ToA began as a desire to design a relatively simple game that I could design and develop mostly on my own. This also marked the first time I worked on a design intended primarily as a small web or mobile game. When I originally began brainstorming the idea the game was actually meant to be in a Sci-Fi style setting. However, that idea quickly got scratched out after a “Eureka!” moment and thus was born the Mage and his spell circle.
After working on the basic concept for the game I began to work out a basic “combat table” – in other words “Rock beats Scissors, but looses to Paper” only with a few more twists and turns. In short order I confused even myself gather thoroughly.
“Spell beats shield…wait no that doesn’t make sense. Spell beats sword surely and sword…looses to shield. Wait a minute…everything’s loosing to the shield!”
Rock-paper-scissors enjoys a rather simple approach in both its “items” and win/loose structure; ToA….did not. So I had three items (a shield, a sword, and a spell) and I need to “balance” them out. While considering the issue the idea of utilizing the “open” side of the Mage’s circle came to me. Now, I had 4 items rather than 3. The arbitrary decision was finally made that the Shield was of the anti-spell variety and thus would “lose” against the blade, but win against a spell. To facilitate the logic behind the choice I renamed the shield and sword to Rune Shield and Mage Blade specifically. Making progress!
I knew that a basic 3, or now 4 thanks to the “open” slot, way system would actually get fairly boring in a hurry. Four static sides wasn’t going to cut it for long. So, I decided that the game would need difficulty levels and the harder the setting the more opponents the mage would face. Easy-mode would pit the mage against 4 opponents in the cardinal directions (N, E, S, W), medium difficulty would add two random corners and hard the other two corners. Even the additional difficulty levels wasn’t going to make the game fun for long, however, so it was time to raise the difficulty another notch.
Thus, the Rock-paper-scissor format went to the next level by adding a sub-element to each. Basically, if you pull out a Rock and so does your Opponent it’s not going to be a tie; you’re going to have to have a better rock. With the introduction of new levels of Shields, Blades, and Spells came all new questions regarding win/loss conditions. Would a higher quality shield actually be able to beat a lower quality blade? It made sense so I began to work out the new tables to see how things looked.
At this point I grabbed some dice and played around with the ol’ analog RNG to see how things looked. Surprisingly, the system seemed fairly balanced. The real question, however, would be how well it would hold up under the need for the player to rotate the “spell circle” and swap out items/spells. So here is where the game went on hold. I knew that in the future I would be learning Unity and other such programs so I decided to wait on further development until I could really get into it.
As of October 2011 I’ve resumed working on ToA. Thanks to my Programming Foundation’s class I’ve begun to learn Unity and have made some basic inroads toward developing the game. It’s nothing fancy (or functional at the moment for that matter), but I so far so good.
