Phalla / Phalla Tools

[Nerissa]

I'm not sure how much visiblehowl wants me to say about this, but he's in charge of designing something like this for work.

Anyway... let's copy the ideas from the Projects thread here and start filling out design details.

[Nerissa]

The current fashion game is the first I've even looked at for around 6 months, so I don't know how things have been changing since then, but I think an important thing to keep in mind when designing tools is to think of the most complicated games thus far and see if / how they could be set up with the proposed design(s).

What are the most complex games people have hosted?

[MrBlarney]

Most of the complex Phalla games can be found in the Critical Failures forum, many of them recent games. Games that myself, Ardor, or Hylianbunny have a hand in seem particularly complicated. The recently-finished Smash Bros. Phalla, Phallout, Gods of Phalla, World War I Phalla, Disgaea: Phalla of Darkness, and Phalla Royale are just a few of the variety of games that have been played in that forum, with varying degrees of Phallaness.

I think the best thing to do is to simply start with a basic system and then expand outward from there. As a player, one should be able to log in, check their games, and in each one make a vote and complete any special actions their role provides them. Let's not worry about extra things like items or secondary votes for now. At designated times set up by the game master, the game will automatically resolve all actions, and players should instantly be able to see the results.

Game Masters should be able to set up games as being with or without limits on signups. In the setup phase of a game, GMs will see a list of characters in the game and be able to change parameters of each. Each character is assigned a team and will have a number of check-boxes available to assign special roles. Teams have their own parameters, including whether or not they start networked and how many kills they may get per night and how they might be blocked. Win conditions should also be set here, with the potential for different kinds of alliances for multi-factional games.

There's lots of stuff that can be done with the Phalla management tools, but I think that handling the most complex games is still far in the future. I mean, the lobby and login system needs to be created first before any further steps can be taken. But once we're ready, I think it's not too hard to see a basic system be created.

[jothki]

To handle complex games, we'd need to add some sort of scripting for GMs to use.