Cyberganked (proof of concept)
From what I remember Robb saying before starting, Cyberganked, while influenced by the classic RPG Wasteland, aims to succeed in some of the areas that Wasteland faltered. For one thing, Wasteland had the player refer to a book that had a lot of extra narrative that they kept out for probably both space and copy protection-related reasons. Modern games need not be hampered like that. Also, Wasteland went wild on the character skills front, but it was a bit unclear where those skills could be used. Make fun of the “toaster repair” skill all you want, but at least you knew whether or not there was a broken toaster around. Other, more
useful skills required a fair amount of luck and intuition just to find places where you could use them.
Cyberganked aims to improve on that latter point by making use of built-in object and character interaction support of the Hugo library. Interestingly enough, this proof of concept doesn’t explore
that aspect yet, so it’ll be intriguing to see how non-combat skills and commands are exactly handled when that point comes.
So yeah, I think the “proof of concept” here is the skeleton of the combat, character creation, and general movement systems. As such, it’s not bad. The combat seems like it’ll be complicated enough that I’ll want to have a manual on hand to reference, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I think I had more fun poring over the high level spells in the Bard’s Tale II manual than I ever did actually playing the game, as I pretty much sucked at it. It’s been too long since a RPG had that kind of “weight” to it and look forward to the modern take on it.
The character creation system works, but it takes long enough that I end up just using the prebuilt party. Ideally, it’d allow you to make one or two characters of your own and then fill in the remaining slots with preset characters.
The first Hugo Open House release was fun to begin with, but the latest release was surprisingly more fleshed out. I don’t know if that’s just to things being
really randomized in the game or due to changes between versions. Whatever the case, my first quest of the game was different in both and I’m pretty sure I saw different chatter while wandering around, too.
I’m really looking forward to playing an “ensemble cast” game like this without a single protagonist. All of Robb’s other games are fun, but some of them occasionally made me wonder why this or that protagonist attracted so many personalities. I think it’ll be a nice change of pace to see the interactions of a group without a protagonist character they all inexplicably revolve around.
I think the general display format is adequate, but I found myself occasionally annoyed by text sent to the main window. Like, when I examine a character, I thought maybe it’d be better to send the character’s stats to the “party window” instead. The combat text and text tied to graphics are fine, of course, but in other instances, it might be best to throw text to their own “page” (clearing the screen and printing them and waiting for a keypress) that’d jump back to the game after having been read.
I’m a little torn on the character creation menu, too. Part of me thinks that you should hack up newmenu so the menu starts underneath the top windows and use its functionality. The other part of it is okay with the existing format, but even in that case, you might want to use GetPrompt or something to make it look like a non-regular prompt.
Graphically and music-wise, the game is looking and sounding really sharp. Seeing black above and under the graphics doesn’t really bother me, but I know Robb has been trying to declare windows properly sized to avoid that. I think that’s kind of a losing battle, but there’s also the option of drawing the window in the same color that edges your graphic so they blend in to eachother. Of course, the graphic I was looking at was edged in a cyan color that doesn’t *quite* match my cyan color on Hugor, so choosing any non-white-or-black color might be hard to match across ports.
I’m really digging the Internet jokes. This
is setting out to be a work that might be much more culturally accessible than previous games. We’re getting to the point where a lot of us can look back and see big chunks of our lives where the Internet and our relationship with it helped inform our views of our own personalities. Even when you hate every other person on the Internet, there’s a connection there that doesn’t extend to random-non-tech-savvy-guy-on-the-street, and this looks like it’ll be a great game to comment on that phenomenon.
