Hi Dark, As for your first point that is sadly all too true. Far too many of the web based gamebook style rpg adventures are nothing more than pvp stat grinders with little to kno story at all. I can't get interested in them any more than I do roguelikes that are basically walking around killing monsters all of the time. More than anything I want a game with some actual story and depth to it. Even games like Sryth, started out as a great story based gamebook type game, eventually just became another stat grinding game with some pvp elements to it. After that it just killed the game for me. I doubt I'm going to renew my subscription because of that fact. Then, we have the games like Kingdom of Loathing. To be honest I couldn't stand that game.Oh, some of the jokes are funny the first time you read them, but it really just turned me off in a hurry. I want something more serious and shall we say professionally done. For example, I haven't done a lot of table top DND roll playing, but what DND playing I have done was always fun and entertaining. What always drew me into the game was the story, the adventure, and the various characters in our party. The Forbidden Relms adventures were always cool because you could fight enemies such as the Drau and the Dergars which haven't shown up in any web based gamebook I've seen to date. Even in Entombed Elves are generally seen as one of the heroic races, and there is no mention of the dark elves, the Drau, from the Dungeons and Dragons games which would fit right into an underground dungeon like that. Same goes for the dark dwarve races like the Duergars that would be interesting to fight in Entombed. My rpg type game would include such races for a more in depth game world than we have had in audio or text based format to date. As to your second point I'd say a game like this would probably take three to five years to complete depending how much I worked on it in my free time. Keep in mind even Sryth took a couple of years before there was enough adventures etc to make it really worth paying for. I beleive the first paid adventure was the Stoneback Hill quest. At least a year or so before Sryth began making any money for the developer. Well into Sryth's development, and I'd likely be faced with a similar development sschedule. It takes time writing stories, playing each adventure, and debugging that style of game. It isn't like one game, but more like hundreds of smaller games rolled into one game. Which really takes time to produce. As to your question about sounds/music I didn't mean to indicate that this would be an all or nothing situation. I certainly could add some sounds and music for background ambience effects, probably add some combat sounds here and there, but I wouldn't necessarily want to buy hundreds of different sounds to have sounds for every item, creature, and area of the game. That would get extremely expensive after a while. More than people are willing to take in account at times. Finally, as for your last point I agree. One reason I'm writing this in C++ is to make it downloadable and so you don't have to be on the internet the entire time. You can save your games directly to your computer and back them up as needed. Since I now have licensed Streemway I could certainly use it to stream music, background ambience, and play some sounds as necessary. In that way it would be better than something like Sryth, but maybe not as audio packed as Entombed. I'm not sure how people would feel about that compromise.
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