Scotu's Blog

STLE Basic Mechanics

scotu42 — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 04:07:32 +0000

Combat Stats:

Strength – Physical Attack Stength
Dexterity – Accuracy part of evasion or graze
Agility – Speed, part of evasion/ graze
Defense – HP, Damage Reduction

Will – Magic Attack Strength
Determination – Max and rate of recharge of Spirit
Resistance – Magic Defense
Channeling – Effectiveness of combat usage of familiars

Resources:

Spirit – builds up over time, most common in usage of spells
Faith – Permanent resource, can only gain or use. Mostly used for making cards or ridiculous attacks. Kinda like money too.
Graze – Builds up on “Grazed” attacks, used to draw new cards from your deck
Essence – roughly EXP, but gets used in the manufacturing of everything (including level-ups)
Border Meter – Meter that builds up on damage dealt/taken/avoided that enables Super card

Spellcard Mechanics:

Deck: 60 Cards
Sideboard: 15 Cards
Max 4 Duplicates
Hand size = 5 cards + Slot & Emergency Card

Slot Card = Card chosen from deck to always start in hand in a useable state (no declaration necessary)
Emergency Card = Card chosen from deck to always start in hand. Unusable until Emergency conditions met (not yet determined what determines those), at which point it becomes usable.
Border Card = Card chosen from deck to be drawn into hand and activated for free upon border meter filling.

Declare = Pay activation cost to put a card into a usable mode for a short time.

When graze bar fills, you can draw new cards to refil your hand of used cards

Project: Mega Mari Battle Network (2D RPG)

scotu42 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:30:31 +0000

Pretty straightforward, this will be a PC implementation of a game similar in gameplay to the Mega Man Battle Network games, but instead will feature a Touhou roster. The original plan was to ROM hack MMBN2 and replace characters with Touhous, but we decided we’re going to fresh make our own (due to a lack of ROM hacking experience, and a surplus of development experience). With the advent of this format change, the planned roster is now invalidated. What is known for sure is that it will star Marisa (shout out to Mega Mari dur), the obvious choice. I also have a feeling it will be casting lots of stage 5 and Extra bosses. For good measure you can be sure there’ll be a Flan.

Project: Visual Novel Website

scotu42 — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:38:55 +0000

I’ve noticed several things about visual novels, and came up with an idea that would simply make them better. A website that hosts Visual Novels off the web in a centralized, standardized way, would give a boatload of benefits to creators, users, and translators.

Visual Novels don’t require too much power. This makes it so that they can easily be run inside of a browser environment.

A centralized site means that users could go to one place to “play” all their VNs, keep save files, track progress and which VNs they’ve played. Furthermore, it makes it trivial to work in groups to create VNs. Creators can make from anywhere in groups, users can play from anywhere. The owner of the VN can simply assign different permissions to different users on the site: He could give the artist the permissions to upload graphics, writers the permissions to write the script, etc…

Most VNs operate in the same way. Users could set up their profile to have the options for many common things (such as autoread speed) be the same. It would also make the options behave and be controlled the same way across all VNs providing a standard way to use them. This also means that developers don’t need to implement any common features, as they’re already there.

Publishers can easily release their game or sell their game on the site, and instantly hit a large market (userbase dependant) without ever having to invest in any capital. No shipping, no packaging.

It would be free for users to use, and free to create VNs on the system. Premium accounts/projects may be purchased to give additional features (more save games for users, etc… more server space for developers, etc…) for those who need something heavily commercial that can’t get by on a normal home use sort of deal.

Project: Music Player (still needs a good name)

scotu42 — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:14:22 +0000

Ever wished your software for playing music didn’t do _______? What about wanting it to do _______? Just dissatisfied with overall performance or ease of use? Rest assured that this music player will deliver. It aims to play virtually any type of music, maintain tremendously large libraries of music with ease (guaranteed for tens of thousands of songs), and most of all, provide an ease of use unmatched by any other product on the market.

Taking full advantage of the new Windows 7 Taksbar, this Music Player can be completely operated, and inspected from the taskbar. Browsing the web while listening to music? Need to change tracks, play/pause, or check what’s playing, or how far into the song it is? You can do that without ever taking the focus off your browser or changing windows.

In my experience, I have found two different types of music listeners: those who dump their whole library on random play (or take some form of random subset from their whole library), or those who just want to listen to their favorite songs from their library. In addition to standard playlist style features, this Music Player offers a feature not found in other media players. A favorites button. As you’re listening, if you like the track, you can press the “Favorite This” button (also available on the taskbar interface), and that track is added to a list of favorites. This favorites list acts like a top level playlist (much like your whole library, or the “Now Playing” list), and can be used either to sort out songs into playlists that better describe that track, or it can simply be used to keep a running list of songs you like to listen to.

This software also offers top notch features for managing a library and playlists. From anywhere, you can search what you’re currently looking at or your whole library for instantaneous results (no more long waiting times for those of you with 50,000 songs). Anywhere you see a track in a playlist, you can filter that playlist or your whole library to find all tracks with the same title, artist, or album.

This media player is also 100% certified to not detract from old/slow computers. It boasts a memory usage as small as some of the most efficient players, and never takes up more than 1% of my old single core Pentium 4 CPU usage.

Only for Windows 7, as it makes full use of Win7 features to deliver a next generation Musi Playing Experience.

(also, I’m still looking for a name for this)

Project: Nexus (IM Client)

scotu42 — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:01:49 +0000

Every IM client has a bunch of stuff that nobody likes. I’m trying to fix that. Nexus aims to provide all the necessary features that a multi-protocol IM client would need, while still keeping it in a way that is efficient, usable, and not wasteful.

Many IM clients have lots of extra toolbars and extra space that they take up. For instance, almost every client has so much window infrastructure that your chat takes up only 1/2 – 2/3 of the window. Nexus promises more efficient use of real estate.

Different people like different schemes for managing conversations. Some like their convos tabbed, some like them in separate windows, and some like (my personal favorite, and rarely seen) docked windows. Nexus will allow full choice of how your windows are displayed. Including combinations of the different styles. You could have two windows open, one with a chat with your boss, and the other being a collection of docked conversations, with one of those docked convos being a tabbed window of all the people you know from this one website.

Nexus also promises to deliver a quality user interface, making it super easy to navigate your different conversations with ease, and not succumbing to problems like changing active conversations when the window focus changes.

Finally, Nexus aims to integrate chatrooms (and IRC channels) seamlessly into your normal IM environment. A chatroom will appear in your contacts window like any other contact, but it will have a sub-listing of all the participants.

First Minor Scrabble Tetris Update

scotu42 — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:52:34 +0000

There will be an options menu allowing the user to configure things such as input controls, and the mechanics for choosing what gets counted as a “word”. You will be able to set minimum and maximum lengths for words to be before they count, and will be able to select from a large set of default dictionaries for what counts as a word. In addition to the built in dictionaries, there will be a custom dictionary feature. If your circle of friends wants to use the your made up slang word “frowndged”, Scrabble Tetris will not stop you.

Project: Scrabble Tetris (Arcade Style)

scotu42 — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:49:19 +0000

Scrabble Tetris is the ultimate combination of puzzle games, designed to be the most deep real time puzzle game you can imagine. It plays much like tetris, except in each square of each block that falls down, there will be a letter (per standard scrabble distribution). Players may clear rows like in tetris, but this doesn’t add any points, and simply allows them more space. The only way to score is to spell out words with the scrabble tiles. When a word is spelled, those letters clear, an the blocks above them fall down (allowing tetris attack style combos). To make the game more like scrabble, many squares on the tetris board will be marked as bonus squares, that generate more points for either a letter or a word being formed through that square. When a bonus square is used, it becomes inactive for a brief period of time to avoid bonus abuse (really long combos may still be able to make use of the same bonus square twice, but they’ll really deserve it). Just to make things more complicated, a list of about 10 words will be chosen at random to be “target words”, which generate an exaggerated number of points if you spell one out. When a target word is spelled, it is then replaced by a new random target word to keep the list of target words constant.

Project: (STLE) Super Turbo Loli Extreme (MMORPG)

scotu42 — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:38:34 +0000

An MMORPG aimed to give all the good aspects of what people want in an MMO, but none of the BS mechanics to go with it. Players will be able to customize characters as they see fit, and will be able to change around how their character acts at will at any time (pick a class you don’t like in the beginning? No problem! Just switch to what you want to be!). Characters raise “Familiars” which are essentially monsters that aid in combat, and non-combat tasks, and eventually end up becoming the player’s main weapon, “Spellcards”. Spellcards are essentially a magic spell, written onto a trading card. Players make “Decks” out of spellcards and use the cards they draw from these decks in battle.

Classes, Mechanics, Stats, all have yet to be determined.