Re: How to keep players invested
by Interloper » Sun 10. Apr 2011, 03:11
Actually yeah, we can spawn new buildings and caves, assuming we use a world map, setup. Think the original Fallouts - you might stumble across a cave or a village or a bunch of underlings on the way to your next destination. It's as easy as making random encounters more interesting than a bunch of guys to fight.
That said, fighting guys is still pretty important because it's what the player will do a LOT of.
First off, I imagine the enemy list would be something like this:
Found on planets:
Imps (these would be basically neutral unless you attacked)
Ogres
Basilisks
Liches
Giclopses
The Denezin
Found on the battlefield:
Pawns (probably also neutral unless attacked)
Bishops (it stands to reason only Dersite creatures would actually attack you)
Knights
Rooks
The King
The Queen
Other
Agents
Underlings would be affected both by prototyping and by their material, the rest just by prototyping. Also battlefield enemies don't seem to drop grist.
In terms of a power hierarchy, the order above should work, and battlefield creatures should be on average more powerful than their corresponding planetary counterparts. So pawns should be able to kill imps without a lot of trouble. Agents should be the most powerful, like minibosses. In addition, within those classes, their strength could be based on prototyping - so a player 1 prototyped imp would be weaker than a player 4 prototyped one. Different materials should also be rarer than others, so finding a gold imp would be harder than a shale imp.
Ideally this creates plenty of depth in terms of power levels, and plenty of variety in appearance. It should also be interesting in that minecraft sense where finding a rare material would be satisfying, though this would be proportionate to the kind of stuff people can craft.
Additionally, having enemies able to pick up items and equip them could be interesting, as they might behave differently based on what they were equipped with - one wielding a hammer might hit slower but harder than one wielding a stick. A great example of this is Plants Versus Zombies where most zombies are just the same thing, but with different behaviours.
The real question is how to make carapeople fun to fight, because being on the battlefield neither they nor you would have access to random items, so there would be a lot less variety. Perhaps they could be made more fun by each one having different attacks based on their class - pawns will lunge at you, knights will do jumping attacks, bishops might cast spells and perhaps you have to scale a rook to kill it. I think allied carapeople could be recruited to follow you though so you might get a kind of RTS aspect - additionally, certain pawns for example could take medic roles or be given different types of weapons, so it would be kind of like Half Life 2's squad mechanics, where they're differentiated by function, not so much because they're actually different. And I think that kind of thing would be necessary anyway - a god tier player for example wouldn't have access to any inventory items so they'd have to rely on medic pawns if they got hurt.
In that way gameplay could follow two different styles - going from Diablo to a kind of Overlord setup based on whether you're on the battlefield or not.
I think this would play well with the procedural generation, as well as having them perform a few basic actions or being able to issue a few basic orders to allies, the most difficult part to program would be having allies follow you, but as long as they don't collide with you, it should be easy enough. I don't estimate AI being a huge problem, as they don't have to be smart, just be able to navigate and perform simple tasks.
You'd still have side quests, lore, items to find and puzzles to solve, in terms of keeping interested but this should about cover the enemies.
The biggest challenge is just making the battlefield as interesting as the planets because it's visually bland, and beyond randomly generated castles, there isn't a lot of opportunity to do interesting stuff with it, or the enemies there because as I said, they don't drop grist. On the other hand, this is where you expect to really do a lot of adventuring with friends, so it could have a focus on cooperative elements.