Making progress
Hey guys! Couple three things to report:
Internal Development Wiki created
Game development generates lots of documentation. Putting it all in one single central location has obvious efficiency benefits, but I hadn't prioritised it until now.
Behold...STONEGHOST! We created it using Confluence.
Right now it's bare bones, but over time we'll build it up with design decisions. This will help us work more efficiently as a team because there will be one authoritative source of decisions, game rules, writing guides, etc.
It's going to be spoiler heavy, so STONEGHOST will stay internal at least for the short term, but setting it up was something I should have carved out time for ages ago.
Miscellaneous tasks
A few more tasks on the new Interactive Big Fucking List™ have been completed:
Lara created the UI for a secure messaging app that we're introducing in the next part of the story. Your agent will use it to communicate with the task force
We're experimenting with the discipline of creating writer's guides for new locations in the game. The aim is to make locations feel consistent throughout the game (even if scenes or quests that feature them are written by different writers). We created the first one of these, Suvarnabhumi Airport, today.
I uploaded some more raw Illustrator files to the server in preparation for Jeff's second batch of art processing, tomorrow.
Master Skill List
Three of the systems we're planning to implement in 1.7 (money, inventory and quest log) will probably live on the character sheet somewhere. That means we need to go firm on some character sheet design elements soon.
Skills are a key element of the character sheet, so today I worked on the game's Master Skill List.
As well as letting you know what your character can do (e.g. if your agent has Motorbike +1 she's pretty good at riding a motorbike), skills in Female Agent have an extra purpose.* Certain skills affect your character's stats: e.g. riding a motorbike can make her more Daring.
So the skills are really important. I'm sure we'll have at least one scene in Bangkok where your agent can ride a motorbike, but even if we don't the fact that your agent is a badass biker chick might still impact every single Daring roll in the game.
The skill list has needed some attention for a while, because some of the skills were too granular and others were too broad. I went through it today and made some improvements to the design. (For instance, I combined the Sidearm, Longarm and Sniper skills into one Firearms skill. And I broke up some skills that were too broad: for example, the Cheerleading skill is now gone. If your agent becomes a cheerleader, she'll now level up in the Dance, Gymnastics and Live Performance skills.)
I know this isn't sexy work, but better design in this area will let you create truly unique, complex heroines. And...one part of the redesign is actually kind of sexy. But more on that soon.
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* Is this unique in RPGs? I haven't seen it in any other systems. That said, the most recent version of D&D I played was 3.5.
Comments (9)
... all good points/suggestions. can't think of any myself today; I am still mesmerized by the crop-top/under-boob in the image post!
If there's a low probability that the skill will be used in the game, then I think that it should be combined with other similar skills. Since this is a spy-themed erotic game, all skills that are about espionage and sex can be more fine-grained. Not only for game design purposes but also to make the experience a bit more immersive. It wouldn't matter much for me in this game to see if the agent has a leveled up Knitting skill and would instead be clutter, but knowing how good she is at lying, deepthroating and disguise is instead useful information.
So, there have been a lot of interesting approaches to skills that bring more of a narrativistic approach to it over the last couple of the decades. The first I can remember is Unknown Armies, which had no set skill list, and instead asked you write down your skills in ways that matched up to broader storytelling goals. Like instead of having a laundry-list of incremental stuff to explain what you can do, you'd just have a skill "Assassin". Or, if you want it to more specific: "Ninja Assassin", etc. Then, if you needed to do anything that would be something that "Assassin" could do, from sneaking to garroting someone, that skill would apply. A more modern take on the same approach is FATE Accelerated, which doesn't even have skills at all, but rather uses approaches. In their mind, it's less interesting asking "if" your character can do something, but rather "how" your character would do something. How Obi-Wan or Han Solo approach defeating a storm trooper would be vastly different. Solo would take a flashy approach, make a loud noise, shout as he blows a whole in the poor guy's head. Kenobi would probably be more careful. Tied to that are aspects that describe your character (Retired Jedi Knight, PTSD, bubble-gum brain) that you or the opposition can use to influence a scene. These aspects can change through play. An example of a twine game that uses this system is GirlFriend: https://tfgames.site/index.php?module=viewgame&id=1070. It's pretty swell.
I've played Fate. In sequence, apply effect "wind and range judged" to myself, apply effect "the position and hold support the weapon" to self, apply effect "the weapon points naturally at the target with no undue effort" to myself, apply effect "sight alignment and sight picture are correct" to myself and then shoot.
Just one firearms skill? Nah. Single-action revolver, double-action revolver, single-action-only self-loading pistol, double-to-single-action self-loading pistol, striker-fired self-loading pistol, AR-platform rifles and carbines, SA80-pattern rifles, Kalashnikov-pattern rifles, Uzi SMGs, H&K MP5 / KH 33 / HK 53 / G3 / G3-PSG1 weapons, P90 & PS90 (those things are feckin' weird), break-action shotguns, pump-action shotguns, bolt-action rifles, lever-action rifles, range estimation, wind estimation and reloading ammunition correctly are all separate skills. I could even argue that hitting targets fast at up to 50m, hitting targets fairly fast at up to 300m and hitting a target at all at 600m are different skill-sets for any weapon with that kind of range and getting the bastard thing back into usable condition is a whole other skill set for anyone saddled with an L85 that the RAF, Navy and fucking Int Corps have had their useless hands on. I'm not saying they should all be separate skills in-game, just that they're separate skills. ;)
You *are right* but this line of thinking necessarily leads to the skills "Computing (Windows)", "Computing (OSX)", "Computing (Linux)", "Computing (iOS)", and "Computing (Android)" on everybody's character sheet. Which honestly I'm not morally opposed to, but it means tracking lots more variables than just having one "Computing" skill that broadly tracks how much of a computer whizz your agent is. I was in two minds about it, but then I realised that the game literally knows every choice the player has made. So the skill system doesn't need to anticipate every eventuality. It just needs to get *most* encounters right, and oddities can be hand tweaked by writers. e.g. If an American agent picks up an SA80, we can just manually code in an extra INTELLIGENCE + FIREARMS check to let her figure out how to make it go bang (while her MI6 counterpart is busy rolling COORDINATION + FIREARMS to shoot the bad guy).
character sheets are always sexy
Sounds great!! 🤯 cant wait to play it!
This is awesome and sick!