Frayed Knights: Entering Awkward Adolescence

My eldest daughter is becoming a teenager. She's hunching her shoulders and learning to say "Whatever!" and sulk a lot. It's a weird feeling. Particularly since I don't feel too far out of that stage myself.

My indie RPG project, Frayed Knights, seems to be getting into that awkward stage itself. It's progressing out of early childhood, but is still pretty far removed from maturity. It's a mess of code that kinda-sorta works together. Code-wise, it's at that awkward stage where the features needed for the April "beta-demo" are about 85% there, but they are in dire need of refinement.

Coder's Hell
Combat is too slow. The UI is awkward (not to mention ugly, but that's a content issue, not a code issue). Monster encounters aren't perfectly behaved. Monster scaling isn't working. Sound effects are firing off before the visual animations LOOK like sound should be happening. There are things working exactly as designed, but still don't have the "oomf" that they need. The missing features are glaring by their absense. The strategies aren't quite in place yet. Bugs are everywhere. I'm having trouble maintaining the code I wrote months ago because I have to re-acquaint myself with it and how its organized. I spent one night two weeks ago writing a feature from scratch because I forgot I'd ALREADY written it back in July, but I'd had to finish a couple more things before I could finish and activate it.

It also means that I'm not getting the nice little psychological rush of seeing huge new features appear after only a night or two of work. Two nights now equate to apparently minor improvements. I fix three bugs, optimize a routine and increase its flexibility, and tie in communications between two objects that were previously architected not to talk to each other, and add in two more sound effects. Woot. Go me.

Some Coolness
However, I've got Kevin Rogers as a member of my team now, and he's adding his considerable map-building prowess to make Frayed Knights look way cooler than my paltry skills could have managed. The dude is making the temple of Pokmor Xang (God of Boils, Blisters, and Pimples) look pretty dang cool. And ominous, for a god who's worshipers are best described as "redneck orcs."

I've also forked over some cash for content packs, which are going to need some amount of texture and possibly geometry modification to make them a better match for the game style, but I think they'll work nicely.

But At Least It Has a Cool Title!
I commissioned Shawn Boyles to work on the title screen. It's not quite done yet (Arianna needs some work), but it's coming along very nicely, and really gets across the . I think you'll agree:


The Game World
As I'm starting to transition from chief code monkey (if the coder's hell I'm stuck in will ever let me escape) back to game designer mode, which means lots of writing, planning, and testing. I've been working a lot on character dialogs, since, as a comedy, a lot of the humor comes from the conversations. I've been going back into the design notes and trying hard to flesh out the world, the history, and the characters of the Frayed Knights universe.

It's a weird, twisted place. It's sort of like what a D&D campaign world would look like if all the heroes acted like player characters. What's really fun is that these characters have started evolving their own voices and language (well, professional jargon). Or maybe I'm just going insane, hearing voices in my head. But here's a little cross-section of some of the terminology they use:

'Keet, (or Parakeet): A party member who is so useless that they are only good for sticking out in front of the rest of the party as an early-warning device for traps and ambushes.

Stomper: A newbie adventurer. So called because they "stomp around" a dungeon with their lack of finesse or experience.

Hand-Me-Down: Euphemism for equipment taken from the dead, particularly the remains of dead adventurers. Not applied to loot gained from enemies.

Chewspit: An adventurer (or thing) so vile that the monsters don't have the stomach to eat him - they can only chew him up and spit him back out again.

Class A Dungeon: An underground complex with intelligent hostile forces capable of mounting an organized defense. The most dangerous kind of dungeons.

Anyway, if you are curious, I've got my little weekly development reports and ruminations for you to endure:

Learning the Lingo

A More Refined Slaughter

Cartographic Incompetence and Dirk's Interview

Interview With Chloe

That last one is probably my favorite so far. Where Chloe explains the relationship between sex and blackberries.

Jay Barnson
Rampant Games
Tales of the Rampant Coyote