Stu's Rusty Bucket

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Quest Journals

In between drawing some arms and legs (see previous post), Ive been doing some testing on the PSP. Its amazing the little things that show up on there that don’t on the PC. (Porting is not an exact science). I found a couple of really stupid errors, obvious things that really only manifest on the PSP because of how its control pad reacts. Auto repeat is not good in menus, dialogues and quest journals).

Speaking of quest journals, my roguelike has one and I’m thinking of implementing it to augment the current quest journal, only not as verbose as my roguelike.

Right now the quest journal just shows given but not completed quests which you can page through and then completed quests. Each screen has the option to quit out or go to next item. I need to change it to use ‘X’ to quit out or directional pad to scroll through the items instead of buttons to page through…

Thats the basic quest journal, but I want to add something like a game notes. Not something the player can edit but something the game tracks and shows you, example;

On 4th of Foo, year 1203 The Party defeated foobar the great
On 8th of Bar, year 1249 Pinky was turned to stone
On 8th of Bar, year 1249 Foozle died from poisoning
On 30th of Zot, year 1253 Baz was recruited to the party
On 30th of Zot, year 1255 The party accepted the quest to find the hold grail
On 24th of Bar, year 1376 The party entered a moongate

Now the roguelike is more verbose (detailing on move X you did Y etc), but we dont need that kind of granularity. I think the journal notes would be recording bigger events. Not every combat the party undertook but used more as a memoir type thing and using a book type interface drawn with good old pale yellowing paper.

mmm… if I should be able to adapt my CNC code…

mmmm Thinking some more I don’t know if it would really offer anything up to the game. It makes sense in the roguelike but this kind of journal, I dont know for a traditional CRPG....

Think I’ll stick to the quest journal.