Any book, film, game, something else that especially gave you ideas for this great game?
Well, I'm definitely a pen-and-paper RPG GM at heart. And I've been designing games forever and ever, just not electronic before now. So a lot of stuff, like Eclipse itself, is actually pulled from old designs or games.
Setting-wise, I drew a lot from the cyberpunk genre. The biggest portion of that for me as a roleplayer is Shadowrun, although you can't go wrong with Cthulhupunk.
I had always really loved how Shadowrun had brought the supernatural fluidly into a cyberpunk setting. Definitely an under-explored vein of thought, so that's where my thoughts went to setting-wise.
I also constantly draw on real world secret societies and conspiracies for my games. Wrote a book on it, even. So if you see anything that looks like a conspiracy theory or Illuminatus! trilogy reference, it probably is… especially if I didn't mean it to be.
Kingdom of Loathing was an inspiration. Taking the text/PHP/MySQL route helped make development easy enough that I could include all the branching paths and multiple quest lines I wanted to. It also shocked me out of creating the game in Java, for which I'm eternally grateful.
The only other place I really nabbed any design from is Baiten Kaitos. I had been planning on card-based combat since before I even had a setting or switched to PHP, but the Chain mechanism is inspired by one of their mechanics. Great game if you can get over the voice-acting, by the way.
I know that the puzzles and secrets you put in for a large part stem from your innate sense of mali… enjoyment of seeing players suf… search for solutions. ;) Is there anything else that particularly influences your game design decisions?
Sounds kind of strange, but most of my design principles were picked up at seminars at Gen*Con held by Monte Cook and the Forge guys.
So, the two big things there are: focus on fun (not necessarily what people say they want) and using game mechanics as a form of communication. The latter's a little esoteric, and not even my strongest suit, but means stuff like tying a major reward type (Skills) into the choices you make to directly communicate the weight those choices carry.
I definitely enjoy watching people solve problems and make decisions, though. I recall offering to run a conspiracy/mystery themed game once and the players were like "we already spend all our time uncovering conspiracies and investigating mysteries, we might as well at least have spells, right?"
Just curious and also wondering if what I think I see influences of are indeed influences of what I am thinking of. And perhaps you'll mention some great movie/novel that I have not seen/read yet. :)
Actually, there are only a very few references. Other than the conspiracy stuff I mentioned, I can only come up with three. I had to give The Hellbound Heart a nod in the puzzle box, there are some fairly oblique 1984 references, and the QM book you can pick up at the University bookstore is the one I used when I took QM.
Cheers!
Kinak
Edit: Ninja'd by myself!
Edit 2: Oh, and all the Midgard references to Norse mythology. I don't really count those, though, because Midgard is making those references in world.
