Elven Academy

The site went down this morning, and apparently there was a corrupted file. I’ve re-uploaded the core JS/HTML files, and this seems to have fixed the issue. If strange issues continue, then I will have to investigate the possibility that the site is being hacked.

For now I will assume the hosting and server performance is sketchy. I also uploaded the new class portraits that were missing.

I am currently plodding along on outdoor adventure C3: Return to the Town of Terror. In this adventure, you return to Queen’s Bay with Alex, and possibly Jeanie or Nimwee. You can test your spells against sea zombies that rise from the sea during a full moon, and earn bounties for each one you find and kill.

Town of Terror is meant to be a full-size late-night town adventure, with drinking, gambling, whoring, pirates and an evil plot from a well-known nemesis in the game. It’s also your chance to get to know and romance Alex if you so desire, or a succubus if that is your persuasion.

It will once again be my best module. I am also very intent on making it by far the largest adventure module. Since the main companion is Alex, a character who is very conflicted between the dark side and trying to be a whiter wizard, a major theme in the module is ethical choices.

So module C3 is a good exercise on this design topic. It will also offer the most opportunities of any module (so far) to be ethically neutral and hedonistic.

I’m still doing a lot of oil painting, but I’m sort of close to reaching my annual painting goal, so hopefully I will have time to focus more on Elven Academy in the near future. I thought that adding a completion/achievement panel would be inspiring to me (to fill it in with content), but perhaps the development perspective (in terms of overall progress) has actually been demoralizing.

Notes – October 2021

In recent months I’ve been very focused on oil painting, but I’ve made time to also work on Elven Academy. I’ve done a lot of work, mainly on the second big dungeon (D2), and the first episode of Book Two. The new content isn’t finished or uploaded yet.

I’m going to have more vacation days during the upcoming holidays, however, so I wanted to review what I’ve done in recent month, and see where I’m at. Hopefully I can finish off these big projects.

But I’ve also had some health issues that put me in the hospital (again), and I could just drop dead at any time. So we’ll see what happens.

Last summer I researched a few other old similar games (besides Tunnels and Trolls) and how they play. I.e. Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, and some Steve Jackson stuff on Steam.

Lone Wolf was the most basic of the three, with almost no graphics, but I found it to be the most engaging. The cool thing with Lone Wolf is that many of the books are free thanks to the wishes of Joe Dever, the main author. Free is a good way to get me to play. You can find them here https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home

Lone Wolf allows me to skip combats by just declaring myself the winner.

A big part of Elven Academy was to create a classic game like T&T or Wizardry, but eliminate the main feature of those old games that I don’t enjoy at all, which is the combat dice rolling slogs. In fact, I never actually roll combats in Tunnels and Trolls modules. I just declare myself the winner and move on, for various reasons that you would understand if you have played T&T solo modules. I.e. you can either beat the monster, or you can’t. There isn’t much strategy.

I’ve done a lot of experimentation with a combat “system” for Elven Academy, a system that allows for just enough combat strategy and duration to make things interesting, while reducing the boring overage of rolling dice and attrition for multiple rounds. At the moment, my combats last maybe 3 to 6 rounds.

In my current dungeon project, “Geomancer’s Deathtrap”, the monsters are vulnerable to a certain type of damage. So you can gear up appropriately for the dungeon if you want. This is an important part of the gameplay in my game, and a big reason to collect different pieces of gear.

I’ve always wanted the combat in my game to be something like ‘Punch Out!’ or ‘Dragon’s Lair’, but your choice of action is more premeditated, more chess and probability calculation than game stick reflex.

I’ve considered hinting at enemy’s weakness in diplomacy in the NPC descrip words in the dialog overlay.

I’ve also worked a fair bit on organizing my Google spreadsheet tabs for style, game design, and code function references.

I’ve also decided not to do nudity – yet. It’s actually more interesting to do drawing with tease and sensual interest than overt nudity. My game is all about the throwback to the 1970s and 1980s. So I’m thinking Heavy Metal magazine and Frank Frazetta, etc. I would also like to continue to say there are a lot of romance encounters in my game, but no explicit nudity or sex.

General Updates:

The biggest update is to associate the core, basic 6 attributes with spell schools.

Agility is now Alacrity, and associated with fire spells.

Luck is now Fortune, and associated with water spells. This is an old association related to ship and sea voyages.

Alacrity, Perception (air spells), and Fortune have new character sheet graphics accordingly.

Charm and Cunning are associated with Light and Dark Enchantment.

The point of these attribute changes is to use more of the core 6 attributes, and allow them to influence various schools of magic. This move was born from trying to develop a better, more fun magic-user combat system for the game. This was caused by working on D2, the Geomancer’s Deathtrap, which has an unusually large number of combats.

Recall that the game world is a world of emotional energy underlying the physical world. From that perspective, it’s natural that your character’s personality traits would correspond to the ability to manifest that energy outside the emotional body, in the form of spells.

The side effect of this is that spells currently no longer drain your health, due to the way existing programming functions. I’m not sure how to deal with that yet.

Changed Times font on character sheet to Underwood to match the time skip font. Looks more like a game and less like a web page.

Expanded the sound source library a bit.

Simplified the Challenge Rolls to simply add two dice together, instead of multiplying by two and dividing by two. It seems to give the same algebraic result while making things even more simple for the player.

Module Updates:

A0: Fixed bug with gender swapping graphic in wardrobe?

A1: Editing pass on the Spanish translation. More edits to reduce wordiness. Added ambient sound. Fixed a bug with fairy mage selection.

A2: More editing, shorter paragraphs.

B1: Much more playtesting, ending completed, and another male romantic encounter added towards gender and straight/gay parity. More audio tracks, including nature sounds and people. Full Spanish translation (that was an entire week of work). Module is more or less completed.

D2: Much additional work, as mentioned. Odd encounters and multiple combats added. Multiple combat graphics for four combats. Created a coded combat system, and also a simple companion AI incorporated into the combat rounds. D2 now includes a gnomish gender reversal chair, if you want to change gender. There is also a battle chicken to fight. I’ve also started adding interesting encounters into the maze rooms, so the experience is a cross between a Wizardry dungeon and a Tunnels and Trolls module. I.e. you have encounters and situations in different rooms, but you are walking through a 3D maze.