Wisest Wizard

A game of spellcraft

The Concept:

In Wisest Wizard, you will play as a hapless young wizard as they learn how to perform the art of spellcraft in order to solve puzzles, defeat opponents, and uncover mysteries...

The runes that spells are comprised of are my own invention. They come together to form words, phrases, sentences, etc. Spells will take the form of programs made up of commands that these runes can perform. The setting is planned to be a wizard school, in order to teach players how the ins and outs of this system work.

Milestones:

The focus thus far has been on the editor that will allow you to combine different runes into words. So far we have:

• An interactable object that opens the editor UI
• An inventory that holds "scrolls"
• A menu of available runes
• Rune combination functions, including:
• Simple overlap
• Nesting
• Raising
• Rotation
• Scaling
• Shifting context with the "Doh Stick"
• Complex Nesting (WIP)

Code exists to show the proper name of a rune if it's created. At this time, that code doesn't do anything, because I've removed all the proper names in order to refine the ID combination and JSON formatting, as well as add complex nesting.

Plans:

To consider the editor complete, I'll need to have the "Save and Load" features finished. At the moment, they can save, but loading them is harder-- I've gotten some features loading, but it's very limited, and it's not at all complete.

It'll be quite some time before I work out all the kinks, I need to verify trees work (such as a.(b,c)), as well as multi-overlapped combinations (such as a.b.c) which have both been iffy, then I also need to make sure that combining the two doesn't result in a situation like a.(b,c).d, because that would imply that 'd' is a grandchild of 'a' but has no parent. Correct would either be a.(b.c,d) or a.(b,c.d) or something similar. Once those are done, I'll get to work on the nestings, which will either be easier or harder.

I'm absolutely terrified of improper nestings. And other grouping symbols. The character for those is necessarily different, because it has to place the left and right boundaries farther out than its contents, but there's a couple checks in the parser that checks if something is specifically a "DraggableRune," which is the classname for regular runes. It'll probably be as simple as either an "and" or an "or," but who knows what else will break?

Once the editor is complete, the "hard" part starts. The rune combination IDs will be used as syntax for the "programming language" that will be used for the spells. The reason that's so difficult is that, well, it's making a programming language. That's hard. It's an esoteric language by necessity, the rune IDs are pretty incomprehensible but technically when the language is finished you'd be able to program with those independantly, save for the actual planned integrations with the game. I've been reccommended to look into Total Functional Programming because I'd mentioned that I want to avoid infinite recursion, among other things.

I expect that creating all the gameobjects and properties that are editable by the spells is also going to be a real challenge. It'll require a lot of thinking and planning, but luckily at that stage it should be possible to just modularly add in new possible spell outputs whenever I find one we're lacking.

Payphone

A game of coin-counting maids

The Concept:

In Payphone, you'll become a minimum-wage employee of a maid cafe. At the end of the day, though, it doesn't matter how many customers there are, just that you have enough money to make a phone call.

This was inpsired on some levels by the Maroon 5 song of the same name. This is still in its earliest stages, so a lot is still up in the air. I don't think I want it to focus on a Papa's Pizzeria style of customer management. I've played with the idea of different types of customers having different ways of catering to them, one might have a street-fighter style 1v1, another could be a platforming mini-game, but I'll probably ditch that idea.

What's really important to me for this is the core concept, that the player will have to do their best to collect enough coins over the course of the shift to make a phone call to a friend, or family, or someone. That's a very evocative concept to me, so I'll have to see what I can do to make the mechanics cater to that.

At this time, there's not enough progress to share.