Thursday, May 19, 2011

Long time....no time....

Well hello guys, been awhile eh?

Things have been going very slow here with AST. However there is nothing we can do about that until the beginning of June. This is because of our schedules are very hectic lately. I am in the midst of begging Champlain College for more money, finishing up my senior project, as well as studying for finals. Allen is dealing with a rather large Latin class he has been putting off due to the development of A Shpaians' Tale. He told me he is on Chapter 15 out of 21, and is moving quite fast. I know that Tyler is busy with school and his internship at AMD, so hopefully by June things will calm down in school for all of us, and we can work full time on AST.

Although I am very busy, I have been throwing ideas around in my head for AST, and figured I would share them with you guys and see what you all think:


  • Personal story: Your Shapian has their own personal story line throughout the game. This story is generated in a semi-random fashion. You will have a few choices during character creation, which change the generation of your Shapian's story.You story will deal with NPCs in the game, and possibly(I really want) others players as well.
  • Binding quests: When you are in  party exploring the wilderness, there is a chance that a random quest will be put upon that party. This quest must be completed to leave the wilderness. As of now, we have come up with one example of this and that is a kidnapping quest. One player would get kidnapped from a group of trolls, or something of that sort. The other players in the party must rescue them, while the kidnapped player tries to escape for them self.
  • Retiring: You can have the chance to retire your player, and he will be put into the real world as an NPC. He can give you quests which pertain to your personal story as well. If you retire your player, you clear a character slot in your account, and you can get small perks that you had before in you next character.
These are some of the recent ideas I have come up with, and discussed with some of the team. We want your input as well, so that we can have an idea of how we would implement them, or if we should implement them at all.

That is all for now guys, I will keep the blog updated, and I am going to be doing more Vlog entries covering  things like this as well.

'Till next time, this was your friendly neighborhood game designer,

-Connor