Sometimes the hardest thing about being what one may call an “Indie Developer” is the amount of time and tole all of this game development takes on the normal person. It’s been a long time since I’ve approached a project with such a strong desire for it to succeed, at least in terms of Active Worlds project. The last time I pulled this kind of attitude, AWRPG and Draeda popped out. Already this development has taken its tole on my ability to think about other things, other issues: I’m consumed! I suppose that’s a good thing for development, and a bad thing for people who are tired of hearing about the game. This balance between life, work, and extra curricular activities (Ashianae) time is a hard balance. I often find myself jotting down ideas and scheming while working on Revit at work.

I’m partially hoping that at some point the constant gears in my head will cease, but in other ways hoping it doesn’t. I’m constantly scheming up ways (or trying to) to keep players involved and having fun within the game idea we’ve been working on. Lately we have been putting a lot of thought into new stats, spell creation, and the division between the various spells. After some scheming today and some talking with Allen last night, we decided on four different “Trees” of spells, that would help improve diversity among the player ranks. You can read about those here. The idea is to give players a few different routes to go in terms of spells and stat improvement, but at the same time allow players to conquer all of it if they so desire. As of yet, all stats in Ashianae’s Journey are “trainable” - that’s to say, they will all improve with usage. Some people have expressed concern that this would in fact not result in diversity, but I propose this argument: Take two players, each of which spends 100 hours improving their stats. Player A who spends 100 hours on only improving her mana and Fire abilities. Player B spends 100 hours improving his fire, water, arcane and mana abilities. Player A is going to generally have much stronger spells than player B at this point.

At this point we’re still open to the idea of making things a little more exclusive than that though, and I’m curious to hear compelling arguments on why the above is a bad idea. One such alternative might be to limit characters to learning either Water or Fire spells, but let them freely dabble in both Arcane and Divinity, or limit those as well so you end up with players who have various combinations of the four different spell trees. Any input on the above would be greatly appreciated!

One reason we’ve been so interested in not limiting players like this is to let players have as much freedom as possible. Making things like PvP not a necessity in the game, but an optional thing, to me makes our original concept completely do-able and fair. If players aren’t interested in conquering everything, they won’t have to in order to progress along in the game. However if players do spend the time to “master” everything, they would have a leg up in PvP and PvE situations. Is that fair? Most of me says yes, but part of me is a bit hesitant.

Apart from working out a bit more on spell theory, I’ve continued to sculpt some of our natural environments. It is an aim to make this environment as rich and fun to explore as possible. While we have used some automatic placement of trees and such, I am going back in and layering in more detail over those original tree objects to give things a little more oomph. Here is a screenshot of one such area I’ve been working on a bit more with a meandering deer in the shot.

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The hand sculpting of these environments is a tiring process but ultimately I think these areas feel more developed and realistic than the areas that have just had a layer of randomized trees entered. As always, comments are welcome on anything I’ve said above - and they’re appreciated!

Until next time…

Jim Rothfork