A Train in Vain

Okay folks, new orders from up top, time to get to work designing. Having just started my courses for this semester, the one that's probably going to be taking up most of my time is IMGD 3500 Artistic Game Development. The assignment: make an entire first person platformer level from scratch in Unity, and make it look damn pretty. Best get to the old drawing board.

I don't know a lot of details quite yet, I've only just begun to play around with Unity outside of cats pawing at it idly last semester, so I've got some work ahead of me on that front. For right now, all I've got is that it will consist of at least one interior space, a larger exterior space and a bridge somewhere in the mix. There is definitely more detail to come, so laying anything down in concrete terms is probably unwise, but we can start some preliminary planning right out of the gate to find a general direction for the later work.

The bridge seems like the best starting point, it's a concrete place to start, unlike the ephemeral concepts of "an interior and exterior space." A little free association off the word bridge turned up the phrase "rail bridge," like a bridge trains use to cross a river. Working out from here one can easily imagine a game set aboard a moving train, the conflict almost sets itself, a train is speeding out of control, and the player must reach the locomotive to stop the train. The trains increasing speed can be used to create a nice difficulty curve and impart a sense of rising tension, and the player can move amidst both the interior and exterior of the train fleshing out the other two known requirements for the game.

Setting the game aboard a train also has the added benefit of keeping the action nicely contained, and suggest constant forward movement to the player. This also makes things developmentally simple as well, trains being highly modular, if a planned section of the train doesn't work out, just remove it and hook the previous section to the next part. If we want to get really devious we can have individual cars become uncoupled as the train moves along, perhaps setting a time-limit forcing the player to race across each train car, or at least make a long lead from one car to the next.

Seeing how this is an art class, let's keep the discussion mostly about the visuals. I'll keep these in general bullet point format, to keep me from over-committing to one idea.

• Colors commonly associated with trains: the black, white and red of train crossings as well as the warning yellow caution signs that alert people of their presence. Seems like a good pallet of urgent colors to let the player know they should keep moving. Perhaps tone down the reds and yellows though, I'm thinking some manner of rust color for the reds, and a drab, worn out taxi-cab yellow. Also some tinny metallic color might be a good idea too.
• Railroad tracks suggest a lot of intersecting straight-ish lines, possibly a motif that can be carried throughout?
• Perhaps the smoke from the chimney could serve as an indicator of the end goal? Perhaps wafts of smoke hinting a possible path forward.
• Stray thought here, title of the game should be A Train to Catch or something like that.

Well it's a good start anyways, at least for quickly jotting down some ideas. I still have to play with Unity a bit more to see what I can do, but it doesn't hurt to put some thought into now though.

Design Notebook: Fixing MMO Combat

Welcome to our first installment of Design Notebook, where I kick around an idea I've been toying with. This is a nice catch all for ideas that aren't really a full game.

It's no secret the combat in MMO's is boring, it basically boils down to clicking on a guy and hoping his hit points run out before yours do. There might be a little strategy in pressing hot-keys at just the right time, and perhaps positioning yourself correctly, but all the same it's a rather passive activity.

Worse, there is almost no skill involved, combat effectiveness is solely based on how powerful the character is, and that is almost always a function of how much time the player has put into the character. Assuming their is some sort of skill in MMO combat, even the most skilled new player isn't going to be able to beat an unskilled player with a higher level character.

There are reasons for this, MMO controls have to be something simple anybody can pick up, to make it easy to resolve combat and for players to learn the game. Also a computer has a limited number of inputs it can take in, information for an attack has to come in through either the mouse or keyboard, and there is only so much you can do with these. Finally the core conceit in these kinds of games is that the players get better over time, and it is difficult to do this without statistical progression.

So what other option is there? Funnily enough the best answer might be typing. Think about it, monitoring key presses is trivial for a game, attacking enemies based on spelling out words wouldn't be that hard to implement. Typing based combat would allow for quickly designating which monster you wanted to attack, just assign it a letter, no more fumbling to click just the right priority target in the middle of a horde. If implemented correctly this form of combat could be even more simple, and a lot more fluid than combat is now.

Typing based combat also involves the player, no more clicking on a boss monster with a lot of health and leaving to make a sandwich while your avatar chips away at it's health, the player has to be constantly in the game typing the words that come up. The player not only has incentive to perform his actions by requiring constant input, he has incentive to perform those actions well. MMO's are all about dealing damage as fast as possible, with typing based combat you can have attacks resolve upon completion of the word instead of just assigning a time to the action. This way words per minute translate into damage per second, the player actually learns a (useful) skill as a result of play.

Having a player type out his attacks might add a nice bit of flavor to the mechanics in your typical fantasy MMO. Consider the basic character types:

• A Knight to tank damage to the other players.
• A Spellcaster to lay down Areas of Effects and hit enemies with powerful spells
• A  Cleric to keep the Tank on their feet and provide buffs.
• A Barbarian who does a lot of damage in a short amount of time.
• Finally a Rogue to do sneak attacks, ranged combat and maybe some debuffs.

You could have the player type out something in character to perform the particular attacks for their role. For example say an enemy is rushing headlong towards the vulnerable charactes in the back ranks, it's programmed ahead of time to go for the vulnerable characters unless something stops it, so just attacking it isn't going to draw it away from the squishy wizard in the back unless you kill it. Giving the Knight an attack, where he types out something like "face me" or "get back" that also draws the enemy into combat with him seems pretty character driven to me.

It works for the other characters to, for the wizard longer magic words would translate into a more powerful spell and area of effect spells would highlight only effects as many enemies as letters typed before the spell goes off. Clerics have to type out their prayers to heal their allies, beseeching their divine patron in their own words. Barbarians deal damage based on how load and incomprehensible their war-crys sound, staying in their rage so long as they don't make a mistake transcribing the words that pop up on screen. Finally Rogues can write out taunts and insults for their intended targets, rhetorical salt into the literal wounds.

Interesting concept, I might come back to it later.

Just for fun, the ideas expressed in this blog are Copyright © Edward Golden.

Design Document Archive

This post will be the general archive for all design documents and other files I'll share through Google Docs. I'll link back to this post when we finish other design documents which I'll edit into this post.

Dracula's Castle

Design Document - Available here

Enemy Appendix - Available here

Equipment Appendix - Available here