onebug

I have been posting about the game I have been hard at work on, Crucible of Aether, for quite a while now. So, I think it is about time I talk about what makes it so damn cool and unique: The Character Progression System.

Forge Your Character in the Crucible of Aether

The main principle behind Crucible of Aether's Progression is that every Player Character should be a complete history of their adventures. Each challenge overcome, every faction joined, and every vocation taken on should directly influence a character's growth.

Where other games have linear progression through class systems or predetermined packages, CoA characters grow alongside the exciting and unpredictable nature of the narrative.

"How is this achieved?" I hear you ask. The answer is twofold: The Skill System & The Career System.

The Skill System

CoA boasts 40 different skills, each of which is improved with successful use.

Plain and simple: succeed at a Skill Check, get XP in that Skill. Get enough XP in a Skill and it Ranks Up. (This mechanic is deeply inspired by my billions of hours playing Morrowind.)

What Makes It So Cool: The fast-paced, improvisational nature of TTRPG stories mixed with this system results in skills both expected and unexpected being utilized to solve problems and shaping your character in exciting ways.

Meet Garnet Moors: a simple tailor who found herself in the middle of a grand conspiracy

Garnet has a Background as a clothier's assistant, which allowed her to begin her adventures with a relatively high Weaving amongst a few other talents. She started her campaign with Weaving at Rank 20.

As such, she has found every opportunity she can to utilize her skill at the sewing needle. She has made wedding suits, patched soldier's uniforms, and even sewed secret pockets in allies' clothes. She has predictably Ranked Up her Weaving all the way to 34.

However, her adventures have led her down a dangerous road. A job fitting dresses at a wedding has found her amidst a grand conspiracy to overthrow a local lord. During this time, she has had to utilize her Investigation and Perception to spot half-truths and hidden messages, ranking them up from 10 to 16 and 15, respectively.

She spent time hiding from those who wished her dead, ranking up her Stealth significantly from 5 to 22.

She has even improved her One-Handed after coming to blows with an assassin!

The best part is: She is only 2 SESSIONS INTO THE CAMPAIGN! Who knows what twists and turns will shape her character?

The Career System

CoA has a whopping 63 Careers, each an ability tree tied to a specific faction or vocation.

Each character will begin their adventures with a single Career. However, by joining factions and accomplishing certain tasks, they will open up access to many more.

After Leveling Up, achieved by earning enough total Ranks in Skills characters will get a point to spend on any of the Career Trees they have unlocked.

Plain and simple: Careers let characters specialize with unique abilities tied to specific factions or vocations.

What Makes It So Cool: Characters become a history of their allegiances and achievements. Spent some time working for a shadowy group of mercs? YOU HAVE THEIR TREE NOW! Unionized an oppressed group of factory workers? YOU HAVE A TREE FOR THAT NOW!

And you can invest in whichever ones strike your fancy!!!

Here are Two Great Examples: The Ashen Reservist & The Union Agitator

So anyway, that's CoA's progression system: a simulationist take on RPGs that actively molds your character as you interact with the world. AND IT IS COOL AS HELL

Also, we are going to be opening up for public playtests in a few months. So, stay tuned! <3

Punkt slut

"Vi ska inte skicka trupper" säger de, medan de skickar två hangarfartyg till Medelhavet...

my brain only comes up with bad stream ideas, like "what if i played every single dr who video game, yes all the horrendously bad ones"

i don't even LIKE dr who

therefore i want to play it,

This list is arranged vaguely chronologically, but only vaguely; it's more in character that way (and allows me to group sequels and other similar things). Enjoy!

• Two games solely on the BBC micro: a text adventure called Doctor Who And The Warlord (1985), and Doctor Who: The First Adventure (1983) which is... frogger?? I guess?? Tbh, I don't know how emulate-able the BBC micro is, and i'm not... super interested in finding out.
• Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror (1985), a platformer for the bbc micro and commodore 64, this one i gotta play cause it gave us SPLINX the robot cat. it doesn't look good. stars the sixth doctor.
• Dalek Attack (1992), the first game with like... recognizable graphics. A platformer/action sorta game for c64, amiga, pc, and others. Apparently INCREDIBLY hard. Would need to check this out.
• Destiny of the Doctors (1997), a pc game from that glorious era where people's ambitions were sky high, they could get actual actors to record FMV for their games, and the games were... often very bad! this game looks TERRIBLE, it's mostly exploring weirdly textured mazes and interacting with confusing shapes, but it DOES have a ton of actual Doctor Who crew working on it! not just writers, but some fucking amazing FMV from doctors 3 through 7 and one of the masters. I don't know how playable this is as old pc games are a nightmare to get running, but look at this wonderful clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L2LkspJTxU
• Attack of the Graske (2005), a dragons-lair style "press the right button" interactive FMV movie starring tennant???? This is awesome. I gotta try this one. Fuck yeah, dude, i'll watch bad FMV any day of the week. Why aren't there more bad fmv doctor who games, honestly? These two shouldn't be the only ones!
• Top Trumps: Doctor Who (2008), a video game adaptation of the card game Top Trumps which i can only describe as the most british CCG imaginable. It's basically just War, but instead of having a single number you take turns choosing a stat on your card like "height", "intelligence", "fucked up and evil rating", "year character premiered on doctor who", etc. and both players compare that number. An obvious cash grab adaptation of a card game, but with funny little comic art of doctor who characters.
• Doctor Who: The Adventure Games (2010/2011), a telltale-style episodic point and click series that got 1 full series and 1 episode in the second series before being cancelled. These had real writers and look like real games, probably the most likely to be... some level of good?
• Return to Earth (2010), a wii game that looks so stunningly bad i'm genuinely in awe of it. I have to try this. This isn't just shovelware, this is some real top notch filth. Matt Smith got done dirty both by Moffat AND by video games, as his was the era of awful, awful games.
• Evacuation Earth (2010), a DS game that's pictured above; looks equally terrible and equally compelling to my kusoge-soaked brain. Amazingly, both of these have matt smith and Karen Gillan doing actual voice acting, which they did not deserve.
• The Mazes of Time (2010), an IOS puzzle game that i think is just another variation of sokoban; this looks even worse, and has the same writer! why did he get to do all of these. you're killing me BBC
• The Eternity Clock (2012), another game starring, you guessed it, Matt Smith. Why'd you let em do this to you matt. buddy. I just feel bad. This one's a sidescrolling platformer for PS3, PSvita, and PC that looks... better then the last 3 games, but not by much. Woof.
• Doctor Who: Legacy (2013-2019), a free to play mobile game that weirdly enough seems better then the above titles? It's a match-three RPG sorta game (as was the style at the time) where you unlock more characters and spend money and such, but by all accounts was much less miserably money draining then other similar free to play games and as time went on got way, way too many weird doctor who lore references put into it. Still, it's a free to play puzzle and dragon clone so it's not like, a good thing. Would be followed up by:
• Doctor Who: Infinity (2019-2022), a follow up to the previous game. it lasted for 3 years before shutting down, and due to it being an Online Games As Service Game, it's no longer available for purchase anywhere. Don't ya just love modern gaming?
• Worlds in Time (2011), a flash based mmorpg? I don't know who looked at runescape and neopets and went "we need that, but doctor who", but someone did, and it gave us this beast. I have no idea if any of it is preserved in 2023, but I highly doubt it; which is sad because it's the only doctor who game where you could be a catgirl. I'd kill to know more about this one.
• Say What You See (2013), an ios i-spy game that doesn't deserve the time i've already spent talking about it.
• Lego Dimensions (2015), THAT'S RIGHT, LEGO FUCKING DIMENSIONS BABY. The only game where you have the Twelth Doctor meet GLaDOS each voiced by their actual voice actors. This game is deranged. I think I might stream all of it just to see what actually happened in it, as it's fucking chock full of the weirdest crossovers lego could come up with. That is, if i can find a way to stream a super heavy on DLC game like this...
• The Runaway (2019), a short 15 minute VR experience, As Was The Style At The Time. Tbh, you could sum up a LOT of doctor who games as just "we tried to cash in on what was super popular, and thus our game has been forgotten because fads are forgotten and modern gaming trends are super ephemeral". For example...
• The Lonely Assassins (2021), an attempt to do the popular trend of "what if a phone game but it pretends to be an actual thing, on your phone" As Was The Style At The Time. Find some guy's weird phone! Play an adventure game with it! This game actually sounds like it was... at least passably good, and if anything is Doctor Who it's having some random guy get roped into a baffling adventure they don't really want to do! Have your game be completely forgotten in 2 years because ios games are the least preservable market imaginable... haha... It could be worse though. It could be:
• The Saviour of Time, a game that was only playable on skype by talking to a series of bots. This is an incredibly cool idea, that is also maybe the least possible to emulate thing imaginable. Fuck this, man. At least it can't get worst. Oh wait, nevermind, we could have:
• Battle of Time (2018), an attempt to make a card game that could compete with hearthstone/MTGA. Quietly soft launched by bandai-namco, then quietly soft-killed as they realized what a stupid idea this was. Sometimes, a came can be ephemeral AND bad!
• The Edge Of Time (2019) and The Edge Of Reality (2021), a VR puzzle game As Was The Style At The Time. Well, Edge of time was vr, Edge of reality was a frantic attempt to pull out the VR so they could put it on switch, making the game lose the only thing that made it interesting. Once again, they try to capitalize on The Trends, and once again, it makes them fall apart.
• Hidden Mysteries, a hidden object mobile game with maybe my least favorite art style of any game so far. And that's saying something, given what the matt smith era looked like. This game looks and plays exactly like every bad mobile game you've ever gotten terrible ads for on youtube. Maybe there's something worthwhile here, but it's buried in the absolute worst hell.
• Lost in Time, ANOTHER terrible mobile game, full of microtransactions and misery. Are you seeing the awful trends yet? The demons beneath the surface?
• Almost 50 assorted online games, most of them made in flash, most of them with no value whatsoever. A few of these are interesting, being flash game platformers or point and clicks or such, but there's no real way to distinguish between the "it's a canabalt clone" vs "it's got actual time and effort put into it" without playing them all. Which I might have to do. yaaaay
• Assorted crossovers with Roblox, minecraft, fortnite, and funko pop, none of which bear more then a mention
• Two pinball tables, one an adaptation of a real table and one a completely new table, both in the pinball arcade
• And lastly and most CERTAINLY leastly: Worlds Apart (2022) an NFT card game announced in 2020 that will never come out with a full release (god willing).

The picture painted here is one of a company completely unwilling to give money to people who want to make a good doctor who game, instead entirely captivated by whatever the current market trend is. When flash games look Interesting we make a flash MMO, when wii games have Motion Controls we make a bad wii game, when phone games are big we sell out on mobile, when VR is big we throw up a vr game, when people mention nfts... well...

Both unwilling to open up and let devs actually experiment with the license (aside from the rare opportunity that someone's gimmicky idea is being made by dedicated fans) and unwilling to fund a major project that could give it the time it deserves, they're eternally trapped in a hell of their own creation. I'm sure someone who knows the history of doctor production could explain this better, but mostly it just makes me sad. Perhaps someday this will change, but for now we remain stuck with a couple of interesting oddities and a lot of ephemera that cannot last.

Punkt slut