After making some progress implementing new game features, I found myself leafing through my design journals to extrapolate the final design decisions. To solidify the ideas, I’ve spent a few days codifying the design in a wiki (DokuWiki with Dokubook template). Now I have a more rigorously defined design. There are still gaps (the 20% of the unfinished design mentioned earlier), but they are more clearly exposed, so I can code around them.

The most fundamental design change is to the character attributes. From a gameplay standpoint, the character system should feel more “classic.” Simply put, raise your attributes to become better at things. Strategic decision involves which attributes to raise, and what equipment best compliments them. From a technical standpoint, this affects many of the core content objects (characters, creatures, and items).

The new attributes have been implemented, but not integrated with any logic that uses them. As soon as I can, I will release a new client, so Alpha playtesters can at least see the character changes.