Another year another class that's trying to kill me. I welcome game engines with open arms, I've fought through the year of Hogue and I'm up for its challenge. So far so good, they've learned from homework systems, With due date a student understands when material will be introduced to them, and have a community of students all on the same page. So far the lectures have become large tutorial videos explaining some core mechanics of 2LOC, and how we should use them. A new collection of pointers to play with, and a series of exceptions systems that I'd usually save for clean up when writing code. Lectures consist of lengthy explanations of simple review and advanced theory, combined with a slide or two of lifesaving syntax. The syntax shown is so important because "Googleing" isn't really an option with 2LOC. This isn't as much of a problem because the people teaching lectures and tutorials are easy to contact. I plan on completing my 4 easy questions before the due date. To sum up the course so far its going good.
Since we haven't gotten very deep in content yet (last tutorial was setting up a camera) I thought I'd talk about some concepts I've been going over for my GDW team. As of resonantly our game has gotten a complete override, we've completely ditched our last idea because we felt the scope was much to large. We have many skilled people on our team, but we felt the design side would prove to be to much for a few students in a year time. We decided to go with our back-up idea of making a FPS game with fighting game like combat. We thought that we could still put some work in as far as art and content goes, but the real reason we changed was because this game direction will let us make the game much more fun. What I'd like to talk about in this blog is why we think something thats competitive is going to be more fun, but also how making it properly is harder than you'd think.
My Favorite genre of video games is fighting games. They are usually the hardest to make, taking the normal requirements of good art and programming, but also the challenge of getting multiple people to face off. There is a winner and a loser, but since this is a game you want both to have fun. You need a combination of balance and understanding of skill. With a cooperative or singular experience, you have a player or two going towards the same goal and for the most part experiencing the same things. Even with large multiplier games where you have teams facing off against teams, the vastness of the differentiation of skills and choices allow some balance to come naturally. With 1 vs 1 fighting games the story is different. Both players may start the same, look into the game the same, but the difference comes when you have compare their individualism. It can be as simple as people picking characters suited to them, to people just orientating towards certain playstyles(offensive defensive). These factors make balancing a game harder, because its hard to take two different players, with different variables and skill level and making the game feel fair.
I can't count the amount of times I've seen people lose interest in a game because someone beat them too hard, or they felt cheated in defeat. Recently competitive games have found a way around this factor and that has been simplification. Games like League of Legends, towerfall, and Nidhogg. Taking RTS's and simplifying them to 4 buttons per character, taking a shooting game and simplifying it to 2D, and taking a fighting game and simplifying it to two characters of equal strength. These games follow a play method of easy to learn difficult to master. It just works better with the general population. I personally like it more when I can chose my own fighter and hes his own original thing. That is because i think individualism in fighting games, allowing a defensive player and an offensive player to thrive, lets a game have more depth.
I'd like to talk about one of the games i mentioned specifically, Towerfall. Its where the majority of our game idea comes from. Its a 2-4 player game that involves Archers facing off against each other. Each archer starts with 3 arrows and they can jump, dash or shoot arrow. Jumping is used for movement, but jumping on opponents heads is a way to defeat them. dashing makes you invisible for a short period of time, moves you fast and allows you to catch arrows but is limited. Finally you can shoot arrows to kill opponents and you can pick them up by walking over them after shot. Its a pretty simple game, but we're pushing it to the 3rd dimension and making it a FPS. I'd like to go over the things we're going to face in this blog.
Guns with limited ammo that must be picked back up, a movement system, and a parry method. Now FPS makes some problems real quick, first off multiplayer on FPS is usually on different screens. This means we are going to have to look into the online functionalities of 2LOC. This is a Fast paced game and if packets can't be sent from computer to computer fast enough we are going to have to limit it to split screen or use "dirty" methods like prediction based on player gameplay. Personally I think that systems that some FPS use are absolutely terrible. Its the idea that if the host isn't getting the packets in time, the game will fill up the missing information with assumptions based of what was last known. Thats why in some games when you lose connection you see players continue to walk into walls. I personally hate this method, and when similar methods are found in fighting games its considered blasphemy from fan bases. Theres also a lot of gameplay problems that come from just porting one idea to the other. For one, with limited ammo in an FPS collecting ammo is completely different from something like TowerFall. Towerfalls map loop, like pacman, so technically nobody is ever actually above or below somebody else. In an FPS creating connecting segments like this is much harder to create in a full 3D game. Without these connecting maps you encounter a problem with limited ammo. All of a sudden Jumping is unbalanced, if somebody shoots while you're in the air, their bullet hits the ceiling, traveling way farther away then someone shooting at the ground. its now also harder to get to this bullet now that the maps don't loop. Also aiming is harder in 3 dimensions than 2. The transition to 3D is going to cause a lot of reimagineing of this idea and I know my group and me can pull it off
No comments:
Post a Comment