The Dark Furie

This is a proposed dynamic auto-levelling system for the Fable series of videogames. It may not interest some of my readers but it's something I'd like to see in the games so I thought I'd post it as it may be of interest to the few Fable fans that read my page.

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Using these systems any action that characters take build their character's skills and attributes automatically.

Health & Speed: Blocking and rolling are two basic skills that characters start with. Being hit, eating healthy food, or drinking potions provides characters with experience that builds their Health attribute. Rolling and running around the world builds up experience that builds the character's Speed offering access to more dodging techniques (different animations).

Melee Combat Skills: Melee combat improves statistics in three ways, depending on how you're equipped, with hitting enemies and blocking attacks building experience for the character.
Two Handed weapons will build strength and add skills such as Flourish and other heavy hitting attacks like Devastate (strength based single hit kill attack like the more agile Reversal). Expressions learned from this discipline include the Heroic Pose and Bloodlust Roar.
Single Handed weapons build strength and add skills such as Reversals and other agility based attacks like Aerial Combat (performed like a flourish, the launcher sends the enemy into the air and the character's further attacks take him up after his enemy). Expressions learned from this would be skill based like a weapon display.
Pugilist characters don't use weapons. Fighting bare-handed builds their strength over time and provides access to a mixture of skills and expressions from the other disciplines.
While all three disciplines include strength characters wont gain extra strength by mastering multiple disciplines, but will gain new skills. Each skill set can only be used when equipped with the associated weapon type although only the first set of expressions learned will stay active for the character.

Ranged Combat Skills: Characters start with the ability to blind shoot at the nearest enemy by tapping the button or aim while holding the button. More experience is gained by aiming and even more by hitting sensitive spots such as the head or groin. As the character levels up they'll build their accuracy and gain further shooting skills like Target Locking, Zooming and Sub-Targeting.

Will Powers: Each spell will be built up seperately expanding it's strength, range, duration, and other factors as it is built up. Characters will start a spell by finding a grimoire containing the spell and learning the first level of it that way. From then on they build the spell by using it.

Stealth Skills: Sneaking, stealing, using criminal expressions and skills all build up your Guile attribute which will allow access to new criminal expressions (extort, pickpocket, etc) and skills (picklock, etc) as well as increase your chance to remain hidden while sneaking.

Personality Skills: Having generally positive interactions with people increases your Charisma attribute which gives access to new expressions, increases your ratio of success with new expressions, and allows you to extend expressions.

Morphs: Each attribute mentioned above will morph the character in the following ways. While most of these were in the games they were quite general with one attribute defining each feature, and this system spreads the morphs more naturally.
Strength - this builds upper body muscle definition and height.
Speed - this builds lower body muscle definition and height.
Health - this makes the character more broad.
Accuracy - the characters eyes narrow and become more keen, and he becomes slightly thinner.
Guile - the character becomes shorter and thinner, gaining more hawkish features
Will - the characters eyes and tattoos start to glow blue, while their hands occasionally crackle with electricity.
Personality - the characters smile becomes more friendly and natural as does their gait, their eyes become more open and their teeth whiten, occasionally shining comically as they smile.

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These systems would replace the current levelling and morphing systems in the Fable games, in my proposal, allowing characters to build a unique character throughout their game simply by playing the way they prefer to. The systems to adorn characters with different hairstyles, facial hair, tattoos, clothes, etc would be kept from the current game design as would the current system of gaining and losing weight. Together I think these things would help improve the playability of the games and allow people to create the character they want to play.

I've been working on this web runtime widget for my page for a little while now and, when I got my i8910 HD, I finally had a web runtime enabled phone to test it out on. For a less than 20KB download I'm quite impressed with how it turned out, especially as I couldn't get the feed reader working properly at the start. Obviously that's kind of a problem so I decided instead to make the widget a site launcher which loads up a mobile optimised version of this page, complete with resized images and video embeds transformed into mobile friendly downloads.

As the widget launches a site instead of containing the styling and details itself, it can be configured directly from my device with no new downloads needed, even allowing me to change the site that the widget feeds from. Sharing options are included at the bottom of each post with the ability to bookmark to del.icio.us, send via e-mail or tweet the link to the post on your Twitter account, and there's a link to the full version of the post should you wish to see the styling or comment. All in all the widget and site working together are lighter and more capable than the widget alone would be.

So, Fable 3 has had it's trailer and some game play revealed. In this game, due towards the end of 2010, you play someone fed up of the injustices of the world and out to remove a tyrant king from power. Unfortunately the game will continue with you in power once you've killed the tyrant, and you'll find out that there are reasons why some of these injustices had to happen. Make promises to allies on your rise to power and you'll have to keep those promises when you're the ruler of Albion. Yes you may well think you can do a better job of ruling the land but given a choice between spending money eradicating poverty or spending money building your army to take over lands which will you choose? Add the fact that your family will be after a bigger and better castle to live in, groups that are annoyed with your rule will try to overthrow you, and that there's only so much money coming in from taxes and you'll soon wonder how the tyrant did such a good job.

I'd show you guys the trailer but all I keep finding online is these, which is pretty fitting considering what today is.

Trailer ~ Mobile Trailer

By the way, did I mention that it's One Hit Wonder day, where we celebrate all those singers and bands that dropped a song and never showed up in the charts again?

When you have eliminated the impossible whatever's left, no matter how improbable must be the truth. So states the principle of Occam's Razor if you listen to some people. The simplest answer is always the truth is the principle of Occam's Razor if you listen to others. Both are kind of right, both are very quotable, and neither is the way I see things. Occam's Razor states simply that the best explanation for any phenomena is the one that contains the facts and nothing but the facts, with no guesswork and no leaps of explanatory faith needed. As such I can state with no problems whatsoever that "I am a cool guy." While this no doubt comes as no surprise to you guys who worship the ground I walk on and eagerly devour every word I have to say (type?) every day of your lives (no doubt declaring national days of mourning and organised silences whenever I take a day away from blogging), it's a conclusion I've only recently arrived at through the very scientific method I described above.

There are other things that have tipped me off to the fact that I'm so cool that I make Fonzie look like a mug of warm cocoa on a sticky summer's night. For example, that wonderous day that I realised the world truly does revolve around me. I'd always wondered before then why interesting things only happened in my life when I was there...

You see, back in 2006 I read an article about blogging and how it's mostly used by companies to spread their brand and maintain a personal side to their brand or by people trying to make a fortune with their life story. It was obvious from the article that the author considered all bloggers to be geeks at heart. In 2008 I read an article that spoke about the rapid growth of blogging and social network use and how "all the cool kids have been doing it for at least a year". As I started blogging in 2007 it's obvious that I'm one of the cool kids which was my first step towards realising just how cool I am.

Of course I had to be careful when writing this post. After all, the scientific method I used to reach my conclusion is one of the uncoolest subjects to ever be written about in a blog post. It seems like whatever moron discovers the principle has to write about it as soon as they can in some transparent attempt to prove that they're more intelligent than others and, if that over-eagerness wasn't enough, they all follow the same format too. First they come up with their own meaning for it, which they'll establish in their opening paragraph as the right meaning while disparaging others' understanding of the concept, then they'll come up with some lame experiment based off a single subject or anecdote, then they'll read the results of the test to prove something to themselves that these lame morons desperately want others to believe. It was tricky to avoid these pitfalls but I think I managed admirably. After all, I'm a cool guy and pressure situations don't get me down.

Now I realise that some of you habitual naysayers may well be scoffing at this post and I do feel sorry for you trying desperately to disprove the scientific method and constantly failing. You may even go to the lengths of a smear campaign, saying that if I were truly as cool as I say I am then I wouldn't have to say it at all. Well, there's a problem there. Certainly that would be true if it was one of you guys claiming to be this cool, but I'm not one of you guys and shouldn't be judged as such. True, with regular levels of cool, saying that you're as cool as they come (I've had that hand-stitched into my business cards) would lose you about 70% of your coolness. But I'm so cool that even running at only 30% I can still keep a steak chilled until dinner and have enough raw coolness left over to run a small airport (the sort with three planes and a cattle-grid) as well as make everyone who reads this look cooler by proxy. So yeah, given those circumstances I think I can get away with stating these hard scientific facts in an effort to get everyone to understand a scientific principle a little better.