Battle Castle is an experiment in doing blow-by-blow combat in the style of Fighting Fantasy within StoryNexus. It’s barely a game - it started as a proof of concept when must effects and rare successes were added to SN, and i just recently picked it back up and did enough work to make it playable. You can try it out here:
I had some ideas for making it more satisfying as a game which got scrapped for the sake of “shipping”, ideas I may yet add, but I think this at least shows that such a game can be built and can work within SN as it exists. I would note that my strategy of using a card for each monster is a little hard to wrangle. It occurred to me that I could instead use a single card, and make the “Fighting!” quality a MajorLateral. You’d lose the customization of the text but with QLD insertion, and a few special case actions, it could be very effective and much more manageable.
For a longer form version of this game the three features I’d like most are 1) equippable items, for obvious reasons, 2) “second chance” qualities like in Fallen London, which could hopefully be used to add some neat defensive and offensive variation, and 3) multiple rare successes and defaults to add some spice to combat, like critical hits and rare treasures, as well as potentially just a range of textual descriptions of an ongoing battle.
Looks like a good proof-of-concept. We did a similar thing in Zero Summer with the “Fifty Miles South of Lexington” content. I don’t know if you read Penny Arcade, but Gabe’s been talking about a deck-building D&D supplement he’s been developing. My theory is that using the Opportunity deck as a deck-building mechanism for combat scenes would work in a more satisfying way than using pinned options. That said, this works – it’s just not very dynamic yet.
Hmm. As a mechanical construct I think that’d get pretty hairy, though I like it at least conceptually. But I would think that would dominate a game entirely. While combat is all Battle Castle does, the idea was to put a blow-by-blow combat mechanic that would fit inside a game like a dungeon crawl with puzzle elements and exploration.
Oooo, nice to see how someone else is building a deck for combat. Obviously a lot of effort, so thank you for sharing. Gives me some ideas for elements to use in Zero Summer, aside from the deck system Gordon was referring to. :)
[color=#009900]The other two aren’t on the roadmap right now, I’m afraid, but may be after we’ve got messaging and social actions into the mix.[/color]
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[color=#009900]It’s really good to see this sort of experiment. It’s also the kind of thing that might be a good, non-abusive fit for a bit of the ol’ free-to-play monetization.[/color]
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