@Brian, pleased you liked the rewarding abilities option. Threeblacknoises is to thank for that, since it was an idea he came up with. Although it didn’t get added to Sable until the Alpha, its been in there for a while now. I think in the video I posted in December, when I’m going through all the new speech options with the first NPC I create, I briefly show off rewarding options, although I don’t set an ability reward you see the option in there.
@dragons, thanks as ever for the continued support, pleased to hear you liked all the additions in the change log we posted earlier this week.
@fred, I’ll answer your questions below, as Brian said though most of what you Aare asking for is more likely to be stuff for gen 2. I’m currently doing a final play through of the prototype and then going to take a little break whilst the game design team work on Crimson Eclipse, so I’m not really at this stage looking to add more features to the prototype. although there are a few additions I’d like to add before its release, most major changes will probably be more likely to appear in generation 2. Although I could keep constantly adding new features to the prototype, it would just push the eventual release date further and further back, plus I’ll never actually get started on gen 2 anyway, answers to your specific questions below:
1. Enemies speaking something when they reach a certain HP. Recently various posts have suggested stuff similar to this, where an enemy would do something based on certain criteria, or actions. As mentioned, I’d like to add more advanced battle systems into generation 2, including a trigger type counter system , where the creator can specify specific actions/trigger points where the enemy would perform a specific action, or group of actions, following certain triggers. It’s a really good idea and would add lots of flexibility, but its outside of the scope of the prototype, so sadly this would definitely be a feature better suited to gen 2
2. A building exploding when you get close: you could simply add this in from a storyline/game or sound design standpoint. If its going to explode when you get near, technically it doesn’t ever have to be there in the first place (since it’s going to explode before you get there. So, You just set the scene through audio queues or cut scenes to imply to the player that there is a building in front of them, . as you get close, you have an invisible event trigger which causes an explosion with sounds of a building crashing down in some cut scene, as the player moves forward they then encounter all the rubble, making it seem like the building exploded. This is definitely an Advantage of coding an audio game instead of a graphical game, as with clever game and sound design you can make your player feel they are experiencing something , even if that’s not really what’s actually happening, even graphical games do this to a degree, this is part of the art of game design. Take the video I created where I made a pit which the player had to swing over using a whip, the end result in the play through video made it seem exactly as if the player was swinging over the pit Indiana style but in reality as you saw in the making of the video it’s in fact actually something totally different happening. This is where careful sound and game design become really important as a game designer and where some out of the box thinking can really add to the projects that people create. An alternative , is there is an event trigger which can change terrain types, although you couldn’t do it on an actual building, there are ways (again with a little out of the box thinking) you could achieve this, by for example creating a blank object the size of a building, then manually adding in walls and other terrains and sounds to make it seem like a building. You then set an event trigger somewhere which triggers an explosion cut scene and at the same time alters all the tiles to rubble, making it seem like the building suddenly explodes, allowing the player to walk through debris where the building previously was.
3. Allow creators to set exp progression. I did add an option which allows creators to specify stat progression style for each class, based on some pre-existing stat progression types. My intention was always to extend this to allow users to create their own stat progression styles and exp growth. Again though, this might end up being more of a gen two thing.
4. Online activation. I don’t want to get into specifics about security at this stage, but I can confirm we already have an online activation system. its not the one we used for the alpha, as we’ve moved over to a more secure solution.
5. Sadly multi classing almost definitely won’t make it into the prototype
6. Downloading other peoples projects, As dan pointed out, this isn’t the type of thing Sable has been designed for, it’s been specifically created for people to create their own stand alone RPG’s. I want to avoid getting into specifics about distribution at this stage though, since it’s too early to confirm anything like that before we have even released our first game title and seen how successful that has been.
Hope that answers all the questions, sorry that so many of them have the ‘probably a gen 2 answer’, but I think its important to remember this first version is just the prototype, a proof of concept if you like, so we could find out if the community wants a set of tools like sable, if it’s successful then I can go on to make something bigger and better, with more advanced features and flexibility
Paul Lemm