Crossgate Gladiatrix League

[DocClox]

Wow this is moving along pretty quickly. Keep up the good work! It's looking great.

Well, it's keeping a steady pace, anyway. I've got screens for broodmares and a personal data screem which still needs a bit of work. And I'm also just chasing the last bugs out of the XML import code. Which means that the client app is close to being able to submit a set of orders, albeit without the set of commands.

That said, there's not a lot of point without the server to process the data, so we're not there yet.

In other news, I just got my hands on a shiny new Android mobile phone. I wonder how hard it would be to make a mobile version. With a bit of luck I can use Boojay to compile the code directly into java bytecode. Could be fun

[DocClox]

Just to let people know that I'm still working away on this, promises to devote some time to WM notwithstanding. Not that there's been a lot to see, since most of the work has gone into the server end.

Anyway, I've been thinking about city wards, and also about character creation.

City Wards:

I want each ward to have two friendly wards and two rivals. This is one possibility; red lines are rivalries and green likes are alliances.



That's got Nobb Hill condescenting to talk to the wizards and the money men, which seems fair enough. Spark end and Pentangle Square are at odds, which is good. The only reservation I have is that the Sleaze Street districts are friends, and I rather imagined that as a particularly bitter rivalry

The other option I considered was this:



Which has Spark End picking a fight with the Quality for some reason. Pentangle Sq. and Pinchpenny Lane are each keeping links with the more violent elements in town, which also seems fair enough. I'd have expected closer ties between the docks and Pinchpenny Lane, and I have no idea what Spark End did to upsed Nobb Hill, but overall I like this one better.

mmm... more later, I think

[Kenki]

Hey Doc,

What about swithching the following in V2:

Sleaze West <==>  Pentangle Square
Nobb Hill      <==>  Quays



Could be odd that you don't have the Magic vs Tech rivalry. I could see the nobles taking a liking to both philosophies.

[DocClox]

Hey Doc,

What about swithching the following in V2:

Sleaze West <==>  Pentangle Square
Nobb Hill      <==>  Quays



Could be odd that you don't have the Magic vs Tech rivalry. I could see the nobles taking a liking to both philosophies.

So that would look (after rotating Nobb Hill back to the top once again) like this




So the nobles are at odds with the trade sectors. Old money vs new, I can cope with that. Pentangle Square has a rivalry with Sleaze East; Brains vs Brawn, so that's OK. Also with Pinchpenny Lane... I suppose they're two of the most influential power blocks in the city, so a bit of sporting rivalry is to be expected.

Spark End has a similar disagreement with the other Sleaze Street ward on the same basis, and also with the pirates independant sea captains of Crosskeys. Not sure where that last one came from, but I can't see any reason why not.

The Sleaze Street gangs hate one another as usual, so that's good. It's just a pity about the magic vs science rivalry. Still, I like this a lot.

[Kenki]

True, it is a pity there is no outright rivalry between Magic/Tech. But how about looking at it from this angle. Both the Wizards and the Inventors are trying to curry favor with the Nobles, selling their wares. Sure they dislike each other, but they are not about to risk their standing with the Nobles over All-Out war. So they do the next best thing. They arm the Sleaze Wards. They fight through the East vs West Rivalry. The Nobles can't be bothered by what the riff-raff do. This allows the Wizards/Inventors to settle their score in a more subtle way without exposing themselves directly.

[DocClox]

True, it is a pity there is no outright rivalry between Magic/Tech. But how about looking at it from this angle. Both the Wizards and the Inventors are trying to curry favor with the Nobles, selling their wares. Sure they dislike each other, but they are not about to risk their standing with the Nobles over All-Out war. So they do the next best thing. They arm the Sleaze Wards. They fight through the East vs West Rivalry. The Nobles can't be bothered by what the riff-raff do. This allows the Wizards/Inventors to settle their score in a more subtle way without exposing themselves directly.

Workable. I think I'll probably go with this, unless anyone has any better suggestions

I was talking about character design: here's a rough screen.



The plan is to give every player a number of points to spend customising his character, with cost-per-point going up as values rise. About the only thing I'm not going to let players choose is their ward, and that only so I can keep the wards roughly balanced.

The email password field is going to be optional. The idea is that if you use a gmail address, the software can auto-mail your orders for you.

All of those fields are going to have tool-tip help attached to them.

(That's all a bit random, but I want to get some of this written down).

[Amoeba]

No choosing our Ward huh? That makes me sad. I was looking forward to proving the dominance of Spark's End. Understand the design decision though.

As for the Wards rivalries, to me this 

makes more sense. But then, that's just my feelings on the matter.

[DocClox]

No choosing our Ward huh? That makes me sad. I was looking forward to proving the dominance of Spark's End. Understand the design decision though.

Indeed. What we don't want is everyone piling up in Spark End and Pentangle Square and no-one representing the docklands.

What might work would be to let players choose a preference from the available wards, and then choose randomly among the candidates.  It wouldn't garuantee your choice of ward, but it would give you some control over the outcome. If you didn't get it, you'd get a random allocation from what was left at the end

Another possibility woud be to let players bid with build points. So if you were prepared to spend a point or two less on starting stats and the like, then you'd automatically get your choice of ward. Assuming no one outbid you, of course.

I'd also quite like to allow players to change wards in-game when opportunity arises. But not easily, and not for some time

[Dagoth]

Alternately, you could just make certain wards unavailable when they reach a certain unbalanced threshold, still allowing the player to choose from other wards which have fewer players in them.

[DocClox]

That too. But there's still a problem if we have three new players/characters and three available wards, for instance.  If they all pick Pinchpenny Lane (for instance) then things still end up out of balance.

I suppose I could award them on a first-come-first-served basis

[Mehzerz]

Well is there any difference between picking the wards? Because if not, I'd just do them how you originally planned. If being able to choose can hinder gameplay then forced wards is probably the way to go.

[DocClox]

Well is there any difference between picking the wards? Because if not, I'd just do them how you originally planned. If being able to choose can hinder gameplay then forced wards is probably the way to go.

Good point. I was thinking "differences". I haven't got them all worked out yet, but roughly speaking:

Nobb Hill has snob value, so if you work for them you get a bonus to prestige. Pinchpenny Lane gets you some nice discounts on equipment. Surprisingly it's not the one that pays best - that distinction goes to the Sleaze Street wards, whose teams are by far the best supported in the city. Pentagle Square will give its trainers first refusal when selling demon girls; spark end gets some rare items and unusual combatant from time to time. Crosskeys offers some discounts, and also has the occasional beautify light combat specialist to sell...

I'm not sure how balanced these are going to be - this is going to need a shakedown run to get some of these details sorted out.

[necno]

Something else to consider if you were to go with choice of ward based on the number of players in that ward is player activity, a player who hasn't played in about a few months should probably not be counted.

[DocClox]

Yeah. I was thinking of some sort of progressive penalty for missing turns. Something like:

• first turn - loss of prestige
• second consecutive turn - prestige loss and fined by the arena
• third turn - trainer is suspended until he settles his fine.

Suspended trainers may be allocated a new ward when they return to the game.

I should also add that ths would be for unplanned absences. If you're not going to be able to play for a few turns, it should be possible to arrange for a leave of absence without penalty

[edit]

With a bit of luck, I may shortly have a character creation screen for people to play with.  The game still isn't ready, but I'd like some feedback on the design process.

While I'm on, let's talk about the format for the image sets that I'm going to use. Rather than the WM approach of having one set of images per girl, I thought we'd decouple image sets from the characters. So you design your character and pick an imageset for him/her/whatever. I'm probably going to need some help with these, so best get the format established now.

The directory structure for imagesets is a bit deep:



I've only show the structure along the top branch, else the pic would be huge, but each branch has the same structure. So "others" and "slaves" can  have male/female/futa/monster folders underneath them

I'm allowing futa as a gender. It's not a kink that does anything for me, but I know a lot of people like them.  I've also included "monster" as a gender (which it strictly isn't) to cover shapeshifters and tentacle beasts.  Players are goign to be able to choose these as geners for their character, but there's going to be a points cost. Not because there's any advantage choosing them, but just to discourage people from takign the option. I don't want everyone in the league to be a futinari or an intelligent tentacle beast

What else? Male slaves are allowed, although the league considers them to be monsters for all practical purposes. I'm not sure what to do about the "rape" category for males though. Male rape is a major turn-off for me, so that's not going to be part of the game. We could use it for when the gladiator in question gets the better of his female opponent, but in that case, I'm sure most people would sooner see the female pic. The easiest thing is to say that male rape pics will be ignored. Much the same goes for monster gender

The only other thing about imagesets is this: please keep them small. If an imageset gets used in the game, it's going to end up being replicated to the HD of everyone in the game, and some players may not have 10GB to spare to hold all those pixels. So one or two pics per category if we can. Preferably scaled to size, but I'll have to get back to you on what the size is...

Anyway, that's enough for now

[DocClox]

OK folks, have a play with this:

http://www.mediafire.com/?z793e2anb5gx21p

You need to click the "add trainer" button to get to the design screen. It's still a bit rough, and undoubtedly buggy, but I'd appreciate some feedback.

I should also add that this is not the game - just a demo of the character creation screen.

[edit]

If nothing else, I'm interested to see that all the needed DLLs are included. Which reminds me: .NET 2.0 or later needed.