to get members when Livia goes save newly exiled players from the river. It’s actually in that building the above party screenshot took place. (There’s currently two spare rooms, I believe. Hint hint, come join us.)