Category Archives: projects

Thrash 2.0: The Maneuvers

projects

It hadn’t occurred to me before, but it’s been a while since I played much in the way of fighting games. If my collection of old PlayStation, Saturn, and Dreamcast games is any indication I was really into those back in the day, and I have a good number of both import and domestic releases (Sega Saturn represent and all that). The point of all this is to get into the nitty-gritty of the special moves for Thrash 2.0, since I was getting a nagging feeling that there were some important moves I was missing. There were, though it was primarily the kind of stuff most people would overlook.

I played some of Touki Denshou: Angel Eyes, an obscure all-girl fighting game that Tecmo put out in 1999, with some of my favorite and most blatant fighting game characters (like Mysterious Power, a retro superheroine with bouncy breasts and a ray gun, or Chibiko, a loli P.E.-themed girl in bloomers), and an array of dashing and jumping moves that make for insane, kinetic fights (a homing jump!). I also finally actually played the copy of Asuka 120% Burning Fest. Final that I picked up for cheap during my trip to Japan like 3 years ago. That game is also a schoolgirl fighter, with each character using moves based on what club she belongs to (Asuka, the main character, is in the chemisty club, and has a special move where she tosses out a flask that explodes). The fighting in that isn’t as aerial as in Angel Eyes, but it’s still pretty insane. And I haven’t even gotten into the doujin fighters like Queen of Heart and Eternal Fighter Zero, which let you do off-the-ground attacks that most 2D fighting games studiously avoid. Unfortunately, my Saturn has seen better days (I think I need to try another RAM cartridge), so I didn’t get around to playing Vampire Savior or Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter. And I ought to go borrow a few games from my friends too. I got plenty of Street Fighter in too. I still need to play:

  • DarkStalkers
  • King of Fighters
  • Capcom Vs. SNK
  • SVC Chaos
  • Waku Waku 7
  • Samurai Shodown
  • Last Blade
  • What else?

The maneuvers in Thrash are getting a bit broader out of necessity, and certain kinds of moves have become recurring. I’m starting to be able to look at most fighting game characters and define their special moves in Thrash terms, which is a Good Thing. There’s a definite need for the maneuvers in Thrash to not correspond to the number of “hits” in a fighting game (not that they ever did in the first place…). This isn’t just for stuff like the Tiger Uppercut doing 7+ hits (to say nothing of the triple-digit weirdness in MvC2); in Asuka 120% there’s a character whose rising uppercut has a slapdown hit at the end, and it occurs to me that this could easily be treated as a “special effect” rather than making life needlessly complicated with a superfluous modifier or mucking around with combo maneuvers.

Anyway, here’s the new maneuvers I’ve come up with so far:

  • Blast Knuckle: A heavy standing punch that sends the opponent flying backwards.
  • Death From Above: The character leaps high into the air and comes down on the opponent. Popular with ninjas.
  • Forward Leap Kick: The character somehow jumps/flips/whatevers forward to clock the opponent with one or both feet. Not the most widely recognized maneuver, but actually pretty common.
  • Intercept Counter: Not 100% sure what to call it, but basically the special counter maneuvers, Geese Howard’s being the most notable.
  • Justice Fist: A powerful standing punch that knocks the opponent down. Named (for better or for worse) for Allen’s move from SFEX, but Karin (SFA3) has what amounts to an open-palm version of the same thing.
  • Leaping Power Throw: The fighter jumps at the opponent, and grabs them while airborne to do a throw. Alex (SF3) has this maneuver a couple times over.
  • Stepping Power Kick: A powerful thrusting kick done with a short hop. As seen in Cody’s Ruffian Kick, amongst others.
  • Through Strike: The fighter whisks past the opponent, and delivers a lightning-fast attack whose effects are felt a moment later. A very anime-esque move, and Gen (SFA2) has a super version of this.

I’ve also found myself poking at the Thrash Companion a little bit, which’ll be the first sourcebook for the game, and a general collection of neat stuff. Weird Powers wound up divided into the categories of Freaks (cyborgs, robots, mutant animals, aliens, guys like Blanka and Dhalsim, etc.) and “Metapowers” (espers, magic, gadgets, “otherworld power” — like Dizzy and Jedah — and so on). Freaks will mostly just be a set of themed character traits (should you want stretchy limbs, or claws, or whatever), and I’m not sure how to handle metapowers just yet. It’s also going to be a repository for wackier maneuvers and other character traits. Whatever crazy rules options I come up with will also go in here; I have a vague notion of a universal Thrash variant and an FPS-themed variant. Plus I have this idea for a thing called The Fighter’s Soul which would bring in a sort of narrativist “layer” to the game, and replace the game’s boring character advancement mechanics in the process.

So yeah, I’m definitely in the thick of things with Thrash, and enjoying it. ^_^

Mascot-tan: Update!

projects

A small update on Mascot-tan: the designs for the last two RPG girls (Twenty-tan and Story-tan) are complete. I’ll be making some minor revisions to the game, not to mention making the descriptions of the RPG Girls match the illustrations better, and putting up a snazzy, with-art-and-everything final version of the game in a PDF whenever I get around to it. I’ve made some good progress on Thrash 2.0, but it turns out I have a little more to go on that freelance translation work I was doing, so RPG stuff goes on a brief hiatus once again. TT3TT

Twenty-tan

Story-tan

Moonsick Part I

games, musings, projects

I sort of “accidentally” wound up working a bit on Moonsick, one of the games in my planned trilogy of Superflat-inspired RPGs, we are flat, owing in part to having finally bought Takashi Murakami’s Little Boy book, and in turn getting inspired to pull out Junko Mizuno’s Pure Trance (which is very unlike any other manga I’ve ever seen, and a bit weird even compared to her other works). The thing with Moonsick is that I’m finding it surprisingly easy to control my writing style in the same way I do when writing pure prose. I think reading Schauermärchen and especially Lacuna Part I did a lot to help me get there.

Lacuna does certain things that could put off a casual browser (some of which I intend to avoid), and I didn’t bother checking it out until a forum post tipped me off to why the game is the way it is. It’s called Part I even though Sorensen has specifically stated that there will never be a Part II (Second Attempt notwithstanding), it was the inspiration for the unfunny (IMHO) April Fool’s joke that got him banned from RPG.net, and everything describing the game is full of vague, leading questions and almost nothing solid. Nothing about the city in the collective unconscious or that there’s a fascinating set of game mechanics dealing with heart rate that’s central to the game, just cryptic stuff about Spidermen and the Blue City. The thing is, reading the book doesn’t actually answer all that many of those questions. There’s no such thing as a “right” way to play any given RPG, and in the case of Lacuna Part I that’s even more true than usual because it very deliberately forces anyone who plays it to fill in some gaps on their own. The back of the book gives hints, but even the GM doesn’t know what the designer intended the true nature of the Girl to be.

Moonsick is about girls who can’t grow up, who live on the moon and look down at an irradiated earth and wonder if the world was ever something different. It’s about feeling powerless and having a hard time making meaningful choices. The works of Junko Mizuno, Aya Takano, and Chiho Aoshima (amongst others) inform some of the game’s feel. The wording of the text, which stays rooted in this fictional world as much as possible, treats readers of the players’ section like children, and the game mechanics force them to make several choices right off the bat that seem pointless and aesthetic but are potentially significant in a purely arbitrary way. The number 28 matters in Moonsick for the same reason it’s significant in Akira.

The other thing with this game is that I’m winding up wanting to use visuals in very specific ways. The “rabbits” the game constantly refers to are not cuddly leporids (I’m not 100% sure what they are just yet), but the game text is not going to explain what they are, period. Instead I’ll have an illustration of one. Similarly, the fact that the girls on the moon all wear the same kind of white slip will only be shown in pictures, and one of the choices in character creation will be to pick out a hairstyle from a chart. I’m considering doing something similar with the various mutants on earth (like the Meltyplane and Prettyhead), purposely making it so the GM holds up a picture when the thing appears in the game, because it’s as close as he’s got to a description himself.

I have some vague ideas, but I really need to sit down and think about what rules the game needs, and what I want them to do. I think I’m designing a narrativist game, but I also suspect that simply designing a game about girls who live on the moon with rabbits that aren’t rabbits would be a better use of my time.

Hello, Old Friend (Thrash 2.0)

projects

I haven’t had a chance to do any testing with Halo: The Covenant War, but over at the Fudge Forum a fellow who goes by CmdrCody posted saying that he gave it a spin with his friends and they had a blast. I mostly design games because (1) I wanna play them with my friends, and (2) designing games is fun, but being able to share them is definitely nice. That third one is part of why my next big thing is to get back into working on Thrash 2.0, something that, if my old notes are any indication, I’ve been failing to do since 2002. Of course, I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere that this partly has to do with me getting so much more experience with RPGs, from every angle (designer, player, GM, reader, theory, etc.).

Thrash 2.0 has a lot of major changes, but compared to some of the things I could be doing with it in terms of creating a fighting game system (like going all Narrativist all of a sudden) it’s still true to the earlier versions. And it’s still doing a genre that no one else is really bothering with right now. There are some new martial arts related RPGs (like Weapons of the Gods and Final Stand), but they’ve tended more towards the kung fu movie end of things. Living Room Games had announced their Capcom World Tournament thing a while back (and I was very interested, even if I wasn’t hellbent on playing it), but a few months ago they announced on their forums that it was going on “indefinite haitus.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard that from an RPG publisher before, but I think it’s safe to say that CWT is kaput. The LRG guy was scant on details, and no doubt had to be for contractual reasons, but the combined weight of printing and licensing costs were apparently the main problem. This kind of thing is part of why I don’t particularly aspire to run my own company. The indie approach I think would work much better for me.

While I’ve been a fan of Street Fighter for ages (and of KoF, DarkStalkers, Samurai Shodown, etc.), I’m planning to concentrate primarily if not exclusively on original content for Thrash 2.0. I already have a laundry list of things I want to add to the game (and Weird Powers is at the top), though I’m going to be putting out Thrash 2.0 under a Creative Commons license, so everyone will be free to make whatever they want for it anyway. I also want to try to be more active on the mailing list, and having a version of the game I can stand to look at will help make that happen. ^_^; I’m also thinking of putting together an inexpensive POD version, so that those who are so inclined will be able to order a nice printed book, but that’ll wait until I’ve gotten through plenty of playtesting, feedback, and editing, and added some artwork.

At the moment, I’ve gotten the basic framework of the game all figured out. It was pretty simple overall, and what innovations and changes I’ve made were mostly either logical extensions of what was there before (like the more extensive rules for super bars) or stuff that should’ve been blindingly obvious (like getting rid of styles as a character trait). The bulk of the work I have to do right now is, unfortunately, the annoying grunt work of putting together the stats for all of the character traits, especially the maneuvers. Granted, I need to take care of writing the GM chapter too (which, like everything else, I’m rewriting from the ground up), but it’s the maneuvers and whatnot that will fill the system out to the point where I can run playtests. Just like with writing novels, everything I work on has gotten more time-consuming, but of better quality when it finally does arrive. :P

After so long writing/designing RPG material, I think I’m starting to get tired of writing descriptions of skills and other traits. To a certain extent it’s possible to design an RPG without these, or at least without too many of them, but apart from the annoyance it causes when I have to sit down and write descriptions–which inevitably becomes repetetive and boring–it’s not worth it to try to fit the whole game around that design concept. Risus has only player-defined traits for a specific reason, but other games rely on pre-defined ones for specific reasons. I just wish I could figure out a good way to write them without getting bored, especially considering that if I’m bored writing that part of the game, the reader can’t be all that enthralled either. The only time I ever manage to make that sort of thing remotely interesting is when I get sarcastic, but that only works for certain games (like with Mascot-tan).

Did you notice I’ve been trying to talk in terms of “designing RPGs” instead of “writing RPGs”? There was a blog post (and crap, I can’t remember whose it was) that pointed out that there is a difference, and an important one. I think it’s important to keep in mind that what I’m doing here is making games. There’s a side of it that’s similar to writing stories (but then, I do that separately), but I feel I need to try to give higher priority to the design aspect, and thereby make better games.

And once the beta version of Thrash 2.0 is done, I need to get back into Tokyo Heroes, my sentai/magical girl RPG (the combination makes sense if you read the game). All that one really needs is for me to finish up the rules for bad guys and write up some of the sample characters, and it’ll be ready to playtest. I really do come up with too many projects for myself.

H:tCW continued/24-hour Hikikomori

projects

I finally get Halo up (and Louis Wu at halo.bungie.org was kind enough to post a news item about it), and I’ve already got a laundry list of things to add:

  • Some more rules options for character creation, damage, and so forth. Some for putting the more standard Fudge rules back into the book, some new stuff.
  • Other optional rules for running a Red Vs. Blue style game.
  • Filling out the rest of the variants of the Covenant aliens (e.g., I have several flavors of Elites, but I need to add Rangers, Honor Guards, and a few others).
  • Stats for important characters from the games. Tartarus is going to be interesting.
  • Stats for semi-canon toys like the flamethrower and ATV.
  • Details for stuff relating to the Halo ringworlds themselves — stats for the Sentinels and the Flood.

Anyway, in a few minutes I’ll be starting my 24-hour RPG. I’ve posted about it before, but to reiterate (for myself as much for the miniscule number of people who actually read this) it’s going to be a “solo RPG” about hikikomori. A friend of mine suggested making it a more standard RPG, but with the different players taking on the role of elements of the shut-in’s deranged mind, but stuff like that has actually been done before, if mostly in the indie scene (Cranium Rats comes to mind) and in stuff like 24-hour RPGs. So for this exercise I’ll be sticking to my original idea, which is a little bit choose your own adventure, a little bit RPG, and a little bit writing exercise.

I decided to start after a good meal (which makes my choice of having lunch at Denny’s questionable), in the afternoon so that I work until late at night, then sleep, and wake up and get a few more solid hous in. At the moment I have some System of a Down playing in the background (“If it wasn’t for bad taste I wouldn’t have no taste at all”) and on the way home I got a 2-liter of Coke, which I suspect won’t last anywhere near as long as it should.

Wish me luck!

Update #1 (4:20 p.m.): Two hours in. I switched to Nine Inch Nails for my tasteless music, and the bottle of Coke is half empty. I should go easier on it. I’ve written just over 2,000 words, and I’ve actually figured out the basic framework of the game; I just need to fill in the details. If you try it out, you’re going to get a lot of mileage out of those ten-siders.

Update #2 (7:15 p.m.): I realized that I hadn’t eaten dinner, so it’s time. I also switched computers, since my posture will be better at my desktop (sort of). It’s currently up to about 5,300 words, and I really feel like I had the basic design (which was pretty simple, admittedly) in my head, and I just have to finish pouring it out and executing things. Still, five hours so far. I’m remembering the good and the bad about marathon RPG development. Ideally this thing would need a good amount of playtesting to get the numbers in order and balanced, but that’s how it goes. And after this I’ll be getting back to my freelance work, and then getting back into Thrash 2.0. I decided to switch gears and change from music (Lordi) to anime (Evangelion). Now, back into the action…

Update #3 (9:55 p.m.): After nearly 8 hours straight, and my brain is turning to Jell-O. I’ve written about as much as I think I can in one sitting, which actually has the game very nearly done. I’m going to write a little bit more, then go to bed and get an early start (I’m weird and I’ll probably be up at 6 a.m., or 8 at the latest) and do the remaining writing and editing.

Update #4 (6:05 a.m.): Told you I’d be up at 6 a.m.

Update #5 (7:39 a.m.): Wow. That’s it then. Download Hikikomori (I couldn’t come up with a better title). Be afraid. I think next time I need to not have so much of it in my head before I start. Like, not even a concept.

Update #6 (10:11 p.m.): Yay! It’s official!

Halo: The Covenant War, LAUNCH!

projects

It’s definitely nice to actually get a project moving. I’ve uploaded the initial draft of Halo: The Covenant War, the aforementioned Fudge-powered RPG adaptation of Bungie’s Halo video games. It’s completely untested, but them’s the breaks. Any comments would be appreciated. New versions and new matieral will follow paytesting.

My artist friend also realized that I suck at inking and coloring, especially comapred to him (which was not a big revelation), and took it upon himself to re-do the coloring for the forthcoming paper minis:

Up next is an adventure scenario for Halo, then Thrash 2.0 (fighting game RPG), and then Tokyo Heroes (sentai RPG), and I have entirely too many ideas for what’ll come after that. Plus a 24-hour RPG mixed in there somewhere.

Power 19: Tokyo Heroes

projects

The Power 19 are a series of questions meant to help guide game designers. I decided to take a stab at answering these for Tokyo Heroes, and later on other RPG projects I’ve been working on or contemplating.

1.) What is your game about?
Heroes that work together to beat up bad guys.

2.) What do the characters do?
Seek out, confront, and defeat bad guys.

3.) What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?
The GM comes up with the Monster of the Week. The players try to do what they characters would want to do, building up to that episode’s final battle.

4.) How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
The game has a milleu of sorts, but the setting is left up to the individual group. From the source material, there is a notion that heroes are the same in every setting. Despite the similarities and the crossover movies, each year’s Super Sentai Series is a totally new setting.

5.) How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
Characters must be made as a group, with many important details decided by the group as a whole, and thus they have to be concieved as a team.

6.) What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
Teamwork is strongly encouraged; going solo is difficult at best.

7.) How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
Hero Dice and Karma are the most important form of reward in the game. Hero Dice contribute to the teamwork side of things — and are all but required to win battles — while Karma points reward individuality and thereby create a certain amount of tension.

8.) How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
Mostly in a traditional fashion, except that at the end of each session players have an opportunity to give the GM input about what will happen in the next session/episode.

9.) What does your game do to command the players’ attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)
The heroes in this game must participate and do things in accordance with their Keys in order for the group to gain enough Hero Dice to function effectively.

10.) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
It’s a dice pool system using six-siders. The base target number is 4 (so dice come up as successes half of the time), but this varies depending on the circumstances. Hero Dice can be spent on any given action by any group member.

11.) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
The resolution mechanics are intended to strongly encourage teamwork. Characters can almost always assist their friends in some way, even if the target gets pushed up to 6. Unlike previous attempts at the game, it lets each player roll their own dice and see their contributions to the whole.

12.) Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
Basic character competence is improved by spending Karma points, while new weapons, giant robots, etc., are handed out whenever the GM feels like it.

13.) How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
The fact that Karma is the basis of character advancement adds to the characters’ individual drive for achievement, and is meant to create tension. That the GM periodically plays Santa Claus draws in the source material’s tendency towards deus ex machina, but also frees players to spend Karma on improving their characters’ abilities over time.

14.) What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
Primarily, I want to capture the fun, melodramatic, vivid, and cool style of sentai shows, and get them to play their characters to the hilt.

15.) What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?
The game is mostly about a genre, so the emphasis is very squarely on conveying that genre and why I think it’s cool enough to be worth the effort of roleplaying to the reader.

16.) Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
Aside from the fact that it’s meant to bring what I consider to be a really fun genre into the realm of RPGs, I’m really excited to see how well the Keys/Hero Dice really work. To me it’s at the heart of the game, and a big part of what makes it feel like it’ll fit the genre.

17.) Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t?
The sentai genre has been almost completely overlooked by RPGs, even in Japan.

18.) What are your publishing goals for your game?
My main concern is putting together a fun game to play with my friends, but if I can put together something that other people would actually be interested in, I’ll probably try to get it out there, on Lulu.com and RPGnow and such. I don’t have the personality or resources to really concern myself too much with it as a commercial venture, but from the beginning I was eyeing this game as possibly something to sell.

19.) Who is your target audience?
People who are fans of sentai, or at least curious about it. It’s a small niche hobby, but as I mentioned before there’s next to nothing for it in the realm of tabletop RPGs.

Do I post too much?

projects,

Halo: The Covenant War is coming along nicely now that I can spare some time to work on it. At this point I have a few more rules to fill in, and I need to finish statting up some generic NPCs (both UNSC and Covenant), and I’ll be ready to hand it over to some friends for preliminary checking before I throw it out onto the internet. Then it’ll finally be time to actually try out the game. :3

The aforementioned we are flat idea is coming together better than I would’ve expected, and at this point I’ve pretty much decided to go with simple, forgey original systems for all three games to be contained therein. Tenatively, the three games are:

  • Magical Burst: For a long time the world was without magic, but one day the magic started to come back. The people of the magical worlds can’t survive in the human world themselves, so they would recruit humans to fight for them, to become magical girls. Only, the magic won’t stop coming. Magical girls are becoming a nuisance, and the more of them there are, the stranger and more dangerous they become.
  • Moonsick: Earth was blown up, so we all have to live on the moon, with the rabbits. Some day we’ll find a way to fix the Earth so it won’t make us sick, so we can go back, but until then the moon won’t let us grow big. Are we even human now?
  • Spores: Mommy always told you not to eat wild mushrooms, but for some reason you didn’t listen. The mushrooms don’t like you, not at all. Can you get home alright, or will the mushrooms change you?

Halo: The Covenant War, Vehicle Minis

projects

I should mention that the Halo minis are only the things that’ll be used in the scenario I’m working on (or not working on, since at the moment I’m too busy to seriously work on fun stuff). Hence the vehicles part has only thee (including the Shade turret). Note the different Warthog turrets.

Also, although the guys at halo.bungie.org liked the character minis enough to include them in the random pictures that show up in the upper left corner of the site (though they have hundreds, so it’s not like it shows up super often), my artist friend is going to give them a proper inking coloring job. Now I just need the game to go with them… ^_^;

Halo: The Covenant War, Minis

projects

My artist friend is doing up a art for paper minis for my Halo RPG thingy, and he’s completed the major ones (just a couple of vehicles to finish things up), but he left the inking and whatnot to me. So, that’s finally out of the way. Eventually we’ll put together a PDF or something, but in the meantime here’s what they look like:

Halo minis preview!

I’m a big fan of his cartoony style (he does anime well too, as seen in the Mascot-tan illustrations, plus he’s doing a piece for Uresia). It’s a little weird to look at it just because unlike him I’ve played both games a whole lot, and the Covenant guys especially have a lot of weird details that you tend not to notice while they’re shooting at you.