Tue, Apr 27th 2010, 17:38
Fighting Myself
Tue, Apr 27th 2010, 17:38
I tended to the outstanding issues with the different ship types,
getting it all squared away in short order. Feeling proud and
productive, it was time to figure out what came next.
Upon considering what would happen if a ship was put into battle
against itself, I found that two of them yielded unwinnable
encounters. Well, unless you consider "staying alive until the other
guy accidentally suicides on the terrain" a form of winning (and not
all terrain types have lethal collisions, so that's not always an
option anyway).
This left me with the decision between pressing forward as is, or
chopping things up a bit to make things fit together better.
The obvious option was to just omit battles against ships of the
same type and be done with it. While that does prevent the
stalemate scenario, it feels more like avoiding the problem than
solving it.
In a competitive multiplayer game, a bout between two similarly
matched characters (e.g. two Warriors with approximately the same
stats / build / what-have-you) is often more interesting and
exposes the players' skill through success or failure. I mean,
we all know rock beats scissors, but rock vs. rock becomes
about who has the bigger rock. No, it is not a tie!
So, I set about fiddling with the ship concepts so that they'd be
able to competently fight their twins. In doing so, I also discovered
a few glaring oversights in some of the heterogeneous match-ups. After
getting all of this patched up, the design feels significantly tighter,
even on paper. The downside is that the ship diversity has suffered.
The original concepts were just too different; if each had its own
game tailored to it, it would be fine, but as they all have to play
well with each other and adhere to a core rule set, a compromise was
made.
As grouchy as I sound about all of this, I'm quite happy with how it's
shaping up. This coming week should see some quick an dirty prototyping.
VERGE's gimped input capabilities aren't quite up to snuff, but I'll
probably use it anyway out of familiarity with both it and Lua. It won't
be ideal, but it should be enough to let me know if I'm on the right
track without burning up a lot of time.
