Now, however, the project has been handed in, and I have exam next Tuesday, which will – no doubt – be rather exciting. The project itself is about game balance in board-games, which included me and my “partner in crime” made our own game from scratch, and making A.I.’s that could challenge each other in it, in order to prove said balance – a thing I really enjoyed.

Looking back, that would mean that I’ve actively taken part in two games (the other being Gwardar in the summer – which I still plan to eventually make into a version that doesn’t require a terminal-window and a ZiLOG-board) over the past half year – and enjoyed every second of the brain-storming and development.

As a result, I underlined one of the big questions in life: “Where am I going?”, which I had known the answer for quite a while. It’s where my education is leading me, at the least. Perhaps that’s also what my creativity has been spend on since then, and to build a bit on that, I decided it was a good idea to write a 6-parter blog on how I find the process of creating a game. Yes, it’ll be very basic – and only cover small ideas like these. But with all things, we always start with the small things.

So with that, I hope I’ll be able to scrap off some creativity from somewhere, and get this 6-parter going – and leave you with what I plan on covering in the different chapters

1. Getting the idea and developing the backbone
2. Visual results and basic testing
3. First signs of a game, modifying the base idea
4. First rounds of balancing issues and bugfixes
5. Battling an AI and customization – …and killing more darlings
6. Final touches and looking back

Till next time – which is hopefully a period sharply lesser than another 90 days.

For those of you that doesn’t know, I decided to challenge myself in the world of Sanctuary – the Diablo universe, and it did indeed prove to be a great choice. It was a splendid challenge, and the result is – in my own personal opinion – quite great as well.

After the defeat of Diablo beneath Tristram, Etophir – a paladin of Westmarch – travels east to find out more about the order of paladins, that seemed to have been turned to fight his kingdom. As his journey out-folds, he’s given a whole new view on what corruption can really do.

So, why wait? Read it right here, in PDF-format.

As last time, I’d love to get some feedback, and hear what you think of it – it’s my only payment from writing it, after all. As a result of that, I also updated my Fanfiction subpage, to better reflect the new work.

For instance… in one of the simulations (lasting 10 minutes each), over 500 Flame Shocks was fired, along with only 50 Lightning Bolts. Everyone should know that something is phenomenally wrong there. On top of that, Flame Shock seemed to add up to over 200.000 DPS. Hardly realistic.

On the flip-side, the other casts seemed to work out pretty well, and had their total values match my earlier alpha-version pretty well. The difference from that was that it didn’t do an actual simulation, but did a single cast of each of the different spells, and weighted them after how many of each I had done in a previous long single-target turret-fight. Problem is that that method made it impossible to correctly figure out how much various parameters meant (like the Tier 10-4 bonus – which might also be the one causing a lot of problems in the current version).

Lastly, it seems 4.0.1 is going to hit live very soon, which will make this version outdated already, as all the new statistic-changes are going live, along with new spell-numbers, talents and all that.

So long story short, I will officially have been postponing Thunderstruck for a whole expansion-pack. Or, well, it was at least that long ago that I started working on it. It’s not going to be impossible either, that’s quite certain.

Last time, I stayed within the familiarity of the Warcraft Universe, with the story “A Change of Ways“. The advantages was that it has a rich lore, with tons and tons of details and places, and the more obvious thing that it’s the universe I’ve spend the most time in, so far. But, what’s a competition without a challenge?

With that in mind, only two real universes remained: Diablo and Starcraft. Being more a fan of dark fantasy than science fiction – although I do like both – and knowing something about Diablo, I chose the realm of Sanctuary. The lore is less detailed, and lots of stuff is still clouded in mystery, which makes a lot of nice openings for a good story.

So far, I’ve gotten a plot shaped, and slowly iterating through it and adding details, fleshing out characters and figuring out what part they’ll have. The main thing I want to do, is tying the various games together, and make further connections, as one of the things I’ve been having on my mind lately is just that. Looking forward to seeing how the story will turn out. This time, I shouldn’t have a problem with with time running out – I hope.

Now, first of all, it was “just” (3 days ago) announced that the Mastery and Talents was up for a bit change, by giving us less talent-points, but giving each of these more meaning, while – as we have known for some time – making all the boring stuff passive. The way I’ve built Thunderstruck, is basically by having a long list of what the various talents does, and add those bonuses to the base spell-values, which are then used to simulate a casts, based on the characters current statistics (as these can obviously change, by using trinkets, being under the effects of [Bloodlust] or otherwise). Less numbers flying around should make that a lot easier.

The fun part about masteries was indeed the Elemental Overload (basically just [Lightning Overload], where Lava Burst can now be triggered as well), which I’ve already covered the basics of. The way I’ve done it, is basically that Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning and Lava Burst, are all simulated with the same function, with the only difference (except different input numbers), is that the later has a variable set that doesn’t let it do Overload, but instead causes it to always crit. Now, this is something I can change, and completely leave out, as all of them will be able to do it.

In regards to statistical additions, there will be three additions/modifications: Spirit, Intellect and Mastery Rating. The first two are easy, however. Spirit will simply (as it stands now) be added as Hit Rating, and continue as that. Intellect will add a conversion-ratio for Spell Power (and that is possibly being changed to “Spell Power on weapon”). Lastly, there’s Mastery Rating – but do we know that works? Actually, it is quite simple – if my assumption is correct: Like any other Rating, Mastery translates directly into a percentage, from the basic rating formula. This percentage boosts your current Third Mastery (in this case: Elemental Overload), by that amount.

So, basically, let’s say the base percentage of Elemental Overload is 25% (as it looks now), and our Mastery rating translates into 38%, we’d end up having a 34,5% chance of Elemental Mastery doing its wonders. I like that – it’s going to give some nice theoretical wonders in determining which stat is the best, and how they’ll end up scale with each other.