My apologies Jojo, wasn't intentional and I can't for the love of god figure out how I screwed up so fiercely...
Should you happen to re-post it I'll fix it all.
/snowdrop
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Greetings and welcome to our tiny community!
Superb intro of yourself, and thrilled you're here. We've been around for a while but are in need of people since CCG development interest seems to be close to zero out there, even in CCG communities In a way I can understand it, since the people hanging around in them are usually the ones that have spent smaller fortunes and since they already have done so "giving it up" and working on a libre game is maybe considered a bitter setback
Think that's the first time ever I have gotten anyone's attention in a meaningful way with a signature in a forum. Glad you found us.... btw intfiction-forum is a marvelous place. Although I'm there seldom, from what I've seen there are a bunch of amazing people there and much knowledge in that forum... and not only when it comes to scripting IF.I heard about this project from the tagline of post of snowdrop's at intfiction.org/forum.
I came across Inform 7 some year ago by accident and was amazed by three things: How cool it was, how easy it was, and how unheard of it was... at least outside the IF communities. I have wanted to learn it ever since but seldom have the time and am still a total beginner with zero IF skills.I'm an author of interactive fiction (using Inform 7)...
Since I'm still the benevolent dictator (or "caretaker", as I'd prefer to call myself) of WT overseeing the entirety of the project and doing misc. work on it, it takes up my spare time, leaving little free to learn Inform. My other obstacle is the language barrier - I'm Swedish, and my English is crap in comparison. Usually people perceive me as a very skilled writer in Swedish, but that doesn't show at all in other languages and it also makes me feel crippled both when it come to the aesthetics of a language but also the vocabulary. I'm very well aware that whatever I would have created in English wouldn't really be good according to myself, I'd never be happy with it since I'd know that all native English speakers would find it mediocre or average.
Some months ago me & Q_x were discussing in which ways we could communicate parts of a background setting for the world where WT takes place. One of the ideas that popped up was to write a short IF piece and put it online, allowing the readers of the official story of the game to play/read it through a self-contained story that circled around a handful of central characters and only take place on a single location, in just a couple of rooms.
Ever since nothing has been done on it since we lack both the story and the scripting skills in inform. I've played around a little just to learn, but that would just be the equivalent of like an hours of work for somebody with your skills.
Please check out the info page about it: http://WTactics.org/go/misty
If you are interested in writing a "whodunit" and want to be the lead dev of it you'd be more than welcome as you're the only one around that's both naive English speaker and already mastering IF.
We don't have any official lore beyond what can be found at http://wtactics.org/wiki/index.php?title=Story ...so you would have almost complete artistic freedom. The only things that we/I imagined were:
- Takes place in a castle.
- Plenty of people there, but only 5-10 are central.
- There is some kind of huge party taking place there and hotshots/representatives from many factions and regions are there.
- Player will, via what happens and what he picks up during the night, get a clearer picture of various tensions, political, personal, among social classes, science and religion, etc. It should however mostly be subtle.
- Our main character, the player, has some kind of mission. Upon almost succeeding the story takes a quick and unexpected turn: The objective fails miserably since a key persona (maybe the objective itself?) is killed and something is missing.
- Rest of the game is spent on finding out who the killer is.
Everyone is always welcome to be involved anyone of development processes of WT. In the end you will decide for yourself how you'll spend your time, if you want to do some IF and develop rules and/or cards, or just want to focus on a single thing.I enjoy the strategy and deck concepts and synergy aspects of ccgs.
What matters isn't that a person does just one thing or is involved in everything: What matters is that you enjoy yourself with what you.
Currently we are still trying to nail some details in the rule system. Next step is creating cards. If you are interested in rule design you're welcome to join the dev of the current system. If you rather create one yourself from scratch or want to adapt an already existing it is also perfectly fine to work on your own rule system branch.
I haven't tried out many online CCG:s since I didn't like the thought of giving money for just pixels that I couldn't materialize into paper even if I'd want to. The CCG genre is easy to transfer into real cards without any modifications, in contrast to many modern computer games (FPS, RTS etc). I want to have that option, and I remember my shock when MtG introduced Magic Online and it proved to cost exactly as much as the real cards, suddenly enabling WotC to sell cards out of thing air and make a fortune of them compared to the paper ones.I don't like the forking-out-all-your-money aspect. As such, the WTactics project looked especially appealing. I've tried online ccgs, and most of them are pretty poor.
The money drain in the CCG genre is happily slowly coming to an end with many competitors choosing to use distribution models where the product content is known and pre-defined (so called Living Card Games, named by Decipher(?) and then adopted by Fantasy Flight Games). Overall it is much more viable to be a CCG player today than 10 years ago. That said, 90% - 95% of all new real paper CCG:s are likely to shut down within just 1-3 years time, leaving their players adrift with their invested money and soon to be useless cards, no matter which distro model the company used.
Poxnora was a solid concept a while ago and is a very decent idea. I would be surprised if it still is in practice since they are probably forced to invent and release new stuff all the time that people would want to buy. Can't say how much of a powershift/inflation there is in it since I haven't played it enough. Problem isn't poxnora though: Problem is when companies design new stuff to a game not because it's needed or necessarily adds something to it, but because it's the main source of income. That will, in the longer term, crap down any good game system and make it obese of bloat "features".Poxnora was fun but too expensive to get into (and more a mini-fig game really. Elements is good, but it takes too long to get all the cards to realise any given deck concept.
(Totally unrelated to creating a CCG here at WT, but still: I'm interested in cloning/improving/releasing an open source http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/58281/summoner-wars using artwork from WT... Check out that game, usually gets top reviews and your armada-game made me think of it. )I've actually written cards games quite a few times. I used to have a webcomic and I made a little card game based around that. With friends I helped make a sea-kingdom defence card game: the players would set a grid of cards out (the sea), and then each player would have a fortress on each of the cardinal directions. They would then send minions from their deck out across the grid (according to movement rules on the cards), attacking other minions, manoeuvring traps on the grid and so on
You're welcome everywhere anytime. Just choose your poison(s). WT is a container where we have a couple of sub-projects that are going on, with the sole goal of creating a libre CCG that plays well and has an adequate aesthetical appeal. Currently the following is in development:Skill-wise, I can develop ideas, write setting, help with the interactive fiction stuff, and I've got a regular group of people that I can play-test ideas with.
1) a card-development site/software being written by ravenchild (aka foodoo on irc) that's called Sandscape. PHP / MySQL
2) two-three different webbased clients/servers that will allow people to play any ccg using their browser. slopes is the one that has done the most progress here with http://wtactics.org/about/sandscape/
3) one desktop client/server solution by aspidites & co called ViCE. C++
4) one unmanned IF project that hasn't started yet.
5) Rules
6) Card templates, Inkscape / Scribus
My hope is that we can nail a ruleset soonso that we can start concept testing it online shortly after new year.
Shout if you have questions or ideas.