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October 5th, 2014

October 5th, 2014 published on

I returned from the break pretty much where I left off: without much idea of where to take the final refinements. Left with no design goals, I decided the best course of action was to start developing a prototype version of a co-op scenario. It’s the best move in this situation for a whole lot of reasons:

1. Co-op creates a new set of problems

It’s quite likely that what’s needed to improve co-op will be far more obvious than what’s needed to improve the competitive game. These changes then have a very good chance of feeding right back into improving the competitive game, or at least give it the depth that it’s missing. In short, I’m hoping that seeing what needs to be added in a pure co-op mode will also be what’s missing from the other mode. If nothing else, I’m a lot more confident in my ability to make a rad co-op game than I am in my ability to make a serious competitive game.

2. Co-op might end up being the main game mode

This one has been on my mind for awhile. The only reason I began development by focusing on PVP is because it needs the most attention to be functional. A completely traditional JRPG would be largely dysfunctional as a competitive game since they’re primarily built around surviving and discovering AI patterns. When foes of similar power face off, battles tend to be determined by superior stats. With this in mind I went about by building the system to work for PVP situations first.

But in reality the game itself probably lends itself to co-op the best, since the foundation genre is built for PVE. Not only that but one of the biggest struggles with this game has been making combat work when you control only one character. Co-op alleviates this by having a whole lot more battles with other participants, adding a dimension of team work to the game. Even the map gameplay lends itself well to cooperation by forcing players to think on their feet and coordinate wise tactics where they have to split up. Combine that with the fact that it’s a much gentler introduction to the game than a competitive mode where new players will be at a disadvantage, and the fact that most fans of the genre are probably looking for a PVE experience and there’s a very strong chance that co-op will be the premiere mode of the game. If it DOES end up being the better part of the game, PVP might turn into more of a side attraction than the core game. Ideally I’d like to do both well, but if co-op is a better game and is more easily improved then it may just end up becoming the game.

3. Co-op requires some long-desired features

From the start I thought it was really dumb that a turn based game wouldn’t have a hotseat mode. It was a time saving choice since adding it would require adding to the functionality of the battle UI to account for multiple characters. But when the time came to think about co-op mode a problem arose: how do you scale the game to work with different numbers of players? The problem compounded when you factored in that I wanted stuff where players would have to split up on the map to efficiently achieve goals.

Eventually I decided the only viable solution was just to make it so players can control multiple characters if desired. So it’s this nice case where I solve a problem and finally have an excuse to add hotseat play while I’m at it. Since I’m mucking around with that part of the code anyway, I’m adding observers to the game as well. The main reason is just so I can have people test them game without playing it myself, which will allow for less biased test results without having to write a full replay system.

4. Co-op is a simpler single player mode

By letting players control multiple characters we basically allow co-op to be played single player by letting all 4 characters be controlled by one person. This could either be really cool or a total disaster. But there probably won’t be time to add proper AI (co-op mode is too complex for AI anyway, and PVP probably wouldn’t be that interesting with bots even if we had them), so this is at least a chance to support some single player. It could even be -too- good where people don’t find the game as enjoyable when only controlling one character. But given the huge risk of a small game being multiplayer focused, I’m glad to have some potential single player support.

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This week I started off by adding support for controlling multiple characters. Along the way I had to decide how to implement the UI side of it. This opened old wounds that our interface for battles still isn’t really intuitive. It boils down to this: most RPGs have you select a command and then a target. This game has you select a target and then a command. It’s this way because that’s the easiest way to minimize the amount of mouse movement required for an action (typical console RPG input becomes very painful with lots of repeat, excess movement if you directly translate an interface made for a gamepad to a mouse. To fix this I’ve taken great pains to reduce the amount of mouse movement required for input). This is an effective method for comfort, but it has created a great deal of confusion among testers expecting a more typical interface. It’s also worse for perception of abilities since only abilities that are relevant to the target are displayed and since the most common target is the enemy, it’s easy to forget that you even have ally targeted abilities.

Thinking about it from this angle, I came up with a new interface concept that’s fairly similar. The idea is to just use the typical RPG menu structure. We can still minimize mouse movement by having the newest selection window always be created in the same are as the previous select. So the “attack/defend/ability” menu would move out of the way for the ability selection window after the selection was made. Once an ability is selected, the turn order list would stretch further out to reach where the mouse was hovering. The downside is that players become less attached to the visual positioning of combatants since they don’t have to target using them, or (worse) they still click on the combatants directly and create unnecessary mouse movements for themselves. I’ll need to see it in practice to be sure, but it has potential to be more intuitive than the old method.