Sanctimonia: Crafting System Mockup

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Kevin Fishburne has been releasing a lot of sound effects lately (check out The Digital Lycaeum for details), but has decided to switch gears in the development of his PvE-focused, Ultima-inspired MMORPG, Sanctimonia. Most recently, he has been mocking up a crafting system:

Sanctimonia Initial Tinkering Mockup

Sketches on paper don’t always communicate the full magnitude of a vision, but the system looks promising even so. The ability to tinker is, I think, one of the more important aspects of a crafting system; constraining a crafting system to a set of known recipes with no possibility of discovery through experimentation is the lazy approach to the concept.

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2 Responses

  1. Sanctimonia says:
    April 26, 2013 at 12:57 am

    Thanks for the article and comments. I haven’t played an MMO other than The Mana World (MMO light, if that), or a SP game with crafting other than Ultima VI/VII, as I’m trying not to influence myself with what others have done recently. Glad you think this is a proper approach. Eventually I want to implement design-based crafting alongside tinkering for more complex PWOs such as wall segments, doors, locking mechanisms, etc., but I agree that being able to experiment with the interactions of random PWOs should be a ton of fun. Like tying a bouquet of roses to a stick and beating someone with it, or smashing a mushroom with a rock and adding the pulp to a bottle of mead.

    Anyway, here’s the nonfunctional, barebones in-game tinkering GUI:

    http://eightvirtues.com/sanctimonia/images/screenshot/Initial%20Crafting%20GUI.png

    The Environment pane on the right will show all PWOs within x feet of the player and the Inventory pane on the left will show all the player’s gear. That will allow you to use objects around you in conjunction with those on your person to experiment, in the interest of avoiding tedium while preserving realism.

    Any ideas about how to do this better, or additional/modified item creation equations would be appreciated. I really don’t get any feedback on anything I’m doing, so it’d be like a cool breeze on a hot day. Thanks all!

  2. Sanctimonia says:
    May 1, 2013 at 2:54 am

    Arbitrary Age of Update: http://youtu.be/dyA1LVexRow

    The “dollar store” sells fantastic synthetic plants for…a dollar. I chose five of the most natural and attractive and am photographing them for use as flora PWOs. The first set was photographed tonight it turned out well, though my white balance was a touch green. I’ll have to recalibrate it.

    The crafting work is going well, but I really need to get more assets in-game like plants. Crafting needs it, and the landscape is too sparsely vegetated to feel natural and welcoming. I need orange trees or edible grass. Something useful in combination with other things. Ideas?