I was recently reading a post on these forums about someone who wanted to do a historical RPG. So it really got me thinking and I started writing some stuff down. That turned into doing some choicescript work and so on. The finished piece of work is one of my favorite stories I have ever written.
Legions of Rome takes you into the fighting sandals of a roman legionary as he campaigns across the ancient world. It utilizes the new *image command to really help the reader become immersed in the plot and have a clear picture of what is going on. It features a stat system built around the gear that you carry and all content is historically accurate as possible. You will definetly have an advantage playing this game if you are familiar with roman military tactics.
Despite the historical information and all the background story, I really made an effort to weave some really dynamic characters into this story as well. I hope you agree as well as you can read the first scene of the book right down below.
The first scene focuses on setting the mood and tone for the rest of the story as well as setting up your stats and giving you some wise pointers for staying alive. You will also meet two of the main characters. The wise but ambitious Marcus, and the strong but short tempered Quintus.
Hey Matt, welcome! Iâd enjoy seeing a Roman game, and hope you keep developing this one.
It will be interesting to see how the choices you make in the sneak peak actually affect combat â e.g., what the stamina/defense tradeoff means in game terms.
Is there a hidden stat that tracks your relationships with Quintus and Marcus?
One of the image links didnât work on my read-through â in the second page, where itâs talking about your centurion uncle.
There are also still several few spelling and grammar problems â might want to have another look over it. (Sorry that I donât have time to do a good proofread for you myself at the moment)
The choices that you made in the first scene are extremely important to the rest of the game. Potentially more important are things that you are taught in the text about sword techniques or how the legion works. That knowledge will be applied later in the game and you better know it.
As of now there is not hidden stats tracking your relationship with characters. However now that you being that up it sounds like a very good idea. I could simply add a loyalty trait or if I could figure out how to make a hidden variable for each character you meet that would be cool. Although I wouldnât know where to start to code that.
Iâll give it all another look over for grammar mistakes because Iâm sure their there
to code something like loyalty you just need to make a variable for the characters you want it for and for it to be âhiddenâ just state the variable in mygame.js but donât mention it in choicescriptstats.txt
Ways you could use it to effect the game is if a character has high loyalty they are more likely to listen to you. or allow extra choices depending on their specific skillsets for example if Marcus is strong but brash while Quintus is weaker but is more nimble, having a high Marcus loyalty could result in an option of sending him to wreak havoc on the enemy camp, or high Quintus loyalty coulde result in an option of having him sneak into the enemy camp to assassinate the enemy leader.
Thanks. I had one of my moments and I donât know why I didnât think about just putting it in the mygame.js and not listing it in the stats scene.
I will go ahead and accomodate that into the code now and start writing more on scene two and hopefully have some really good action sequences and show how your choices of armor and weapons really affect the gameplay. I will also work hard to make the interactions with the characters as dynamic as possible.
Thanks for your feedback and that second slate that the picture wonât show up has become a problem for me. While writing and testing the game on my computer it all works fine. After uploading the files through www.webs.com and everything works fine, except for that one picture. Nothing is out of the ordinary about it either. Its smaller file size then some of the others and its dimensions are not unusual either. It really is boggling my mind as to what may be causing problems. I checked the code just to make sure and I donât see any problems.
Aside from the already reported errors, the game got me excited. History, war, it can definitely get interesting. However, I wonât lie, it is sad that it does not have gender choice.
The gender choice is something that I amthinking over. If I come at it from a historically accurate point of view then it should only be men. That would of course be very bias towards the games female player. Right now I donât specify if you are a male or a female so as to play it in the gray area.
Do you guys think I should simply ask are you a male or female? It wouldnât have any noticable impact on my plot at the moment, unless I got into a romance scenes of course. I really do need community input on this gender issue.
Well, if you are going for complete authenticity, then go male. It will be a bit tiring, since the male point of view has already been explored so, so many times that women and people outside the gender binary feel as if their perspectives were avoided intentionally; which I have no doubt is the case, not in this game, I mean in general.
However, if you go for the bona fide path, I sure hope that every single detail is correct. Changing anything, but not adding a gender option would bring unfortunate implications to the table.
Personally, Iâd love a gender option. Are you completely sure it cannot work with historical accuracy? This is not my area, thatâs why I am not aware if a woman could pull out a Sweet Polly Oliver in this game. It would be interesting, though.
I can certianly add a gender option to choose from. It really wouldnât do anything at all other then simply being displayed in your stats.
From a hisotrical perspective it just wasnât that common for women to be in the front line of legion and pull out her Gladius and start hacking down barbarians. I am however not going for 100% historical accaurcy.
I think I will go ahead and put the option in, but I wouldnât expect picking male or female to have any impact on the plot line or text at any point. I think it is completely reasonable to have a female option as I totally agree with the whole female perspective being avoided.
I was just looking at the upcoming game called Hidden. The developer for it actually added a second button below âShow Statâ in his case he is just using it for credits.
I am however thinking about using it to be able to bring up some kind of map that would show the setting that story takes place. So then you could make your choices based of not only your stats, but also your relative location on the map and the things around you.
Not to mention it would help the player envision the world in which he is living.
Yeah Iâm really hoping this will be something new and fresh for people to play and I really want this map idea to happen. I just have to figure out how to script it.
Iâm glad I have gotten a positive response from this so far. Scene two should be out by the end of the week perhaps. It will be longer then the first scene and have some really good action sequences and important choices.
Any good coders out there that might know how to code an extra button in under âStatsâ button? I want to use it to take the player to a map of the setting.
