Drums in the Deep

Alright, so now that I jacked around for a while with that DK thingie, there's a few different directions I'm thinking about.

First, there's DK Related Thingies, like redoing the way the database works, starting with the User part of it, 'cause that's what you'd need to do to start at the "beginning" of the thing.

It needs its Authority Part expanded out from just having Powerless Users and All-Powerful Admin accounts and Banned Users, it needs a Boss account and Admin accounts that can't jack with some stuff (like the Boss Account heh) and it needs Player accounts that can add their own stuff to the database and see and edit the stuff they've added without being able to see the stuff that the other players have added.

But that actually requires a bunch of changes to the way that the combat part of the game actually works, so that players can't add stuff that's mechanically imbalanced and junk, that whole skeletal mechanics of the thing needs to be buried somewhere and automated some so that players can add their monster-and-item pics with entertaining descriptions and all that without specifying how powerful it'll be in the game.

Y'know, to imagine it in a simple way, just think about the way that only certain guys can wear leather armor, and all the different kinds of leather armor are worth the same amount of armor points, every kind of leather armor has the same stats.

But then the game decides to add +1s and +5s to it (or assigns a Level to it, or whatever) to make it better, when it distributes your thing as loot based on how tough the monsters were that you had to fight.

And the monsters also might work in the same simple kinda way that the Leather Armor you added to the game works, but I think it'd be better if you could select something like a "Level Range" for the things you are adding to the game, and have the game calculate stats and stuff off of that info, so that a Dragon don't end up being a 1st level monster and stuff, y'know, you need a human brain to make all those kinda subjective calls heh.

There's more subtle objective stuff that you could layer into it that would make it more intuitive and clever than just asking people for a level range, though, like needing to specify a terrain type that a monster likes, 'cause then a certain monster would only be summoned up by the game when a player was in the kinda terrain that the monster calls his home, and the rarity of that kind of terrain on the map would determne how rare the monster was, in a way.

And there's more things like that that you could do.

Plus, if you get to the point where you have User Ratings, and the players know the Rules, then they're gonna judge the monsters folks make based on whether they make sense to the place they were encountered and all that kinda stuff like that, y'know, User Ratings ain't just to get rid of tentacle porn (or just to make sure that the tentacle porn stays haha User Ratings Wars awhellyah a whole 'nother meta-level of PvP woohoo!).

Actually it wouldn't be nasty all the time, 'cause there's people that would feel sorry for you and take pity on you 'cause of how stupid the monster was that you made and they'd give you a good rating just to cheer you up and encourage you to do better ahaha.

Anyways the database also needs to have the "Character" stuff separated out from the "User" table, so that you can have multiple Characters per User, 'cause right now all the Character and User stuff is all welded together into one thing.

And that is gonna take some restructuring of the way the interface works.

Which gets into my third thing, where I'm tempted to redo the interface, not just to make it more appealing and to suit my particular tastes, well, not just to do that, heh, but to move a lot of the junk like the font it uses for everything and all the stuff like that into variables, so the clients can customize their setup and pick what they like and what sorta color schemes and stuff they wanna use and all that.

Which gets into my fourth thing, where I'm tempted to redo all the structural graphics for the game.

Not the stuff like, what picture pops up when you fight a monters, I'm talking about everything besides that.

Which gets into my fifth thing, where I'm tempted to start messing around in Java so I can do some really fancy stuff with earth map junk (I was already looking at OpenLayers) and paperdolls and all sorts of other animation and gameplay type stuff.

And thinking about all that Java stuff and the first thing I was thinking about with the User Dealie gets me to the spot where I just wanna make a fresh start of things by making a re-installable user account and monster and item database system with a web front end that people can add themselves and their stuff to without any of the "gamey" parts attached to it yet.

And while all of those things are things that I think I'm gonna have to do, they're also interrelated in certain ways, and they each have elements that the other ones need to have fleshed out pretty well before any of 'em can be sorta completed, so right now I'm just trying to figure out how interrelated they are, in order to avoid wasting time redoing a part of one thing 'cause I'm probably gonna trump it with something else eventually heh.

I mean, I think it'd really probably be less typing to just start over from the beginning ahaha.

And while I'm thinking about that, I'm also thinking about what'll give me the most bang fer my buck, y'know, whatever I do has to be something that'll keep my appetite growing and keep me motivated and entertained and not kill my buzz.

'Cause I'm a multidimensional character, and this heavy gear-head kinda junk ain't the only level that I could be operating on that might do something good for this particular kinda stuff, let alone the only kinda junk I could be doing that wasn't related to this stuff at all.