Arguing about gameplay

I started this post last week, but it wouldn't let me do more than write the headline on my phone. We argued for a while last Tuesday about adding a "hook" to the game, and I played my standard role of contrarion. Oh well. I got my point across. C.p. suggested that we add in a crafting system and gave us a demonstration of some mining game with a really intense crafting system. From the beginning I didn't feel very comfortable with the idea of implementing something similar in our game, but it took me a while to get around to the "why."

Eventually I figured out that I was uncomfortable because I felt adding something like that would take away from what the game was about - gear acquisition and levelling. I felt that adding an intense crafting element would make the game something else altogether. Mainly this is because there are two options with the crafting - if you make it so that nearly everything must be crafted, our game would force players to craft hundreds of items each trip down into the dungeon, making the same weapons on each trip. The other possibility would be that it would be so rare that there'd be no point in adding it in.

In the end, we came to a compromise though: now players can craft items, but they don't actually touch the materials to do so - the game lets them disassemble items and then just tells them what they can make and they can select what they'd like to make. This keeps the crafting system useful but more cleanly integrated into the game.

For Today, the 18th:
Jason and I are doing another marathon day at the lab, getting the equip screen "working". It's just hacked left and right, but ingeniously so. I'm doing most of the graphic work for the screen, since we haven't seen CP since Tuesday and haven't received anything from him yet. I really hope that we can get some nice artwork in here.

We are trying to make it so we can show of the spell individualization, the combination spells, and eventually the combat - which we're likely just going to have to fake in a video editing software. Anyway, we're getting closer and closer. I really hope our game gets chosen because I want to play it!