In what's turning into a weekly ritual of sorts, it's time for another gemlog post! Someday I hope to have more interesting things to post than random musings and ramblings, but in what is becoming a tired refrain, work keeps me busy and fatigued, so progress on all things creative is slower than I'd like.
Usual complaints aside, on to the random musings and ramblings.
Last post, I mentioned seeing if I could set up some kind of solo campaign that I could create using a simplified version of my home-grown fantasy tabletop RPG system VanVan and regularly post adventures to my capsule. I made significant strides toward that goal this week, though I ended up not simplifying the rules so much as just taking a subset of the available options, and then I sketched out a campaign, had AI generate some art
(aside: this is of course a polarizing decision in and of itself -- and I'm actually a reasonably capable artist myself so, strictly speaking, I don't *have* to have AI generate art for me -- but the time savings are absolutely *enormous*, and with good prompts, doing multiple iterations and selecting the best results, and using said artistic abilities to do some cleanup edits where appropriate, the art generated by AI is actually quite good, so personally I have no issue with people using AI-generated art to enhance their projects as long as it's done responsibly),
and drew a "world map" for the campaign area (which actually only encompasses a region some 100 miles across, so "world" map does not quite capture the scale accurately) plus a dungeon map for the first adventure. All in all, great progress for one work week.
As one might grasp from this description, this project will be a bit more involved than a mere choose-your-own-adventure with "light" game elements, as the game elements are in fact quite full, and will entail having the player conduct full-scale tactical battles using provided battle maps and character/monster tokens, with simple "algorithms" to describe how the monsters should behave -- at least, if the player wants the full experience.
But there will also be a significant choose-your-own-adventure element as well, which means lots and lots of interlinked Gemini documents. Doing all this manually by hand sounds like a right pain, so my next major action item will be coming up with some kind of data format and script where I can write out the adventure flow and then run the script to automatically generate a set of properly linked Gemini documents. In total, the remaining todo list before I can start actually posting this content is:
1. Create the Gemini-generating script;
2. Write a document explaining how the basic rules of VanVan work;
3. Playtest and tweak the first adventure.
On the upside, unlike R-Knight, VanVan has been extensively playtested by a lot of people (a lot by the standards of a personal project that is, which is to say over a dozen) and already proven itself to be fun, so I don't need to worry that I'm going to end up with something that's not even fun to play after all this work.
I don't know whether this will become a regular feature of my capsule or just be a one-off thing, but after linking the soundtrack to Dragon's Crown last post, I decided to write more about the game. Developed by Vanillaware in 2013 and released on the PS Vita and PS3, I got it for my Vita. Dragon's Crown is a very D&D-esque side-scrolling fantasy beat-em-up in the vein of Chronicles of Mystara or Golden Axe. Its similarities with the latter give me nostalgia for my childhood when I would play Golden Axe with my brother, but Dragon's Crown is frankly a much better game.
There are six characters to choose from: the Fighter, Dwarf, Amazon, Elf, Wizard, and Sorceress, each with their own moveset and gameplay styles. You can play solo or with up to three friends, who can be either human or AI-controlled. As a beat-em-up, the game is very action-heavy and can get quite chaotic when playing with a full party of four; there are also some light roleplaying elements. I love multiplayer co-op games like this and wish there were more of them.
There's also a narrator (for whom you have different voices to choose from) who describes things as though he (or she) were a Dungeon Master which also contributes to the feeling that you're playing a D&D campaign, which is pretty cool.
The stages are wide and varied, from forests to sewers and caves to ruins and ancient fortresses -- the usual gamut of fantasy RPG locations. The monsters are likewise varied and incorporate most of the classics, inspired more by Western RPGs (as mentioned, the game is very transparently D&D-inspired) than their Japanese counterparts. The boss fights are especially spectacular and the bosses are often gigantic, with foes such as giant chimeras, medusae, cyclopes, archdemons, "gazers" (renamed beholders), and of course dragons. The music is excellent (hence why I linked it in my previous post), and the game has a hand-painted artstyle that is both beautiful and highly distinctive.
It's been probably a decade since I've played this game and lately I find myself wanting to dig it out again. I think it might be available on the PS5's online marketplace, and so far I've gotten so little use out of my PS5 that it's been a pretty wasted purchase, so maybe on my vacation I'll see if the game is available and if so, buy it (again) and give it a whirl.
There's plenty of footage of the game on Youtube. For example, here's a playthrough using the elf:
Dragon's Crown Elf Playthrough
Well, that's a wrap for today. One more week to my vacation.