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Some images to represent the atmosphere of the city of Dathon, as I imagine it.

I didn't exactly envision it as a desert, but a middle-eastern look would be fresh and appealing.  I've actually been meaning to get back to the code I was working on (I've put some thought into it and I'll be replacing quite a few sections of code to make them work better), and start design work on the actual character skills.  However, this weekend is the first crunch of the year, so it won't happen until next week.

I didn't exactly envision it as a desert

well no, not as a desert, but rather a major trading city with a vast desert surrounding it. that setting seems to me to be perfect for housing a lot of different factions with different backgrounds and interests, and a good "excuse" to limit the player to that specific area without the game feeling limited.

as for my coding time, i've recently finished my busy period at school (in which we work on a project for a real company) and am now back to my regular courses. courses, in fact, about game development, which should both teach me a lot of interesting things, and get me back in the gamemaking feeling . from now on i'll devote more of my openwar efforts to this pre-project, because the main project is out of reach for now.

I didn't say that the desert was a bad idea, now did I?  I think for the Dathon storyline I'd actually like to keep everything within the city limits, and an implied desert environment would help reinforce this.  Keeping the player engaged would actually reduce this limitation. 

Sounds like you're going to have some fun in your courses this semester.  I've got Operating Systems, Databases, and Circuit Analysis, plus some arts credits (but they don't even register on my workload).  The Operating Systems prof is a great guy and excellent teacher, but he sure keeps us busy.  I've got a big lab due tomorrow, and it's in assembly.  Ah, the curse of assembly <_<

Anyways, I'll be finishing up the skill selection system as soon as possible (I'll get those synergies working properly one way or another), and after that the goal is to build a "skill editor" so we don't have to create the XML files by hand.  Hopefully by the time we're getting moving on this pre-project, we'll have editors for everything so it's a piece of cake to add new content.

It looks like we're on the same line 2play

Solinx