Holy Cow-Girl, Manbat!

2 years?! 2 whole years?!

Wow, how time flies! But like I said many-a-times: this thing won't freaking die!

Now, I'm only going to be brief about my absence, since you all deserve an explanation, but I'm only going to be brief as that's not the reason everyone is here. I've had... a few run ins and close calls with death and was even homeless for a time, but now everything stabilized in my life to once again get on doing what I do best: making game systems and sucking at coding!
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So, I'm still trying to collaborate what notes I have left over from all my moving around, but I have been working on Alteratio, and I think you all will like what I've done because it just excites me talking about it! Let me try to pace myself though and just make a bullet list for you all to peruse with small explanations as to the large changes.

• We are no longer using quest!

Yes, you heard right - all that work I put into Alteratio is now down the drain! Woosh! But what would we be using instead of Quest? No Twine (that's been beaten like a dead horse, we can do better!), No Inform 7 (ya'll don't want verb guessing for the most part!), No.. well, no sane thing! I did the craziest decision for a system!

Unity 3D!

Mind Blown! But, this does everything I envisioned the game should do from the start the best, most efficient, and allows me to do the visuals that I desire in the game the best. Not to mention, most of it I have to manually code, which means that I have a very large flexibility on how I want to do things.

As of this writing, I currently have map navigation 80% done, map creation 100% done, map randomization 60% done, and basic placeholder map appearance 60% done. The map is almost complete for the first 'biome' I plan for release, the Woods, which includes (for now) 3 different varieties of places to go: meadows, forest, and dense forest.

(Read on!)

• We're using new mechanics!

So, before I had gotten a lot of feedback that things were FAR too complex in the sense that there was too much choice and variety, to the point of confusion. I've learned my lesson, and actually developed an entirely new system that Alteratio will be using - I call it Playing Adaptive Roles.

The basic concept of Alteratio has always been that every-time something happens, you change in some way: physically, personality, thinking, goals, speech, approach, interaction...
Everything changes, subtly, and overtime you notice the changes from the decisions you may or may not remember you did. A butterfly effect, if you will. Standard RPGs tend to have a set amount of stats (Strength, Dexterity, Lust, etc.) to reflect these changes, but they feel rather... flat. Just like numbers. You can do certain things after you reach certain thresholds, but your actions don't define you (apart from forcibly guzzling down some succubi milk or letting a plant-girl feed you after you willingly let her). This puts a lot of the emphasis on what the player wants to do rather than being along for the ride of what the character wants to do.

It could just be me, but when you read tf or corruption stories (for example, this entire masterpiece of a CoC story), isn't it far cooler to see the character fall down into that pit, resisting along the way and crawling out over and over until they lose themselves besides just jumping in and swimming in it constantly and not caring about a thing in the world?

PAR supports this idea. You have a some large, over-encompassing traits that define your character. Your actions, however you do them, shift those traits according to your play-style. For example, you might like playing a very bossy character - acting like a submissive pushover spontaneously is out of character. Specific options will show up based on how you've acted up until that point, and, I do not exaggerate, EVERY NPC will act differently, each with their own attitude them modified by how you act, how you come across when you first meet, your looks, your reputation....

How you approach every situation really affects you in the long run, and doing certain actions (such as being heroic typically and backing out of doing heroic things) is actually identifiable by others and starts to make you more like how you're acting (a coward, or perhaps shy or reserved in this case). You can start as a brave adventurer and end up as submissive slut, or start off as an escaped slave and end up ruling the world (or the personality to - megalomania!)

Hope that sounds interesting for people!

• NPC Interactions

Touched on this above a bit, but basically how every scene will play out will be you encounter an NPC. When you encounter them, several things will happen right off the bat: They will look over your appearance, see if they have heard of your reputation (That Succubus with the huge claymore who works with the rebels!), and have a set of personality traits randomly generated for them. All of this will add up to their initial 'attitude' to you, varying from welcoming a fellow comrade, trying to seduce you as an intimate lover, not really caring that you're there but you're in the way, or outright trying to purge you from the land, no questions asked! 

Afterwords, you'll be given a set of option on how you with to proceed - I would like it to be a 'skyrim' style sort of chat, where you see them speak a small modest amount before giving you several choices. The choices will be vague enough for you to fill in the gaps as you wish, but specific enough to have variations between. Say a goblin approaches you wanting to fuck their fellow recently-turned goblin! You are a bit horny (a condition that can make your normal personality traits be overwritten for a bit), and he made his intentions clear. What do you do? a) Let him use you.  b) Tell him what he has to do to let him have you. c) Push him to the floor and use him. d) Push him away, though he might not like that... e) Run! Fuck that!

It's a very horrible example, but that's the basic idea - offer multiple choices that accommodate your current play-style while still providing varying results. There is also the chance you can meet the same NPC, since all npc's have a name and might remember what you last did with them...
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That's all my confuzled brain can handle at the moment, but things I know I need to go over in the coming posts: Combat, TFs, Monsters/NPCs, Items, Levels, Skills, Special Interactions, In-depth movement, and site-reworking (since a lot has changed! Sorry for the WIP formatting!)

I'm going to start this off slow, and post every Friday, and if I once again get a lot of momentum, then we'll increase the pace of these posts. Good luck out there, adventurers!