As some of you may be aware I recently went on a one week trip to Tokyo, where I spent a lot of time just enjoying not having to work. I highly recommend visiting if you ever get the chance, Tokyo is a pretty cool city. That said, I spend, personally, a lot of time imagining how things could work, and what systems I’d like to bring to the game that will add to the level of immersion and give players new opportunities and directions to pursue.And as some of you are aware, there’s been a lot of work on overhauling how combat works in Might & Fealty. This is not just overhauling combat, but implementing a lot of the unfinished systems as well, like siege weapons. There has been some personal toying with the idea of having a persistent landscape in the game, so if two battles happen in the same area, the battle will have the same regional features. This, I think would be a good move towards allowing more indepth strategy.
For those you who follow my github account, you can already view some of what we want to act as sort of “world modifiers” that will affect battles. This will be things like time of day, wind conditions, weather effects (rain/snow/dust), and even the solar and lunar cycles. That last bit, has lead me to start theorizing what the Might & Fealty solar system is actually like. I don’t plan on the actual entire solar system having a great effect on the day-to-day in Might & Fealty, but a part of me would find it neat to have solar events modeled in such a way so that you could actually figure out the rotational periods of things based on, say, how often a new moon occurs or how frequent something like a solar eclipse happens.
Will the game run these calculations itself? Probably not.
The game will probably exist on rails, similar to how planets in Kerbal Space Program work right now. But, I’d like for it to all actually be modeled after how gravity would work in a real solar system, down to say, how often a particular comet passes (if we decide to model smaller celestial bodies).
Some things I’m more than willing to abstract. But First Ones are supposed to be intelligent, able to look around and not only observe things, but affect things. Which is one of the reasons I’d like this to be modeled realistically. If a character (read: player) is to be able to figure stuff like that out though, that means we need to figure out how big the M&F world actually is. I have no issues setting a solid number on that–if we ever exceed the requirements of whatever the world size is, well, heh, we’ll have to get creative, but it by no means limits what we can do within the constraints of a solar system, or even a planet-sized body.
I’ve a long history of video games to draw inspiration from on that front. And even keeping it low-fantasy, there’s still a LOT of options, some of them rooted in real-world discoveries and physics. Failing that, the established lore of the M&F world already states that Gods are a thing that has previously directly interacted with the inhabitants. If we need them to again from a game master perspective in order to change things while keeping the lore consistent, that shouldn’t be a problem.