For instance, though I still have nothing to show visually just yet, I have a large portion of the fundamental architecture of my roguelike worked out on paper... the tile-based physics will probably take a little time, but otherwise everything's looking pretty good.
I've also been dinking around with Morrowind modding again, in anticipation for the release of Oblivion. I figure I'm one of the best people to work on a character realism plugin, so that's what I've been making. As usual, it's needlessly bloated and complex, and probably won't be finished before The Elder Scrolls 5 comes out. ;-)
Since the release of URW 2.90 in January, I've been playing that pretty religiously too. I have a character generator written up in DM which is just about complete, and I'd be happy to share if anyone would like a copy of the source and the binary. The binary is designed to go straight into your URW directory.
The generation process is pretty simple. First it randomly picks one of the ten Tribes with a simple random number. Once it has determined your tribe, it reads the game's name lists and picks a random Name for your character based on whether you're a member of a northern, eastern, or western tribe. After the tribe comes the basics -- your starting Season and Starting Scenario, which are all just simple random selections.
After that, however, the generator becomes quite a bit more interesting. URW has a number of skills for your character, and during the creation process you "mark" five skills for improvement. What the generator does is pick one Combat Skill and three regular Skills for you to improve, which will also be your self-enforced "favoured skills" -- the skills that you rely on most often to keep your character alive. (The generator actually picks four skills, and picks either 1 or 2 combat skills, so on occasion you will have two combat skills and two regular skills. I deliberately only choose four skills because the last skill option -- URW has five option points -- should be up to you, to personalise your character as best as you can according to the motivations and other factors. I usually put that last point in a ranged combat skill.)
After the skills come two variables that the original URW leaves up to the player to roleplay completely.
The first, Morality, determines what sort of person you are. Good people will do everything within their power to preserve status quo and keep everyone living in harmony with the world. Evil people are the opposite: they freely murder, steal, and do whatever they can in order to make themselves as rich as possible. There are five such moralities -- Good, Benevolent, Natural, Malevolent, and Evil -- and I'm not ashamed to admit they were robbed directly from Haven. ;-)
The second variable is Spirituality, and it determines how close your ties are to the spiritual and ritual world inherent in the game. The five levels of Spirituality are Devout, Religious, Average, Impious, and Atheist, and they determine how frequently you should be using your rituals. I've found it is a very different play experience if you absolutely must swear the Oath of Iron and the Hunting Incantation each and every morning before you go out to get a nice carcass for supper, as opposed to simply going out and getting your butt in gear. URW's rituals are naturally very balanced, since the time taken to perform them is time that could be taken to do other things, so an Atheist character is actually not really at a disadvantage compared to a Devout character.
Not done yet. Not by a long shot. But first, I'll give a little backstory: before I started generating characters, I found I had a little routine: whenever I'd kill a Njerpez warrior (that's a foreign bandit, for those who don't play the game), I'd always strip the body bare and put on every single article of clothing and armour I could. After all, in URW, the more armour you have, the longer you survive. Right?
Well, not so with the generator! After Spirituality comes your Armour Preference. It chooses one of the six possible armour types from the game: None, Leather, Fur, Ring, Mail, and Iron. Your armour preference reflects the maximum kind of armour that you will allow your character to use. None means you have to fight just with the clothes on your back: this is obviously very risky, but when you're hauling around 30 lbs. of equipment instead of 250 lbs. (URW can be a little hyperrealistic at times, it's true ;-)), you start to appreciate the mobility gained. Iron is just the opposite: you will wear any kind of armour you like, ranging from light leathers, thick furs, weighty ring mail, dense chain mail, or heavy iron mail: this means you're nigh impossible to kill, but your mobility suffers so much under the weight that it's extremely difficult to dodge or hit just about anything. This translates to a fun game experience. =)
Once your armour preference has been generated, it chooses a Hunting Type for you. I've found that there are really only three different methods for hunting (defined as actively attempting to kill animals for fur and food) in URW:
- Tracking: using the Tracking skill to find tracks, then following them until you run into the animal
- Trapping: digging pits, setting snares, and doing everything else related
- Baiting: finding a safe place, then luring an animal to you (or simply waiting) and killing it once one arrives
Done yet? Of course not! The generator gives one final set of information. This part of the generator gives what I feel is the most distinctive part of your character: your character's Challenges, Goals, and Motivations. Singly, each of the motivations is a restriction upon your character which determines how your character should act within the game. In combination, the motivations give you a strict code of behaviour and morality for your character to follow. The motivations all have preconditions so you'll always get a set of motivations that intertwine with all of the other attributes that your character has (for instance, if you have a Good character, you'll never receive the "Thief" motivation, and if you have the Pacifist motivation, you'll never receive the Fair Fighter motivation as well).
Phew. Done. Well, almost. You have to make the character manually, I'm afraid -- the profile gives you the relevant information but you still have to use the in-game creation process yourself. To make this a lot easier on you, however, the best feature of the generator is that after you've finished making your profile and have completed making the character from the "blueprint" , it includes a little bit of code to integrate your character profile directly into the game, by copying the generated profile into your character's log. It is extremely handy to be able to hit Shift+L and scroll back to your starting date in order to see a complete synopsis of your challenges and motivations.
Oh, I should also mention that profiles generated are completely editable. If you don't like the season it gives you, you can change the season using the built-in editing functionality before you complete the character. Aside from this being necessary, in order to have the correct information copied into your profile, it's also very useful because it doesn't "railroad" you into a specific character if you're not in the mood to play that way (for instance, if I've had a bad day, I don't want to play a goody-goody character, and if I'm feeling lonely I don't want to play a character who kills everyone in his path ;-)).
Here's a complete unmodified sample character, copied from the text window output of Dream Seeker (it loses the text formatting, but this is close enough):
* * * * * Anskar Sartolainen * * * * *
Season: Spring
Scenario: 5: Call of the Cave
Favoured Skills:
Fishing
Climbing
Woodcarving
Combat Style:
Club
Morality: Malevolent
Spirituality: Impious
Armour Preference: Ring Armour
Hunting Method: Tracking, Trapping, and Baiting
Challenges, Goals, and Motivations:
Must give a small gift to everyone met
Swears loyalty to first village region found, attacks all others
Does not believe in boats -- must always swim to cross water
(Yep, a Malevolent character can still get the "Generous" motivation -- he must give a small gift to everyone met. Only an Evil character is excluded from this possible motivation.)
This character would represent someone who grew up in a village steeped in tradition, and one of those traditions would have been the offering of a small gift -- like a piece of cooked meat, a bandage, or any useful item that is nonetheless not too valuable -- to those people. This village was probably bordering on the sea, but the culture would have been one of spearfishers, or in the case of Anskar's family, clubfishers. Anskar despised the tradition of giving away things, so he left his original village. After he came to a new land, he found a new village and became friends with the population, but still had a deep, seething hatred for foreigners, to whom tradition forced him to give away his things.
He soon learned that he was a grown man and if something happened that he did not like, he could simply "correct" the problem. This was how Anskar the Conqueror was born...