Over the past few months I’ve been working on a platform to develop text-based RPG’s with a bit more flexibility than many of the ones we see today. I don’t just want to build a Choose Your Own Adventure game, I want the player to have hit points, and classes, and roll to see if they can unlock a chest with their skill bonuses.

I’ll be using this series to post my development on this project, along with some player goodies as I get closer to rollout a beta version

The Starving Developer

It became apparent that I needed a way to fund the project (or at least have a plan in mind to do so). This was a project I was getting reaaaally excited about working on and as such I end up spending much more time on it than I should for a fun-side project.

Advertising revenue? Monthly subscription? I didn’t seem to find a good fit for the billing of the platform.

Enter Nano

Around this same time I became more interested in the cryptocurrency “Nano” (or Raiblocks at the time). One of the benefits of Nano is that it is fee-less, which was a reason I had avoided something like Bitcoin (or even Litecoin) initially. On top of this, using a tool like Brainblocks, the payment method can be seamlessly integrated into the application.

Play with empty or full pockets

I didn’t want to make the game only accessible to those who make a payment. Instead, by allowing the user to add the amount they desire into their “In-Game Wallet” they can experience as much or little bonus content as they want.

Certain choices will come at a cost

The in-game currency will be used to buy potions, weapons, and armor. Along with this, as the user progresses through the story they will come across a few options that may take from their balance, though selecting these options may allow you to gain bonus or parts of the story that would normally not be accessible.

Boy, do we have attributes!

What’s the point of an RPG if we don’t have HP you can lose, XP you can gain, and a bag of holding where you can load up your inventory? The platform follows close to the Pathfinder ruleset. Each character gets to select their Race, Class, and starting STR, DEX, CON, WIS, INT, and CHA values. As you progress through the game, bonuses from these values will be included in your rolls which will affect the outcome of your battle, relationships, or overall progress

Moving Along

I wanted to write this post for a number of reasons, not only does it let me get my ideas down as I continue forward but it also gives me a chance to see the amount of interest something like this might have. If this sounds like it’s up your alley feel free to give a follow to NanoRPG on twitter where I’ll be posting more details about jumping in an alpha version once it’s ready.