Child of Light

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Aurora, who lived with her father, the Duke. One day, she slipped into a sleep like death, and awoke in another world.

Child of Light is a side-scrolling platform RPG with a fairytale inspiration and a unique watercolour art style. Set in the kingdom of Lemuria (and a little bit in 19th century Austria) it tells the story of Aurora, the titular Child of Light, whose apparent death translates her from her father's dukedom to Lemuria, where she is tasked with seeking out the Sun, Moon and Stars and restoring light to the kingdom, breaking the rule of Umbra, the Queen of the Night. To aid her, she is accompanied by Igniculus, an elemental spirit that can light darkened areas and dazzle enemies both in and out of battle.

The Map of Lemuria

In the course of her quest, Aurora travels across Lemuria, encountering the various tribes that live there - the balloon-dwelling Aerostati, the gnome-like Capili, the Bolmus Populi travelling tradesmice, the mighty Kategida and the shore-dwelling Piscean fish-folk - and recruiting allies from their number to aid her. She is armed with a sword far too big for her to lift and a toy crown which carries a powerful spell of protection. Throughout her journey she refuses the title Princess (whenever anyone calls her that she insists that she is just Aurora and proves it by taking off the crown to reveal the word 'FAUX' inside the band) and treats those she meets with respect. She even extends the same courtesy to her enemies, seeking an alternative to battle with each of the three main bosses. It's this courtesy and humility that really makes her stand out as a character.

The game is split between exploration and combat. Encountering an enemy transports you to the battle arena where up to two of your characters take on up to three enemies in turn-based combat featuring a wide range of physical attack actions and magical spells, which need to be properly matched against different foes. Light beats dark, the elements of water, lightning, earth and fire each have their weakness, and some are more susceptible than others to a basic clobbering. As characters level up their skills can be improved (pro-tip, specialise, I made a rod for my own back by generalising, which will surprise exactly no-one who knows me) and their equipment can be enhanced with Oculi, magical gems which can be combined to increase their quality or transform their type, and add special defences, attacks or increase character stats.

Through the course of the quest, Aurora literally grows up.

Aurora's story has been described by writer Jeffrey Yolahem as 'the tip of the iceberg' in the greater story of Lemuria. The game hints at the history of the 'explorers', Cynbel the Wise and Erin the Conqueror, who came to Lemuria and became its rulers, as well as having empty corners on the map. In addition, the collectable 'confessions' include a number of letters written by a more modern day student named Sophie Ashton Ellis to her teacher, Mr Elme about 'Balthazar's Book' and her own discovery of Lemuria through its contents.

I for one would be excited to see more games in this series, because it's a fun, compelling RPG with just the right levels of story, combat and exploration, and a gorgeous look. It also has an excellent score from Canadian composer Coeur de pirate. The rhyming speech has been divisive, but I quite like it; my only problem is that I'm not familiar enough with the ballad form to parse it smoothly in my head. It's a shame that there's no voice acting, but on the other hand it's better to do things by text than to have the wrong voice actors, and some computer game voice acting is truly dire. The other main complaint - for the PC at least - is the requirement that the game be launched through the cumbersome, occasionally downright ornery UPlay DRM, but it's not a deal-breaker and only on first launch caused me to rage quit before the game even began as I struggled to persuade it to a) send me a new password since I hadn't used UPlay since the crushing disappointment of AC3 and b) accept that new password and let me play the goddamned game.

The Numbers Game

I have no sample cards, so here's a picture of a fireplace.
Because.

Any given card in the Bad Movie Mogul card game has between 1 and 4 associated numbers, and several additional pieces of information. Performers are currently the worst, having various characteristics which relate to other cards (are the a lead or supporting actor? are they foreign?) a cost to play and as many as three pay out rates.

Balancing these numbers is a challenge, and one that is only weakly solvable by maths (or by my maths anyway). We'll need to play another test game to see how they balance up and whether the game plays too fast, too slow, or just about right. Essentially the balance to be struck is between guaranteed income and futility. The pay-off when a card works out needs to be high enough to be worth the cost, without the pay-off if it doesn't being so high that it doesn't matter what you play. If the reward never varies, there's no strategy; if there is too little chance of making good, the game will drag.

Now, I suspect that the numbers part of this is going to be simple compared to brainstorming the images and flavour text, but right now it's proving a challenge. While it may not matter how well the game plays if the presentation is off-putting, it is equally unlikely to matter if the game is shiny if it plays more awkwardly than a ninety pound piccolo.

B-Movie Mogul - The Card Game

Alpha Prime

Last night, James Holloway and I gathered with friends Bob and Jon to playtest version 0.1 of our B-Movie Mogul card game.

I won't lie; it was... bad, but in a good way. Play was slow and clunky, we had a lot of dead cards and the all-important movie pitch phase was pretty much killed by the fact that half the players didn't have a film out most of the time. It was, however, a really strong learning experience, and not as shockingly bad as it might have been given that this was the first test of the first version of the first card game James and I have ever developed.

For version 0.2 we're expanding the number of performers, since they are the most interesting cards, and making some of the supporting cards more general, as a lot of them ended up sitting around with nothing to use them on. We've also revised the rules a lot and overhauled one of the core mechanics.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 31 - ...and by no means least

Prompt: Favourite non-RPG thing to come out of RPGing

Cut the cheque

This is Hanna, my love, whom I met through roleplaying, and our daughter Arya. If you feel you need more explanation than that, you're probably a nascent AI and I urge you to study love and compassion before you start getting any genocidal urges.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 30 - Who do you love?

Prompt: Favourite roleplaying celebrity

TV's - well, the web's - Mr Games.

So, what are we talking about here? Celebrities who roleplay or celebrity roleplayers?

Wil Wheaton is the poster boy, I guess, and I have a lot of time for the former Wes Crusher. I confess, I was mean about him as a youth, but it's not really his fault; I was bound to hate a character who was supposed to relate to me but whom even I thought was a swotty creep (and I would have been deemed a swotty creep by most outside observers.) With Tabletop and later Titansgrave, he's done a lot to move the gaming profile up from a subset of general geekdom to pretty much blanket geek coverage. He's also done a lot to out a great many other celebrities, some nerd, some more mainstream, as gamers.

Diesel & Dench

Advanced Diesel & Dench

About as mainstream as they come are Vin Diesel and even more so his #1 roleplaying disciple Judi
Dench. According to the story - nay, the legend -the Iron Giant hisself taught M to play D&D during the filming of The Chronicles of Riddick in order to illustrate what an Elemental was, which I have to say is hands down the coolest thing about The Chronicles of Riddick and one of the coolest things about Vin Diesel. Dench... well, she's lived a lot of life, so I'm not going to rule out her having done cooler. She handed Bond his balls at the age of 60 for one thing.

Roleplayers have slightly less
swanky headshots.

Okay, Laws knows how to headshot.

And then there are the celebrity roleplayers, the rock stars of the industry, chief among them I guess being Ken Hite and Robin Laws, game writers, game bloggers, podcasters and just plain gamers. They have the same sort of bubbling brains as my man James Holloway, of whom I spoke yesterday, which makes their writing always fascinating, even when it doesn't have immediate use.

Come back tomorrow for the last day of RPGaDay 2015.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 29 - Friendship!

Prompt: Favourite RPG website/blog

So, I think that just from having referenced it so often, this one goes to James Holloway's Gonzo History Gaming. It's seems a little damning with faint praise, as I don't really follow any others, but it is also a grand read and covers a nice range of miniatures and history in and about gaming. James is a bit of a renaissance man and his blog is occasionally brief, but never less than interesting. I also heartily recommend his non-gaming blog, Gonzo History Project and created that most beloved of webcomic characters, Robot Face Smith, History Bastard.

My remaining posts are scheduled to release each morning, as I'll be spending time with my family, but won't be shared to G+ unless I can grab a moment to do so and work out how to do so on my phone.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 28 - Hello Darkness my old friend...

Prompt: Favourite game you no longer play

Not the edition I knew, but a better pic than I
could find for 1st ed.

I loved the old West End Star Wars. It was one of my first games and it was a lot of fun. The mechanics were... interesting (progression went +1, +2, add another D6 to your roll, then +1 again) and the game contained absurd amounts of detail on different types of Stormtrooper armour, although since our GM was into action movies we could do more damage with a shotgun than a blaster cannon. We also had a habit of crashing starships (the Aluminium Falcon and the Millennium Dustbin both bit the dirt) and stripping them of weapons, heedless of encumbrance, recoil and common sense.

Fun fact; all four of the soldiers on this
cover are the GM from that Star Wars
game.

Oh, yeah; we were 12 at this point, so things got pretty Gonzo. we basically bimbled around drinking too much and shootin' Stormtroopers. We had to take out a boy band at one point; the whole thing was oddly reminiscent of early Schlock Mercenary, but more... 12. I mean, my character was a bounty hunter called Loki 'Spanners' Amenhotep, also known as 'the Bastard', which probably tells you a lot about how assiduously we stuck to the established themes and continuity of Star Wars.

Ah, the wild excess and joy of youth. It was dumb as rocks and fun as anything.