Paragons

[JayRay]

Update 11/12/20178 - Gazeteer Edition

It's my birthday in 5 days!

Alright, ladies and gentlemen, and the occasional lyncanthrope, its that time for a little bit of a development blog.

After dealing with a minor setback, I now have paperdolling portraits as well as faces, sideview battlers AND the default walking character sprites. I'm now going to be spending the next couple of weeks adding to it, frankensteining bits and pieces together, changing some color palettes, and changing some items to make them more unique to my campaign. All those equipment choices but WHY? Well, that's a good question, and here's hopefully a good answer.

In Paragons, a character's outfit affects several factors, not just to determine what he looks like but what bonuses he gets. When you have a suit of armor equipped to your character, it visually changes the character and imposes those changes. Now, unless I want a simple "Leather, Iron, and Magical Iron Armor" I need to have different prices and bonuses for items, and put rarer items, armor, and equipment in higher-risk dungeons. for that reward, and to help the build factor. Likewise, there are some equipment items in Paragons that when equipped, add or detract from interactions with NPC dialogue.

Here's just some of what I've got planned...

Tabards and Coats of Arms - Just like you can't go up to a Green Bay Packers fan while wearing a coat, scarf, and wool hat showing the Chicago Bears, you shouldn't walk into a faction's guildhouse, wearing say, a rival's garments or coats. Likewise, you wouldn't want to wear the standards of Jemiscra in the heart of Merede.

The Accessories make the man - Also, you might not want to wear your clunky war-beaten bloodsplattered armor in the noble's districts, and you might get laughed out of a bar on the waterfront for walking into the Pesky Rat wearing a tiara... Different clothes may illicit different responses from the various citizenry of Merede. (Seriously, depending on what you wear, you'll have a couple of variables that get passed to your attributes - too far from an NPC's expectation number, and they could be rude to you, insult you, give you false information, or flat out ignore you!)

Materia system? Could it be??? - While I can't promise anything yet, there may be a graft or materia system in the very near future. I already will be looking to Yanfly for the Prefix and Suffix plugins to allow for other addon types. as well as Magic items that might not necessarily be seen on the character, but nevertheless bestow bonuses and penalties... This will take some time...

As of now there are 10 equipment slots, and while some of them can't be edited or changed once you choose your starting character, there will be many options to build your character for survival as well as make it asthetically appealing as a character.

And about those items you can't edit? - Well, if you choose to make your own character, There will be some choices you make to have that unique character that once done, can not be changed. Right now, here's how that's breaking down. This number may change as I decide how to change and add things like newer faces, eyes, and more.

Female - 12 different skins, 24 different hairstyles and 7 makeups (each in 5 different colors) for 10,800 possible combinations of females

Male - 12 different skins, 20 different hairstyles and 7 facial hair styles (each in 5 colors) for 9,600 possible combinations for males

THAT's OVER 20K possible people!

* Right now, I'm trying to finish up everything graphically for the character generator, so that I can test my first true 'deployment' in various environments.