Both of them collapsed do to being overcomplicated and underplanned.
One thing I will say is: modding Pokemon in is SUPER easy, as long as you're willing to go through the work of modding a lot of them. Go to bulbapedia, grab the best looking small sprite that looks like its facing to the side, or the large sprite if its a large Pokemon. If you think its medium sized take the small sprite and double its size, if its super large take the large sprite and double its size (do this by copying it into paint, because paint is so simple it lets you just double an image turning each pixel into four pixels if that makes sense). Then open the file in paint.net, size it to the smallest multiple of 32x32 that will fit, and save it as a .tga. Then, and this is the part I'm really proud of, open it again, move the sprite a few pixels forward, and save it with a 2 on the end. That's now its attack and casting sprite
Where I got lost was trying to add in evolutions, type matchups, complicated shit like that. It became clear early on that I would run out of separate mechanics for all of the different damage types, I only managed to do like half of the matchups. And of course even though an individual Pokemon can be modded in in like twenty minutes if you're in your stride, that's still a lot of Pokemon... If I had to do it again I would add in humans to have a baseline, and then give each pokemon the power level it would logically have (so caterpies are borderline helpless, Onix is an unstoppable killing machine). Evolutions could be done but type matchups were a bad idea. I'm not sure how I would handle spells and items; I had ideas in the original but they were ultra ambitious.
The random spell generator was much the same. I had a strong core system: each spell in Dominions can be reduced into form, effect, and modifiers. So form would be like touch spell, aoe ranged spell, ect. and then within that there were things like precision, ect. Effect is what it does, within that there are things like damage value, number of effects, that kind of thing. Modifiers is random things like can only be cast in a forest, only hurts magic creatures, ect. Each of these has an individual power number, which gets multiplied together somehow (not sure on what the formula would be) to produce an overall spell power. This gets randomly spent increasing fatigue (which is actually the determining factor for gem cost), research cost, and paths. Even wildly disparate spells like summoning or buff can fall under the form/effect/modifier system; for example summoning the form would be remote, permanent or combat summon, the effect would be what it summons or how many.
It just wasn't planned or commented well enough. There were too many steps, too much math, and a bunch of random modifiers where if X happened the spell would be more likely to go into this school or this path, if Y happened it would have Z added to its random name list, that kind of thing, and of course it was all in different places in the code which was commented poorly. But I believe it can be done.
In both cases it was fun to try but if I tried again I would start afresh with a more complete plan. Also, if anyone ever wants to do a total conversion mod I have a python script that makes every spell in the game except definable specific exceptions unsearchable. Sadly the standard events are effectively impossible to mod out.
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Topic: Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension (Read 542212 times)