Okay, I've fallen in love with the Alphabet A...

December 10, 2007 by Adam in NWN2

Okay, I've fallen in love with the Alphabet Assault game. It's very simple, but elegant. The coding took only a few days to put together. At this point, the basic mechanism feels pretty solid and all that's left is to flesh out the dungeon and add some quest-related dialog.

I made some general changes. You get letters when damaging your opponent, not just killing them. Depending on the damage you deal or hit dice of the killed creature, you might get bronze, silver, or gold letters. These give increasing bonuses to the word's power. If I have a power of 5 and the word has the letter N, it'll give a negative level to nearby foes. If the word also had the letter Z, a ray will zap your opponents for 10 points of damage. If the power of the word were increased to 25, the word would drain 5 levels and do 50 points of damage.

It all sounds complicated, but during testing I started to forget about the mechanics and started just spelling long words. Depending on the situation, I might want to save certain letters for later, or play my gold U to get a massive undead right away. Pretty soon pretty spell effects are flashing everywhere and melee combat is relegated to refilling my supply of letters.

I'm whipping up some dialog for the area, making it hopefully more than a dungeon crawl and spelling bee combination. So far I'm quite happy with the result.

The testing from the weekend has started pouring in. I'm still struggling to find a good file hosting site for me to upload files to regularly. Filefront, my favorite, strangely stopped working for me. Hopefully I can get that resolved soon.