Viridian Games

This week has been a busy one for me and the weekend will probably be worse. So posting will be slow. But I’ve made at least a little progress on Planitia, and the first demo should be coming up soon.

All right. I’ve thought a lot about this, and I think I’ve got my god powers nailed down.

Basically I wanted god powers to be split into different schools which the player would then improve over time. I rejected the “classic four” of earth, fire, air and water since they are beyond cliché at this point; anyone who uses them deserves a quick nun-style whack on the knuckles.

Magic: The Gathering’s five schools of magic are extraordinarily well done, but I didn’t want to rip them off directly. Plus I wanted at least three powers in each school, which would have meant fifteen powers. That would have been hard to do while keeping to my second rule - that each power be distinct.

Populous 2 had six schools, but several of them are weak and all the “good” powers could be easily consolidated down to four schools.

So that’s what I did. There are four schools of magic in Planitia:

Yellow - Earth effects

Red - Fire effects

Blue - Sky effects

Green - Plant/growth effects

Now, let’s get back to the second rule. I wanted each god power to be distinct and have its own role. So I made a list of what god powers can effectively do in Planitia:

Create units

Flatten terrain

Improve terrain

Damage or kill units

Throw units around (important because units take additional damage from falling and can be knocked int water or off the map, plus looks cool)

Uneven terrain (requires the opposing god to smooth it out before it can be used again)

Ruin terrain (requires the opposing god to improve it before it can be used again)

With that in mind, here’s what I’m thinking:

Yellow School (Earth Effects):
Flatten - Flattens terrain, fixes earthquakes, allows villages to grow
Earthquake - Land unevener, unit thrower

Red (Fire Effects):
Flame Column - Moves around randomly, ruins land, burns building and instakills units - Powerful but uncontrollable

Green (Growth Effects):
Bless - 3×3 cell area - Fixes ruined land, allows villages to grow faster (the bless wears off, but the ruin fix is permanent)
Swamp - Any unit walking into it dies, lasts 1 minute or until it sucks up three people - Area denial

Blue (Sky Effects):
Lightning - Single unit instakiller
Lightning Storm - Area denial - hangs over an area and zaps anyone (FRIEND OR FOE) who comes into it, lasts 1 minute or so

Now we come to the BIG effects, the ones that can end a game quickly. In order to get a major effect, you must max out two neighboring schools of magic.

Yellow + Red = Volcano. Creates a mountain of ruined land, damaging anyone in the affected area over time. The volcano will spew fireballs which create Flame Columns when they hit the ground for one minute, then the volcano will go inactive. The volcano cannot be fixed until it goes inactive. Since an army can quickly run away from it, it’s better used on villages than armies.

Red + Blue = Meteor. A meteor descends from the sky on the targeted area, badly damaging every unit it directly hits and throwing any units nearby a long way. Does not ruin land and does not affect buildings, so it’s better used on armies than villages.

Blue + Green = Healing Rain. Creates a cloud of healing rain that hangs in the air for one minute. Any friendly unit that comes into the affected area is instantly fully healed. Can really take the edge off a meteor or volcano.

Green + Yellow = Golem. A massive earth golem is created that immediately heads for the nearest enemy unit and attacks it by kicking it. When that unit is dead it heads for the next one, etc. One golem can take on an entire army and villagers are pretty much defenseless against it, but once you create it you cannot control it. (It won’t attack your units, though.)

Max All Schools = Armageddon. Clicking this button turns every unit on every side into a Barbarian and causes them to seek out and attack the nearest enemy unit. When the fighting is done the side that still has units is declared the winner of the game. Enemy players can still use god powers, but since army units do not regenerate mana once they run out they won’t get any more. Do NOT cast unless you’re damn sure you not only outnumber the enemy, but that he doesn’t have a Meteor or Golem up his sleeve.

CURRENT PROBLEMS WITH THIS SYSTEM: I’ve only got one fire effect. (Honestly, how many different ways can you burn things?) The two Blue effects are too similar. “Bless” and “Flatten” are absolute necessities so it seems kind of mean to force users to waste their experience points buying them.

Your thoughts?

My first attempt to move this blog to the main page of the site failed utterly. As a result, there are lots of broken images and links on the site. Comments should work, though. I’ll try to get it cleared up tonight.

Let’s face it, this page is where the action is on this site. I haven’t updated the main page or my links in months.

Well, that’s because updating the main page or the links is annoying. It requires downloading pages, mucking around in their HTML and the uploading them again. Unlike updating my blog, which is quick and easy.

I had thought that the problem was that the blog really isn’t integrated into the rest of the site very well. I wanted to fix that so I did some research…turns out that Wordpress is quite capable of running an entire site, especially one as simple as this one. So instead of Wordpress integrating into the rest of the site, the rest of the site will disappear and this blog will become the site.

Thus the radical new template. The template layout is very nice; I especially like the buttons for my various pages at the top. The color scheme will probably change and I’ll do some other tweaking, but I’m hoping very soon to move the entire blog to the root of this site and then everyone can just come to ViridianGames.com to read new posts as well as download my finished games.

And if anyone has any suggestions, please feel free!

Okay, ODE’s out. And I’ve already solved two-thirds of the problems I wanted ODE to handle for me with my own code. It’s kind of good that I got familiarity with a physics engine, but in the end that was the wrong path for Planitia.

And I feel a lot better now that I’ve accepted that. I’ve still got 28 days…let’s see what I can do.

Oh, and we will now resume with regular, non-full-of-angst posts. In fact, sometime this week I’m going to bust out with a post I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but haven’t because it’s a bit effort-intensive.

My recent reinstall of Wordpress in an effort to fix comments broke the site in IE.

Again.

Therefore I will be running the default skin until I can find one that I like and that the little problem child browser can run successfully.

Thatisall.

Usually explaining a joke completely robs it of its humor.

Not in this case.

I had to nuke over a hundred comment spams today. They all got caught by the moderation filter and none made it onto the site, but it’s getting ridiculous.

Therefore I have started using the blacklist. I didn’t really want to do it, but I don’t really have a choice. Posts with blacklisted words now get insta-nuked - they don’t come to me for moderation. They’re just sent straight to the bit bucket. So if you post a comment and it doesn’t appear, it’s possible you’ve used a blacklisted word.

(What are the blacklisted words? Well, if I use one, this post won’t show up so I can’t tell you. Just look inside your own spam filters for examples. I will say that talking about various parts of male and female anatomy, modern popular chemicals, and certain card games will trigger the filter.)

I hate to do this, because it puts part of the onus on you guys to not use certain words or phrases in your posts, but I just don’t have the time to visually look through a hundred comments a day and see which ones are valid and which ones are spam. Sorry, guys.

I was out sick yet again yesterday.

This is getting ridiculous. I do not understand it. I’ve been to the doctor, gotten a prescription, and taken it religiously for over a week. I’ve got so much penicillin in my bloodstream that nothing else should be able to survive, yet every day I wake up wondering if I’m going to feel better or worse today.

And I’ve done very little work on my projects and this site is getting very rote.

I need to get better so I can do something interesting again before everybody stops reading.