Updating is for losers. And archers…

A week or so ago I had a very productive period. It resulted in a whole bunch of pretty pictures and news worth posting. Since then things have been, well, less visual. Punch was actually played and deemed pretty good, so it just comes down to designing the few remaining cards and publishing it. It is literally that easy. There’s almost no chance that it actually ends up taking me forever to do a simple task like that. It would be unprecedented. Maybe…

In terms of actual work done, my entry for the RPG contest has moved forward significantly in just the past day. The only thing I really have to show for it though is a massive and complicated Excel document that won’t really look that great posted online. It doesn’t have a name right now, and I’ve just been referring to it as “the archery game.” Here’s a rundown.

Players take on the roll of a warrior stationed atop a defensive wall. Monsters emerge from the wood some distance away and make their way towards you, all while you fire at them with various projectiles. Each turn you are able to fire at one target, with some exceptions. Targets will look something like this:

There are three important pieces of information on a target card. The first two are its “aim” and “power” values, represented by green and purple respectively. When you roll your dice, these are the numbers that you must roll in order to 1: hit the target and 2: kill it. If either of these fail, the shot is a failure (unless otherwise noted on a card). Finally, the orange value represents that monster’s special effects. There will be only 3 effects, and they will be crazy simple, so it isn’t really worth getting into right now. Also, the art will be much, much better than this. I promise.

Knowing your target’s values, you can then choose which weapon you wish to use from your hand. Maybe you would want to use something like this:

The values on this card represent bonuses to your roll. The colors correspond, so your aim roll would suffer slightly while your power would be increased. Actually, this wouldn’t be a great card for this situation, but whatever. It’s the only one I drew. Finally, you roll. In every roll, you must choose six of the ten available dice, distributing them to either aim or draw depending on situation. Here’s what you might do with this shot against this monster:

Success! Your aim value summed to 12 (4+2+5+2-1) and your power ended up being 11 (6+3+2). You would have just killed the Skinny Goblin, claiming it as your prize. And now we reach the goal of the game: to kill the most monsters.

As the game progresses, you will rack up a body count represented by the cards you claim. The hitch is that while you succeed as an individual, you all fail as a team. The wall takes damage any time a monster is able to reach it, and that damage is not player-specific. If enough monsters reach the wall, everybody loses. No one gets to count up their kills and declare the victory, because you’re all dead. I’m hoping this will force people to work together just enough to survive, but not so much that it could be played as a solitaire game. I’m sort of imagining those scenes in Lord of the Rings when Gimli and Legolas keep count. Neither of them would ever do anything to intentionally hurt the effort in order to increase their kills, but when everything is over, they get to sit down and claim bragging rights.

Either way, this game will probably get tested sometime in the next week. And I guess I’ll work on Punch sometime in between. And you know what, I should probably update when I do those things, because that’s what you do when you make and maintain a website.