This is made of win: http://www.cardhunter.com/2011/10/dev-diary-12-story/ I cannot tell you how happy and excited that made me feel about the game. This also pushed the meter over into the red:
Flavor text? Backstory? I don't need no stinkin' words slowing me down from filling my progress bars! Especially not such an incredibly engaging tale of intrigue and ruin that both draws me into the game and gives me hints about future play! Particularly not if these words are akin to some of my favorite features of beloved games and are crafted by people whose past work has left me in awe! Give me vanilla linear progression or death! Yea, coming from a guy who always liked reading the flavor text on his MtG cards, or bugging DMs about who made my +1 sword and who died using it, this appears to grab me at my core. It looks like a great balance between having too little story and having too much. I cannot wait to get sucked into Cardhuntria. Also, this brings up an interesting question about the board editor program we've seen. If it would even become available to outside parties, I'd hate to see such an engaging gameworld get sullied by crummy player maps. No killing the Eternal Empress at level 1 or anything. Although I guess this could easily be handled in a number of ways, either through a vetting system, or simply distancing user-generated content from the game itself. Still, wow, its like you guys are reading my mind about how to make a game.
Would this be a good time to go "BWAH HAA HAA"? Would this be a good time to go "BWEE HEE HEE"? I, for one, grew up never even thinking of the possibility that "story" and "game" could be different things. How could they be? Here is the presentation: there are visuals, words, sounds and music (for computer games of course), and so on. Would you watch a new movie with the sound turned off? Would you make a CCG deck without reading the cards? Would you play D&D without wondering who built this underground labyrinth in the first place? In trailer content for Diablo III, Blizzard had Cain comment "Bah, no one ever listens." This was telling. There appears to be quite a contingent of people who literally do not care about the story behind the +101 damage Sword of Killing; they only care that it is one point above their old +100 damage Sword of Killin'. I do not know how these people can tell they are "having fun" if they don't play the game in the first place.
Whose sentence? Where? I don't see a problem with the last several sentences of the dev diary. I do, however, see that the last sentence of their first paragraph is ungrammatical and could use more verbs. Edited P.S.: Ah, you meant in the module. Yup. Stray comma.
Heh, that's probably the best internal logic I've seen in a game to explain why there are all these dungeons filled with magical items all over the place. (and yet I still can't buy a Longsword+1 even though people sell the store dozens of them a day...) It's good to see there's an overlying narrative, it makes things more interesting.
Glad you like it (assuming you do, of course.) I love the image of a highly political, suspicious, competitive court where wizards must make better and better items in order to not be shut out socially. "Oh, did you happen to see the diadem of flesh reaping that Lord Agris made last month? Simply divine! I hear he's giving it to his favorite gladiator. I can't wait to see how it performs during the revels." And of course it's an arms race; should one person decide to rebel, everyone else who wants to curry favor with the Empress will slap them down quickly, efficiently and very very painfully. The trick is going to be how we fold this backstory (and ongoing story) into the game.
It sounds like it's going to be a blast! The world at least sounds like it will have a different atmosphere than what most people are used to. Normally it's just a king or wizards are the most powerful always and that sort of thing, but this is new. I like it. I'm sure you'll get it melded in wonderfully. <3
