Jump to content

Duck in a Top Hat

Member
  • Posts

    532
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Duck in a Top Hat

  1. Since mods put in the work to migrate all the scenario reviews, I went through and fixed the links, and added ones which weren't there or I missed before. This was supposed to help find scenarios to play at specific party levels, so this time I also separated prefab party scenarios into their own lists (based on keywords).
  2. We could include a separate license file acknowledging that copyright is held by their original creators, not the maintainers of OBoE, but the scenarios are bundled with the source code under the conditions of Fair Use. I'm not a lawyer but I've read up on it, and here's a quick resource: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ Including them in the repository would fall under the purpose of historical preservation of the material, all of which was created in the spirit of being shared for community members to experience without charge, and stands to have no effect on any scenario designer's potential market unless anyone is still specifically relying on website traffic driven by the Blades community (doubtful).
  3. @fractalnavel The source code for CBoE is already on GitHub, so yeah, what I'm suggesting is to add the scenarios to the same repo to keep all the BoE content centralized under version control.
  4. I don't know how big scenario files are, but unless they're somehow massive, couldn't we just add the definitive version of every known BoE scenario to the CBoE repository and package them with the binaries to keep the files preserved in a player-accessible manner for as long as the project is alive?
  5. Worst case scenario (pun originally not intended), couldn't the custom graphics that were hosted on those sites be mostly recovered by patching together the graphics sheets of scenarios?
  6. Right. If you use sorting hat, go with the newer version of whatever framework you decide looks interesting. And one more thing I'd throw in the mix of suggestions is the PICO-8 which is delightful for making and playing super low-res games: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php Here's one I made that harks back to BoA in terms of the gameplay: https://nqn.itch.io/apprentice-quest And a newer open-source alternative to Unity is now out there called Godot, which I've heard some game design professors prefer over Unity for their beginner students.
  7. Not a problem. For anyone's reference, I used a bash command to automate the download: wget -r -np -nH -R index.html http://openboe.com/scenarios/
  8. Making BoA scenarios is probably what put me on the path to doing gamedev. So I can suggest a few great tools, but none of them are designed explicitly for the sort of tactics-based RPG gameplay Spiderweb games have. I always gravitated more towards story and writing myself, so that's what these will be best for unless you're willing to learn programming and plunge into that side of things yourself (which would be an excellent investment to make). Twine - canonically one of the most accessible, fully featured tools for making narrative games for web browsers, of which Siren For Hire is a great example. Here's a really basic RPG someone made with Twine for a game jam, just so you can see it's possible. Ink - Like Twine but designed for games with much more complicated logic (like 80 Days and Sorcery which are worth playing if you haven't!) and compatible with bigger game engines like Unity. And there are many more options I've never tried (RPGMaker being one of them). Sorting Hat is an excellent website that breaks down those options in the form of a little questionnaire: http://www.sortingh.at/ Hope there's something useful in there. Lastly, the TIGSource forum is a great place to share your progress/creations in a dev log!
  9. Can I get a link to download a copy of all the scenarios to keep my own backup?
  10. Hey all! It's been a really long time since I played any BoE and I definitely never contributed as much to the community, or explored the best scenarios, as I tried to for BoA. Right now I'm spending my summer at the Recurse Center where I'm free to use my time improving my programming working on pretty much anything as long as it's open source. One of the things I've been researching more is game porting and preservation. I've been playing a lot of Openxcom which I'm really glad exists because the fixed resolution and other quirks of running the original game in DosBox would have stopped me from ever playing such a classic. I've made my own games in SDL2 which I know can be compiled to make web games using Emscripten. So my thought for an (ambitious) porting project is this: Fork the CBoE repository and set about rewriting the graphics code in SDL2 with a single game window, instead of SFML with multiple windows. Compile the game to web assembly and get it running in the browser. Host it on a webpage along with the collection of player-designed scenarios so anyone can play any of them online without installing anything. For now I think doing anything with the editor would be beyond my capabilities and scope. Mainly I want an accessible way for folks (such as I!) to play the old scenarios without compatibility issues, and to extend the lifespan of the game perhaps a while longer by porting it to SDL2, which is officially supported by Valve and Steam, which means it's less likely to stop being supported. Anyone thoughts, suggestions, warnings?
  11. Gwahahaha I somehow scrolled right past this post and barely submitted a bug report in the other thread. Anyway, it was nice discovering this tiny little scenario to play as I've had BoA reinstalled for the last couple weeks and haven't been sure which scenario to direct my nostalgia at. Good work, I love me some "Things Dintiradan Should Have Finished Half A Dozen Years Ago" Productions.
  12. Bug report: Playing on a Mac, when I entered the goblin cave: The Pesky Goblin inside was invisible as a result! But I was still able to complete my quest. First scenario I've played in like 6 years or something. Nostalgiaaaaaaaa
  13. This is great. I had ambitions to make a mobile word game but gave up on it, and this reminds me of that because too many word games are just a boring test of who has the biggest vocabulary. This kind of does that but it's also more about lateral thinking? I don't know, I just love wordplay and I think most games miss the point. Sending my first round of guesses now. It got really difficult around the middle, but then towards the end I spotted a few (I thought) easier ones. We'll see if my instincts are right, I didn't use a thesaurus or anything.
  14. Yeah I was too young to play the Exile trilogy and never got very far in the original Avernum 3 so I'm hyped. (I skipped the Avernum 1 remake because I beat the original, but played the A2 remake because I always petered off for whatever reason around the first arrival in Vahnatai lands.) An advantage of being too busy and never playing games anymore is that I also still have Avadon 2 and 3 to play through before Ruined World comes out.
  15. Reading through the first page of this topic the amount of nostalgia passing through my body is unbearable. Hopefully I can make time to watch some of the videos, maybe even get BoA running on one of my computers? Does anyone know how it fares on current Mac OS?
  16. I've been trying to get a group of meat people in my geographic vicinity to play good D&D (and other RPG) games consistently, and So who wants to play again? Last time (that I was a part of) the game was Fiasco, which was fine, but pretty janky to play online. I recently found this free tabletop system that's just a 12-page rulebook and seems good enough to get some zany adventures up and running pretty quick: Ellipses RPG System I'm down to GM. The rules claim to work well for either one-shots or longer campaigns, so maybe we just play once and go from there? We can use Slack or Discord or somesuch and play the game over IM like in the AIMHack days.
  17. I'm currently chugging through Authority, book 2 of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy. I'd be surprised if there aren't any other fans around here—the series gives me major Avadon 2: The Corruption vibes. Authority is much more of a slow burn than the first, Annihiliation, and while the first third of the book I was totally fine with that, it's starting to feel as if it should have been shorter around the 2/3 mark. Anyways, I recommend them.
  18. Whoa I'm coming up on 9 years! And also, same on so many of the points you mention! Same (among other things) and same! And finally' date=' saaaaaaame. But I sorta moved onto my own game development to make up for that. Have you thought about it as a hobby? Some awesome tools like PICO-8 for making cute little games like this (think of it as my new scenario, like, five (?) years later? They've got a cool community over there too! Would love it if more Spiderwebbers and scenario designers started doing PICO-8 carts.
  19. Hi everyone! I know I'm not often around these forums, but I've been playing A2CS on my iPad and loving it. I must have started A2 on five separate occasions, but never got past the first trip to Vahnatai lands in the old version. It's great that I finally have a convenient excuse and method for finally revisiting the game and experiencing the rest of the story. So far I've done two of three game-winning quests, but I'm finding the Angierach arena extremely difficult. Anyway, the reason I'm posting is that I write essays about games every once in a while, trying to analyze how game designers do different things with their games that I like. My newest critique is about the implicit storytelling I found when I tried to return to Fort Haledon after storming the Ornotha Ziggurat. I thought I'd share it here. You can read it on my blog. I hope you enjoy it! And if anyone has thoughts or corrections, they're more than welcome.
  20. @Dintiradan: Awesome! Team 1 actually decided not to finish our game because we wrote ourselves into somewhat of a corner. Act One was a good time, but I don't know if the log is worth posting. In other news, my meatspace friends have started playing roleplaying games in a big way, and it's fantastic! We've been playing D&D every Sunday for about the past month. One of my other friends stepped up to DM and is doing a wonderful job with it. I also have lots of people interested in playing meatspace Fiasco now! My cup doth overflow. I still might be a willing participant/coordinator for more online roleplay with y'all, though. How much interest is there in throwing a Fiasco encore? I also thought Microscope sounded like the kind of thing that would be great with this group, and I'd totally be willing to buy the book to make that happen.
  21. In a little under four and half hours, now.
  22. The 7th works for me.
  23. Alright, if I've done my math correctly, we're aiming to start our game in around 32 hours and 45 minutes. There's still a good deal of players not in the Slack channel. Send me your emails as soon as you can, so we're all ready and don't have last minute technical issues with the chatroom. This morning I'm going to whip up a custom dice roller in Python along with some Google Doc templates for managing the game alongside the channel. We should also settle on a couple playsets as soon as possible. Regina's Wedding won the popular vote, but I'm thinking it might be a little boring to run two of the same game (although they will of course be radically different). Let's discuss it in the Slack?
  24. I'm going to suggest we use a Slack channel to plan and run the games. It's just a browser-based chat client with support for multiple channels, DMs, etc. Basically just an IRC with visible message archiving. I've made a channel for it already. The only problem is, channels are invite-only. So if everyone who wants to play can PM me your email addresses, I can get everyone in on it. We can use the channel to plan the 17th in more specific detail.
  25. After 5 entries in the calendar, here is what we've got to work with. Hopefully 3 hours will be enough for a session over chat. I'd like to suggest these times (Mountain time): Plan A: Saturday October 17, 4:00 PM - 7:00 PM. Plan B: Saturday October 24, 4:00 PM - 7:00 PM. If the 17th works for most/all of us, we'll plan for that. If anyone hasn't yet filled out the calendar, just let me know if either of those works. EDIT: It's Halloween. What was I thinking? Why don't we try a couple of these more "spooky" playsets? Back to the Old House Camp Death Salem 1692 Living Dead
×
×
  • Create New...