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| ==SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT CHANGE==
| | If you're interested enough to read the following ideas, please consider leaving some feedback. |
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| It's become obvious that there are many trivial disagreements about parts of the story / setting, that I had hoped to work around. Instead, because it's too much trouble to please everyone, I think I'll opt to simplify my original proposal a bit. As before, I'll attach suggestions about how some ideas might effect other areas of the game, such as the system in general.
| | ==swimming & oceanwalking== |
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| Here are some of my thoughts about possible changes we could apply:
| | Swimming does not work in the same manner as it does, on the real world. On the mana world, the only place where one can swim, is where the water meets air. Any level of swimming ability probably determines how fast you're able to move across this top layer of airy water. You can only swim on the surface of the water and can not simply sink, or dive downward to access the ocean floor; No Z-axis. |
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| ===Four elements instead of eight===
| | However, if you have gills or some other method of waterbreathing, you can walk safely on the ocean floor. As stated, this can not be accomplished by sinking or diving, since the layer of airy water can not be penetrated. The only common places to access the ocean floor, are beaches. Beaches serve as ramps to and from the ocean floor. There probably aren't very many access points to the ocean floor. |
| Everyone likes the basic '''fire, water, earth, air''' structure, but when anything is added to it, it seems to quickly become too unbelievable. The original plan for the 8 elements was to give a guideline for the amount of races, as well as a way to categorize a magic system.
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| Which sort of leads to the next suggestions.
| | With this contrast between swimming and oceanwalking, we can allow people to swim without ever having to depict under-water swimming. (which would require more sprite frames) Swimming can be portrayed as simply as it is in other 2d games, like Zelda and Graal.. where the character's head is (partially) above water, with some simple splashing graphics and sounds to assist the illusion. |
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| ===Appearence over race===
| | Under-water travel on the other hand, could be done fairly exactly as it's done in the SNES title "Breath of Fire".. a method of which I am very fond. |
| It also seems to be an agreeable notion, that a race system might end up feeling like more of a restriction than a source of variety. If we were able to make the playerset more modular, people could just customize their appearence somewhat, when they create a character. Instead of having obvious labels for a strict set of races, everyone would just be 'people'.. we can still make region / country / kingdom names and such, even make certain appearences more common in certain areas.
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| Instead of having all of this Talpan, Sparron, Tritan-stuff, perhaps we should be more playfully subtle about it. Most of the populous can be generally human in appereance, but occasionally someone looks like a fishperson, dogperson, etc.. That said, just becuase someone looks like a fish, shouldn't mean that they are excellent swimmers or practice in the art of water magic. Maybe it's just a fish-faced farmer, who's never even been swimming. I just think it'd be way cooler if we had an environment that wasn't so easily labelled and segregated. (to avoid stuff like what I just mentioned..)
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| '''examples of stereotyping with race and ability:'''
| | ==elements and materials== |
| *''"Hey fish-face, why don't you magic me up a glass of water, eh?"''
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| *''"Hey fish-face, let's go swimming, eh?"''
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| *''"Hey dog-face, how's that guy's butt smell?"''
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| *''"Hey dog-face, FETCH!"''
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| ..imagine you're walking down the street with your friend and there are lots of people around you; lots of people of different nationality and more importantly, different skin-tones.. So everything is normal and your friend suddenly and loudly comments on someone's appearence, just because they have a different color skin than him. This would most likely be taken as an insult of racist nature. I would like to transpose this fact of society to the Mana World, but with seemingly more obvious animal qualities.
| | I've been trying to come up with a material tree, based on three fundamentals: The fantasy-style elements that we've adopted, the real-life table of elements and of course, as the governing guideline, the rule of cool. Unfortunately, I was once again unable to come up with a complete idea on my own, but this is the gist of it. |
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| In the same manner that the previous example was insulting in the real world, the following should be equally insulting in the Mana World.
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| http://www.inotthink.info/images/tmw/people_without_races.jpg
| | ===energy to matter=== |
| | Using the following forces, elemental energy can be converted in to various types of matter. |
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| Appearence is just starting to feel like a bad thing to attach skills and such to. For example, if you make a new character that has a fish-head and you consciously don't distribute any starting points to swimming skills, water magics, etc.. you'll be much more aware of the fact that in this world, appearence shouldn't be taken so literally in relation to a character's abilities. Assumption like that will remain however, if we have a strict race system with racial modifiers and abilities attached to them. If we are only planning to use race as a method of spicing up the choice in character models, let's make it more customizable.
| | *fire = heat |
| | *lightning = electricity |
| | *air = gas? wind? |
| | *ice = cold |
| | *water = moisture |
| | *plant = acid |
| | *earth = pressure |
| | *metal = magnetics? gauss? |
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| ==A POSSIBLE FOUNDATION FOR A SYSTEM WITHOUT RACES==
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| There are at least a couple games I'm inspired by for this suggestion: ''Paladin's Quest'' for its incremential, magical-attribute system; ''Breath of Fire'' for the use of animorphic people, with more emphasis on specific traits than race; ''Fallout'' because of the personal traits used in the character creation process, to fine tune/detail the character.
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| ===Attributes===
| | These could be some of the basic forms of matter that we're able to create from elemental energy. ''Metal is the only complete set amongst these examples.'' |
| There would have to be some sort of starting cap / max for scores like these, to avoid characters starting with all of their points distributed to one attribute. However it's mathematically accomplished, each attribute should have at least one point, when you create a character.
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| '''Body'''
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| *http://www.inotthink.info/images/tmw/att_body_strength.png ''STRENGTH'' : muscular efficiency/power
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| *http://www.inotthink.info/images/tmw/att_body_dexterity.png ''DEXTERITY'' : manual coordination
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| *http://www.inotthink.info/images/tmw/att_body_agility.png ''AGILITY'' : bodily precision
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| *http://www.inotthink.info/images/tmw/att_body_stamina.png ''STAMINA'' : health, endurance, etc
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| '''Mind'''
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| *''Will'' : mental efficiency/power
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| *''Intuition'' : how well you learn by doing, without instruction.
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| *''Perception'': how well you learn by lesson, observation, study, etc
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| *''Luck'' : luck.
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| '''Soul'''
| | ;Earth:sulfer (heat), lithium (elec), silicon (pressure), carbon (magnet) |
| *''Fire'' : your potential to control Fire elmental enregy.
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| *''Water'' : your potential to control Water elemental energy.
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| *''Earth'' : your potential to control Earth elemental energy.
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| *''Sky'' : your potential to control Sky elemental energy.
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| ===Traits===
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| ''Adding more later..''
| | ;Metal:iron (heat), aluminum (elec), titanium (gas), cobalt (cold), tin (moisture), zinc (acid), lead (pressure), nickel (magnet) |
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| ===Abilities===
| | ''Aside from the potential to be blended in to alloys, each type of metal could have various forms of modification applied to them.'' (hardened, tempered, galvanized, etc..) |
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| ''Adding more later..''
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| ==RETELLING THE STORY, IN THE HOPES OF PRODUCING A MORE AGREEABLE SETTING==
| | ;Air:nitrogen (cold), hydrogen (moisture), xenon (acid) |
| ''This version of the story would call for the following: four elements, four spirits, four gods, four ancient heroes (elders or sages would work, too.); no race system; a primary epic quest involving the collection of crystal shards, with subsequent option to seek out the original crystals, in an effort to return the shards from whence they came; possibly a more modular use of playerset graphics, to better accomodate a raceless system.
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| A long time ago, civilization was manipulated by four vengeful and petty gods. These gods used their subtle influence to turn mankind against itself. After a long age of war, society was nearly annhialated; few remained alive.
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| When all hope seemed lost, four heroes emerged with powers rivaling that of the gods. With the help of every able bodied person in the world, these heroes were able to banish the gods.
| | ''obviously, it's a little easier to do with Metal than the others.'' I imagined this might somehow lead to a the development of a metal / alloy-tree, that would actually have some sort of function beyond sounding cool. Another purpose was to provide a foundation for at least some level of familiarity. For example, it's fairly common knowledge that steel is usually made from a mixture of iron and carbon; wouldn't it be cool if that mixture ''actually'' resulted in a steel product, when you tried it in-game? It would definitely take some discussion to make it usable, but I would love to see a material tree developed beyond a generic list of things like, "ore, wood, blah blah blah.." |
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| This was accomplished by the use of immense magics, the likes of which modern mankind has not nearly harnessed. The gods were pushed into the elemental recycling process, where their immense forces of will impacted with that of the spirits, who were then forced into the physical universe; where they took an inactive new form, as crystals.
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| Though they had been sealed away, the gods had dealt a considerable blow to civiliation. So much was destroyed, that very little of mankind's sum of knowledge was able to be passed down through the generations.
| | Another piece of the idea was to reference historical alchemy. The above mentioned metals could be basic forms of the precious metals. Iron could be turned in to Gold, while titanium could be turned in to Silver. Aluminum (being relative to electricity which is between Silver and Gold) could be turned in to Electrum. If we did this, an imbalance in currency value could be avoided, by using fiat currency in all civilized areas. Precious metals might then be reduced to a value more relative to their usable qualities. |
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| To make matters worse, the four heroes were banished with the gods. Imprisoned inside the spirits (who now existed physically for the first time as crystals), the four gods and heroes continued their battle.
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| Eventually each god was able to overpower the hero trapped with them, barely escaping the crystalline prison and leaving the hero stuck inside the now cracked and detereorated crystals.
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| These escapes required so much force, that each crystal lost much of its mass when the god finally burst out. Countless shards of each crystal scattered outward, across the world. Mankind is so feebly attempting to rebuild their society, that this turn of events goes virtually unnoticed.
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| The crystalline form of the spirits functioned in a similar, but less direct fashion than their previous, nonphysical form; instead of directing energy to the gods, the elements simply poured out of the crystals into the world, free for anything to interact with. However oblivious to this escape, mankind still collectively posed too much of a threat to the gods, now that the spirits indescriminantly spew energy.
| | ==comments== |
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| Fully aware of this fact, the gods went into hiding.. opting to bide their time and use their powers of patience and manipulation, instead of attacking mankind outright; a battle the gods would surely lose, as long as mankind's society is somewhat united.
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| ''still playing with this..''
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| ==THE STORY AFFECTING OTHER AREAS OF DEVELOPMENT== | |
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| ===Geography===
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| This is easily the most troubling area to discuss change, as far as a group effort goes. Some of you are telling me to do what I feel needs to be done, others are telling me to make a story around the old geographical layout (from the old story), which I never had the intention of doing. It's obvious that the world map either needs to be done by one person or a small (predetermined) group, or it will continue to be the most repetetively scrutinized aspect of development. What I've begun documenting here should serve adequately for anyone to just design a world upon; whether I have any say in the actual world development at this point, I'm starting to not care. I'll just offer some simple guidelines to ponder, should this suggestion be implemented:
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| *are the four crystals in an even and symmetrical layout in the world, or are their locations slightly askew?
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| **It depends on how secret/hidden away we want the crystals to be, as far as society's general perspective.
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| ***Are normal townsfolk telling you how to find the crystals, or is it a more elusive search than that?
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| ===Main epic quest===
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| *I had sort of imagined using the epic quest (collecting crystal shards) as something that average people wouldn't really have much knowledge of; something to answer to the question, "Why are these characters so special, in comparison to the rest of the average world?"
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| **It also lends some reason why the crystal shards might hold some significant source of power for the characters to tap into; guardians of crystal shards could often have special powers, acquired from the shards they carry.
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| ***The whole collection of crystal shards could be used in a number of different ways, as far as characters acquiring powers, abilities, traits, score modifiers, etc.. perhaps by holding them, adorning equipment with them, absorbing them; it's very open to interpretation.
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| ===Misc gameplay notes===
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| *The basic idea that I had for the collection of crystal shards, was that you would somehow have the option to keep a crystal or crystals, thereby allowing you to tap into its powers.. or another option, to seek out the originating crystal (fire = red, water = green, sky = blue, earth = purple, yellow, whatever..) and replace the shard.
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| **We could do something with that as well, like: each shard your character returns to a crystal is tallied into some sort of score for your account. That score could be used to unlock new traits for your new characters. ''I know Elven pretty put a veto on any "unlocking" features, but I figured it was worth mentioning anyway.''
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| Please comment on anything here, email to david(at)inotthink.info, or PM me on the forums.. I'm sorry I haven't been on IRC, but it seems like any time a discussion about this stuff lasts for longer than a few moments, it gets out of hand and turns into a disagreement. I'll never be able to please everyone I guess, but I sure can try.
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| [[User:Dabe|Dabe]] 21:12, 22 October 2006 (CEST)
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If you're interested enough to read the following ideas, please consider leaving some feedback.
swimming & oceanwalking
Swimming does not work in the same manner as it does, on the real world. On the mana world, the only place where one can swim, is where the water meets air. Any level of swimming ability probably determines how fast you're able to move across this top layer of airy water. You can only swim on the surface of the water and can not simply sink, or dive downward to access the ocean floor; No Z-axis.
However, if you have gills or some other method of waterbreathing, you can walk safely on the ocean floor. As stated, this can not be accomplished by sinking or diving, since the layer of airy water can not be penetrated. The only common places to access the ocean floor, are beaches. Beaches serve as ramps to and from the ocean floor. There probably aren't very many access points to the ocean floor.
With this contrast between swimming and oceanwalking, we can allow people to swim without ever having to depict under-water swimming. (which would require more sprite frames) Swimming can be portrayed as simply as it is in other 2d games, like Zelda and Graal.. where the character's head is (partially) above water, with some simple splashing graphics and sounds to assist the illusion.
Under-water travel on the other hand, could be done fairly exactly as it's done in the SNES title "Breath of Fire".. a method of which I am very fond.
elements and materials
I've been trying to come up with a material tree, based on three fundamentals: The fantasy-style elements that we've adopted, the real-life table of elements and of course, as the governing guideline, the rule of cool. Unfortunately, I was once again unable to come up with a complete idea on my own, but this is the gist of it.
energy to matter
Using the following forces, elemental energy can be converted in to various types of matter.
- fire = heat
- lightning = electricity
- air = gas? wind?
- ice = cold
- water = moisture
- plant = acid
- earth = pressure
- metal = magnetics? gauss?
These could be some of the basic forms of matter that we're able to create from elemental energy. Metal is the only complete set amongst these examples.
- Earth
- sulfer (heat), lithium (elec), silicon (pressure), carbon (magnet)
- Metal
- iron (heat), aluminum (elec), titanium (gas), cobalt (cold), tin (moisture), zinc (acid), lead (pressure), nickel (magnet)
Aside from the potential to be blended in to alloys, each type of metal could have various forms of modification applied to them. (hardened, tempered, galvanized, etc..)
- Air
- nitrogen (cold), hydrogen (moisture), xenon (acid)
obviously, it's a little easier to do with Metal than the others. I imagined this might somehow lead to a the development of a metal / alloy-tree, that would actually have some sort of function beyond sounding cool. Another purpose was to provide a foundation for at least some level of familiarity. For example, it's fairly common knowledge that steel is usually made from a mixture of iron and carbon; wouldn't it be cool if that mixture actually resulted in a steel product, when you tried it in-game? It would definitely take some discussion to make it usable, but I would love to see a material tree developed beyond a generic list of things like, "ore, wood, blah blah blah.."
Another piece of the idea was to reference historical alchemy. The above mentioned metals could be basic forms of the precious metals. Iron could be turned in to Gold, while titanium could be turned in to Silver. Aluminum (being relative to electricity which is between Silver and Gold) could be turned in to Electrum. If we did this, an imbalance in currency value could be avoided, by using fiat currency in all civilized areas. Precious metals might then be reduced to a value more relative to their usable qualities.
