I’ve had a month of pretty solid design work, and am flowing a lot more on Jo’Jaxon, the Splizzball pitcher known for improbable throws. In keeping with his character trait, there has to be some randomness in how he does his throws, and I think I’m ready to share off at least the basics of his gameplay.

But first: An art! I fed the original Jo’Jaxon sketch into Gemini and kinda medievalled him a bit. The biggest change is instead of a generic baseball guy uniform, he’s kinda picked up a leather pauldron, a kickass rucksack.. and a guild tabard with the Gnorthwell Gnome on it.

So, lets talk about the balls. I never had an idea what a Splizzball looked like, and after a few renditions, the baseballs turned into.. crystal orb things. Since they are the dominant ball in the bag, those are the generic throws. The rest of the stuff poking out of his bag is not only odd and worth commenting on, but those are the random items that even Jo doesn’t know he’s packing and ready to throw. He’s known for throwing his boots off of his own feet, but the trick is: nobody saw him take them off. They just showed up in his hand in the middle of a game. Twice.

Jo’s main attacks are throws. As a pitcher, he’s got some variety of moves, like a fastball pitch that emits fire for continuous damage, or a throw straight at the chin of an enemy that has a good chance to daze them. Those moves he can choose, same as any other player. The random element is what comes out of the bag, and each of his throws have at least three outcomes, based on what he draws up. The player will have a pitching sack and needs to draw three balls out of it per attack (then put them back).

The High Heat’s goal is to set someone on fire. If you just pull out regular splizzballs, the crystal looking things, then that’s what he does – damage and a burn effect. If you pull out one wild pitch out of the 3 draws from the bag, then the ball ignores the target’s defenses AND sets them on fire. So that is even better.. surely two wild balls are better than one, right? Well, in this case.. no. Two wilds mean that the throw ignores defenses, but Jo sets himself on fire with the attack.

The pitches are a mixture of risk and reward. Some are better with no wildness in them, some, like High Heat, reward a little randomness. Then there are pitches that are best saved for when there is a wild streak in play. Again, since the player can choose their pitches, they can balance out the likelihood of pulling more wilds than not.

So how do you go on a wild streak? You do this by pulling 3 wilds from the bag during an attack. This has two effects: One, you add another wild ball into your pitching sack, so that the odds of future wild balls increases. Two: Something dramatic happens to your current attack. Jo builds up Star Power the more times he throws out a full wild pitch, and somewhat similar to Alastrina’s japa, that can be turned into fuel for one of his power moves. Only.. not all the power moves are good, and he doesn’t control when they are used.

The fun of replacing some comedy items for other comedy items has been great; it is pretty easy to say “replace the cabbage for a swordfish” and get exactly that. Getting Jo into various athletic poses is still a work in progress; I don’t really have the right language to tell Gemini to make him hustle and crouch and.. sport.. correctly. So something to work on, but the plus side of feeding all the creative ball replacements to the AI is that when I asked it for some wild pitches, it did end up throwing fish and trains at goblins.

So, that’s what I’ve got so far, both on art and game design. Still need to work on Pox; she’s one of the first three characters, but the inspiration isn’t flowing quite as solidly.