Kingdoms of the Lost: Merriment of Masks Festival

Kingdoms of the Lost is having another festival, this time in celebration of Halloween. This festival is dubbed their Merriment of Masks, and it will be running from now through Wednesday, November first.. Kingdoms of the Lost is a MUD - an old school, text-based online Dungeons & Dragons style of game, but with a completely unique world in a fantasy setting.

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Kingdoms of the Lost: Fall Festival Time

Kingdoms of the Lost is celebrating fall with a pair of festivals running in parallel with one another.

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Kingdoms of the Lost - Merriment of Masks festival is live

Happy Halloween to all of our readers. It is time for some tricks and some treats, and Kingdoms of the Lost - a roleplaying MUD that recently celebrated its fifteenth year in action - is having its annual Merriment of Masks festival.

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Kingdoms of the Lost - Spring Festival

MUDs are not nearly as popular as they used to be. There are plenty of other options out there for players looking to get their online gaming fix, from World of Warcraft to Guild Wars 2 to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and loads of games in between. Still, all of these games still owes something of a debt to Multi-User Dungeons - or MUDs.

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KotL - Summoner project - finished Chapter 1

I go back to this about every 2 weeks. Last week? I was playing a ton of games. This weekend? My son was needling me about getting this project going a bit - he's definitely been interested in playing. Problem was? I had the custom code mostly in place, but untested and I had all of the pretty but relatively useless intro stuff in place, but no real dungeons yet.

Now for anyone who's used RPG Maker XP, they know that the basic systems are... well, super basic. Combat is a fight/skill/defend/item affair. Now most of the scripts I used? I did not write them. I did however have to modify a lot of them to get them to play nicely with one another and my own customized stuff. So now the combat includes things like Overdrives, Summoning replacement creatures and gear that can have spells cast off of it. Getting all of that debugged was most of my Saturday evening.

The other thing that I decided to do was work in a lot of branching paths and choices - for example either, both or neither of your siblings may survive the early going, which obviously affects some of the cosmetics to the storyline, but also who becomes available in your party. Which reminds me - I need to work on the party switching script next...

Anyway, that said, even with me knowing right where to go, I would say the game took me about 20-25 minutes to get through chapter 1, and it took my son about 35-40 minutes when he ran through it. I figure if it reaches 3-5 hours in total, I met my goal. Anyway, the video's nothing special, but I put in the last stage of the first real playable cavern, showing off some of the scripted events and combat options.

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KotL - Summoner project

So I did a few posts awhile back about a game I was prodding at with RPG Maker XP. I haven't stopped working on it - well, not completely. I did take about a month off as I waited for the funds to buy the program (there was this matter of a ps3 that goofed me up in there). Anyway, I have been doing some more work/fiddling/messing around and got the intro complete. It's not going to be a long game. If I can make a 5-10 hour game, I'd be pretty happy. Right now it's like 15-30 minutes to get through the character creation and intro - the character creation of which I have a brief video of below:




It's not much to show, but there's still a lot of little things I'm poking at. I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist. Which is why my MUD was in 'beta' for years.

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KotL - Summoner 4/7/11

So, I got some pretty positive comments about my KotL Summoner 'attract mode' demo, both here and in a few other places I posted it. So, I thought maybe as I prod at this project, I'll go ahead and update on it here and there. Now, the software I'm using is called RPG Maker XP. It's not the latest version of the software - that would be RPG Maker VX. And I've talked to a few of their reps in the last month and they assured me there is a new version coming out this year. I've got about a week of my free trial left, and I will probably purchase it considering the amount of time I'm dropping into it already - it's like $30. Anyway, it's usually referred to as RMXP in several of the maker communities.

So there's a bit of background on the software I'm using. It's basically a framework for making games. It comes with some default art, tilesets and sound/music called the RTP. It also comes with a functional gaming system programmed in Ruby. You could take this framework, and with no programming knowledge or (like me here) if you have no artistic inclinations, still make an RPG game similar to the 16 bit classics of years gone by.

A lot of it is very menu/data base driven. You define characters, spells, items in a data base, assigning stats, images, things like that. I've included a couple of screenshots of the data base and also a short, blurry video of me working in it to try and get some events set up and working properly.

A lot of people who work on these games do so in teams - like a coder, a map maker, a sprite editor, etc. They also tend to try and track rough progress and here's what mine would probably look like at this point:

Story: 50%
Graphics/sound: 70%
Maps: 5%
Code: 90%

Mapping is probably the slowest overall part of the process, so while at a glance a person might look at that and think: wow, you're like over half done. In truth, I'd say my overall is more like 5-10% done is all. I'll probably keep tossing in small status updates, mention what I'm working on next, that sort of thing. I'll try to do better with the video next time too, uploading it to Youtube instead of subjecting it to Blogger's scaling process.

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KotL - Summoner

So, part of what I've been spending some time on over the last week was a demo of RPG Maker XP. I had mentioned this before earlier in the week. Now mind you, most of the code is in place, and graphically I'm using basic RTP graphic assets, but I think the 'attract' or demo mode turned out okay on it.




Basically, the storyline bouncing around in my head is a spin-off of my Kingdoms of the Lost MUD that I run with my wife. The premise is basically people dabbling in a kind of magic they don't know much about. Nothing too deep, but I get on these creative kicks where I want to not just play something, but make something (I do a lot of writing and already have the MUD) - this was just another outlet to help with that particular itch. Hopefully I'll regain some steam on it soon and do something with the gameplay - I have some stuff mapped out and implemented - probably about the first 10 minutes or so of the game. I may go ahead and try to get an hour or so of it out there and playable before too long. Anywho - thanks for taking a look and I'll add some posts here and there as I add things, especially if people show any interest in it. Basically though, it's a throwback the old 16 bit RPG era of gaming - one of my favorite times in gaming history.

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