selene tan

You know, it comes to mind that NaNoWriMo and this blog are not working together very well.

In any case, the treat for today is The Nine-Act Structure Homepage.

It contains a description of a particular structure for movies and games – the Nine-Act Structure. The author goes quite in-depth about what he means and why his way is the best. The Nine-Act Structure revolves around a “two-goal” format – characters in the story start out pursuing one goal, then some sort of revelation make them realize that their first goal was not the right course of action, so they start pursuing a second goal that is.

It’s an interesting way of viewing things, and it certainly seems to work for movies. Does it work for games? I’m sure it helps, but at the moment I can’t think of any CRPGs that actually use it. I suppose Chrono Trigger might, with what happens after you reach Magus’ castle, but the reversal to the second goal usually comes late in the game. It’s probably a problem that I haven’t finished all that many CRPGs, for one reason or another.

NaNoWriMo progress: 2057/50,000 words = 4.102% finished

Sloperama

Lots and lots of advice on getting into the computer game business from someone who’s been in it since before the Game and Watch days.

Okay, this is a really really sad excuse for a game design blog entry, but I forgot and stuff and I need to get to sleep because I have a tabletop RPG session at 9 am. >_<

Errrr…

Medieval Demographics Made Easy

It’s a very cool site describing population densities, numbers of cities and villages, and similar things based on the size of a country. It has links at the bottom to pages with calculators for his method.

I don’ t know about other people, but sometimes I’m a sucker for accuracy and detail. It does seem awfully unrealistic sometimes how few random NPCs show up in most CRPGs, but it is an awful lot more convenient. At the very least, I think the cities should be more crowded…

A game feature idea I had after reading this article and playing Tales of Phantasia was to have a “money pouch” and “roads.” Basically, you would have a “money pouch” that you could put some money in for spending money, similar to putting food in the sack in ToP. Then, while travelling over roads, it was assumed that you would be using the money to buy food and lodging at various places, and therefore regain HP and MP as you walked. Roads would also have a drastically reduced monster encounter rate compared to the wilderness.

Aaaand NaNoWriMo starts… But I really should do homework first or else NaNoWriMo will suck all of my time, not just some of it.