Hello Everybody,
My name is Rich, and I’m currently the game designer on the Greenhorn Productions development team working on the role-playing total conversion Bloodstone – The Journey Home.
I’m just going to give everybody a quick update of what Bloodstone is and what we are trying to achieve making this mod.
Well first and foremost Bloodstone is a total conversion of Half Life 2: Episode 1, with everything that we use in-game being our own custom content from art assets to code, and there’s a lot of code as we are developing several custom systems that are going to be implemented in the game.
Simply put Bloodstone is a third person role-playing game with a strong narrative background whereby the player completes quests and defeats monsters for experience, so that they can level up their character and progress through the main storyline. If you would like to read some of the lore of Darynia please visit our website.
Bloodstone does not use a class based system; instead we allow the player to define their character with the skills they purchase each time they level. Each player has an ‘Innate Power’ inside of them, which is similar to mana/endurance in other games, and this power is used to fuel the player’s skills, whether that be to create a ball of fire from thin air to hurl at your opponents, or to ignite your mighty long sword with flames to cut down your foes. So as the player levels up and chooses which skills to acquire they define their own class within a classless system.
The skills are split into five different trees: Combat, Air, Earth, Water, & Fire. Now as you can see apart from the Combat tree, the remaining four skill trees are the four elements. This is where our game becomes very unique as we have developed a system called the World Enhancement System (WES).
The WES is a system that allows the player to strategically use their skills to increase their character’s combat prowess. Let me explain:
When the player is in a higher than normal density of one element in the world e.g. next to a river for water, or underground for earth, then the player’s skills from that tree will increase in power, allowing the player to utilise certain skills to defeat tougher creatures.
Well I think this is long enough for the first update in game design for Bloodstone-The Journey Home. There is sooooo much more trust me, but if you like what you read please check out our modDB page and website, and if you really like what you read please feel free to vote for us!:)
Finally I’ll leave you with some stats about our game:
- The mod encompasses Chapter 1 of 8 of the entire Bloodstone story, and has over 50+ unique side quests not related to the main storyline.
- The player will be able to level-up from level 1 all the way to level 20 with over 25 unique areas.
- The game has 45+ unique skills split into five different skill trees: Combat, Air, Water, Fire, & Earth.
- There are over 300+ NPC combinations
- There are over 200+ weapon combinations
- There are over 25+ unique creatures to kill that level up intelligently with the player (more on this in game design update 2 – its not what you think :) )
Thanks for reading!
Rich
Game Designer
Greenhorn Productions
Bloodstone modDB
Bloodstone Website
