Trimmed the homepage

2014-09-15 02:02:04 -07:00
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-The wiki is under construction.
+**The wiki is under construction.**
-Introduction
+# Elevator Pitch
-This is the game design document for Tortuga. This is intended to plan out required tasks for the game, as well as serve as an instructional text for modders and others interested in Tortuga’s development cycle. 
+Tortuga is a 2D multiplayer JRPG featuring permadeath, with an emphasis on multiplayer cooperation, exploration and customization. The game runs on customizable public and private servers.
-I have a long road ahead of me, and design docs are never really finished until the project is. So, if you see any italic text, you can consider that to be an incomplete or removed section of text, or an inline comment.
+# Required Upkeep
-Elevator Pitch
+* Flesh out the Wiki
-
+* Promotional video (first impressions)
-Tortuga is a 2D multiplayer JRPG featuring permadeath (deletion of a character upon death). The emphasis of this game is on multiplayer cooperation, exploration and customization. The game runs on customizable server software that can support up to 150 simultaneous players or more.
+* Developer video (more in depth view of the game)
-
+* Screenshots and mock-ups
-This game is inspired by classic 2D RPGs, as well as more modern sandbox MMOs. This project is currently independently created and funded, with the goal of creating a game that will engage user's imagination and inspire a large modding community.
+* Add the combat and statistic equations (already written, just need the section)
 Required Upkeep
 •	Change the license (probably the Uplink license).
 •	Keep the documentation up to date (The GDD)
 •	Promotional video (first impressions)
 •	Developer video (more in depth view of the game)
 •	Screenshot mock-ups (clearly marked as such)
 To Do List
 This section is mostly just rubbish dumped here, that will eventually be moved to a previous part of the document, or outright deleted.
 Possibilities
 •	NPC Characters
 •	Factional Warfare
 •	Controllable Mana Nodes, captured by FW, similar to Meridian 59
 •	Chat system
 •	Money to acquire items from NPC shops
 •	Chaos Gates for long distance teleportation
 •	Gates could be automatic, but only activate if you’ve reached that gate
 Additions to the GDD
 •	Add the combat and statistic equations (already written, just need the section)
 •	Forest enemies tend to be poisonous
 •	Tower enemies are usually difficult, and humanoid
 •	I completely forgot about status ailments
 References
 •	Fewer Options, More Meaningful Choices - Gamasutra
 Random Thoughts
 I read in an article about magic being affected by the environment. What if in the ATB system, magic was affected by what type of terrain you were fighting on? Like, if you were in a volcano, fire magic was more powerful, but ice magic was weaker? Unless you had an ice crystal to draw magic from, which makes up for the lack of ice magic sources, but the crystals only had limited amount of uses?
 When a combat instance is created, a list of enemies is generated based on a series of parameters, like the biome/terrain type/dungeon type/etc. and the level (base and derived) of the area, combat instance, opponents, etc. I kinda… yeah, I’ll have fixed levelling, so your character can be outgunned by an OP boss monster, so I won’t need to adjust the difficulty based on the human characters in the fight (thank god, that would be complex has hell).
 Devving: Creepy Ass Mother Fucker
 I designed one of the strongest, if not the strongest boss creature for my game today. It'll probably be the optional end goal, along the same lines as Minecraft's Ender Dragon; something mythical to strive for, but really out of reach for regular players. It also happens to be a Lovecraftian Horror, BTW.
 Depicting Cthulhu is hard, and games themselves are the worst possible medium to do it with; however, I think I have an idea. I'll get the the physical depiction in a second, but I just wanted to touch on the lore of the game.
 I don't have much in the way of story line, outside of a Mutant Frog King for the first dungeon (first besides "Beginner's Keep", or even Beginner's Keep itself). To remedy this, I'm going to lay down some basic elements of the world. There may be libraries and books in the game (if I have the time), I may convey the lore via out-of-game texts (like a wiki), or I might just leave the lore ambiguous, who knows.
 Anyway, the final boss is an Eldritch Horror who exists in a much higher plane of existence than the players. As a result, what the players are actually attacking, the entity they see, is little more than the Eldritch Horror's "Shadow". A creature in it's own right, but nothing more than an impression of the Horror, lurking above the world of Tortuga. Destroying the Shadow doesn't actually hurt the Horror, any more than ramming a ship into Cthulhu does.
 Still, destroying the Shadow is a reward in it's own right.
 Anyone who follows me probably knows that players can set up their own game servers, which itself I'm planning on working into the mythos a bit. Basically, the Horror is so large, it creates Shadows across every world on every server. It would also explain why the Shadow respawns, if it even does.
 Since I tend to be way to descriptive, I'm putting the physical description under the cut.
 OK, the physical description. Please note that the Shadow doesn't represent the Horror's "shape" in an way, any more than your shadow does when you stand under a light. I wish I could post the sketch, but you'll have to survive with text.
 The top half of the Shadow's body resembles an emaciated human, with unnaturally long arms and fingers, a rib cage showing through the skin, and a bald head without a face, only a month. It's skin is mottled grey (I considered black, but it's too bland), possibly with cancerous growths (or not, I just added that idea). 
 The lower half starts just below it's rib cage (it lacks any kind of abdomen), where a large number of tendrils sprout. These tendrils move and flow through the air softly, much like long hair floating in water (Idea: what if each tendril represents somebody it's eaten?). The tendrils are long, giving the Shadow an overall appearance of wearing the lower half of a strange, unnatural ball gown.
 Height wise, it's not large, only about 180cm from top to bottom. It floats through the air, about 15cm off the ground, but it can travel as high or low as it needs to, often moving between levels of it's habitat (I'm not sure where it lives yet) with flawless ease. It travels at roughly normal human walking speed, but it can move much faster by tilting it's upper body forward, and trailing it's tendrils behind itself. Overall, it's movements are graceful and ethereal, almost beautiful.
 That's it for the main body, onto the "eyes". This, I believe, may be one of this creatures strangest attributes, and also the most Lovecraftian. Its eyes are disconnected from it's body, at least from the player's perspective. The eyes themselves can be destroyed, which only serves to piss the Shadow off.
 To the average viewer, they appear crystalline, often coming in several different shapes. The first shape is of a blue, transparent octahedron, about 50-60cm wide, and a little longer from top to bottom. When designing it, I was heavily inspired by the 5th angel Ramiel, sans shape shifting abilities. The second resembles several geological crystals fused together side by side, with major vertical stones clearly being "dominant" among them. The third resembles Carbink's or Diancie's lower halves, with a central rock-like structure and several small crystals either visible or partially visible. I think of the third form as a sort of immature eye.
 The main body of the Shadow has no eyes of it's own, so to see the world, it creates these crystal eyes which can be found floating around it's habitat, and can even be found by brave adventurers who've strayed too far from safety. The Shadow can sense any and every bit of light that touches an eye; that must be a hell of a way to see the world.
 The eyes themselves don't do much, but they may be able to attack if they're on their own; that's to be determined by the gameplay. When you're fighting the Shadow itself, they're probably going to act as walls.
 Anyway, That's about as much as I have. I'm going to drop this post into my GDD, for posterity. I hope you liked it, and if you're interested in my game, follow or contact me!
 Edit: Nearly forgot, my brother recommended making the Shadow invisible at first, until getting a silph scope style item. I think that's an OK idea, at least for pushing this into the end game. Personally, I want it to be... IDK, more attached to the lore? So I might make the player's sacrifice an eye or something in a big ritual to reveal it. What do you think?