Welcome to AZARIA

"Be welcome to The White Jewel of The Great Mountains of Arake, The Chasm of Luck, The City of New Beginnings, THE MIGHTY AZARIA..."

For some time now, a few weeks actually, just little more than a month, I've been working in a 'sort of kind of text based game'.

Back in the beginning, August 18, I started the very first sketch of what is today something barely playable. I don't actually remember what came first, if it was the name of AZARIA, or the desire in making a sort of game hugely inspired in those old Fighting Fantasy games (the name Ian Livingstone came easily in my mind).
What I know is that after I started I did a small research: mainly a look in the 'first page of google search results' and found nothing interesting. I did found a few online play-by-browser games, but they where just a copy and paste of the old game books.

The thing I have in mind, is a bit different:
You do arrive in city and walk around through scenes. But instead of going to the 'entry number 28 if you grab the necklace or move back to 254 if you forgot it', I want to give you options based on what you have done already. If you have the damn necklace, fine, you have a option to go/do/talk something different, if not, sorry, the only option is the basic one.
Also in this dynamism are the combat system. If you fought the guy blocking the bridge and won, he won't be there if you leave and back again latter, but his fellow could now occupy his place instead.

This is not very easy and not that much difficult. The hard part is just figure out how I want the data to be stored/managed/displayed, and I changed that a few times already.

A second point I have in mind is to have different classes, fighters, thieves, mages, and so on... For now, anything magic is just, well, far in the horizon. But I made the character 'sheet' able to receive that.
The whole character sheet is part of another 'project'. Something totally unrelated to Azaria. I will speak about mechanics in another post.

Well, as I told up here, I don't know if it was the wish or the name who came first. And I really don't care. The name, Azaria, came just out of nowhere. One might think that is related to the Portuguese word 'azar', which means bad-luck.
A river named Azar and a castle of same name will drive one thought to this. But no, first I came with Azaria. Then I began to code and write the very first scenes: the roads, the market and a river. I came with the idea that Azaria should have a river, complete with merchant ships, even being a city locate in the 'Great Mountains of Arake'. The name of the river was the city name shortened, so 'Azaria' - 'ia' = 'Azar'. The castle later just get the river's name.

To give another example of the randomness of the name, the Mountain Range suffer from the same illness: As I was writing the very first entry I just wrote: 'Após atravessar as trilhas das Grandes Montanhas de Araque...'
Now, I changed Araque (a Portuguese word meaning 'Bogus') to Arake and stick with that.

But don't be fooled by what I'm saying here, even if 'azar' (bad luck) didn't being the origin, I do used it a lot, really, a lot. To the point that you have a chance of just fall to death while crossing a unprotected bridge.

Well, the 'game' (a very ALPHA type of game, you've been warned) can be download here: http://cavanholi.github.com/azaria
It is made with python, the very basic of it, so you will need it installed before trying.
You may check the github repository and readme file to updates: http://github.com/cavanholi/azaria#readme