This week went pretty well.\u00a0Everything needed to support a single client controlling multiple characters wrapped up without\u00a0a hitch.\u00a0All the stuff needed to support multiple scenarios was\u00a0also finished, including globally enabling\/disabling PVP (and all the related stuff of having pve\/pvp-specific classes). It’s now all about actually building the first co-op scenario itself.<\/p>\n
At this point I have a pretty good idea of what the plot of the scenario is and how it’s going to function.\u00a0The real troubling questions right now are\u00a0how to deal with all the issues surrounding co-op itself. Primarily,\u00a0making a game where large scale battles (4v4) and small scale (1v1) can co-exist in sane ways.<\/p>\n
1. Scaling random battles<\/strong><\/p>\n The current thought process is to make random encounters scale to the player party sized. So a party of 3 people\u00a0will always be fighting groups of 3 monsters, part of 2 always fighting 2 monsters, etc. This\u00a0should ideally create an effect of “Parties can move faster, but have to face riskier\u00a0battles”.<\/p>\n But\u00a0this effect is probably still a little too potent right now. A party of 4\u00a0people can\u00a0effectively clear 4 tiles in 1 round, while a party of 1 person can only clear 1 tile in 1 round. This is quite troublesome since one of my goals with co-op is to create situations where people need to split up, but it’s hard to make that time efficient when a full party has such a major speed advantage. The other downside\u00a0to scaling encounter size to parties means that\u00a0players in parties will still be gaining the same amount of experience as \u00a0solo player would instead of gaining a reduced amount from the experience split.<\/p>\n So unless\u00a0large group\u00a0monsters are ridiculously risky, players still have far too big of an advantage when\u00a0in a party. And we really don’t want large group monsters -that- risky since grouping should be a common occurrence in co-op.<\/p>\n 2. Dealing with Focus Fire<\/strong><\/p>\n A 4v4 battle introduces a big problem with focus fire. If you can freely target any character on the battlefield, then\u00a0it’s entirely possible for the monsters to just focus fire\u00a0a low hp target such as a mage and kill them in a single turn. You need some kind of target limiting mechanism to make this a little more strategic.<\/p>\n The traditional way for a turn based RPG to\u00a0handle this sort of thing is to just introduce front and back rows.\u00a0Only front rows can be damaged or deal damage with\u00a0physical attacks, while ranged attacks can hit both rows. (In some variations the front\/back row thing ends up just being a defense bonus instead of completely disabling targeting). There’s a lot of problems with using this solution directly though: our art isn’t really set up for it (though we can cheat by using offsets to imply it), it requires players to set up their rows every time they form a party, it’s very much built around heavily defined roles in combat which becomes difficult to support in a game where 4v4 and 1v1 battles are expected to co-exist, etc.<\/p>\n Alternately we could adopt\u00a0a threat system that has become common place in real time RPGs (I’m actually not sure a turn based positionless RPG\u00a0has ever used this type of system?). While typically\u00a0a strictly AI system, I’d probably make it equally relevant in PVP (since this system is used largely in real time RPGs they usually substitute threat for position and being a nuisance, but since we have no positions the threat system would continue to act as a substitute).\u00a0Lots of ways to build this- either only high\u00a0threat sources can be targeted, or having low threat grants a heavy defense bonus. Makes more sense with our visuals. Potentially injects\u00a0a lot of strategy into a game that is relatively low on\u00a0that right now.<\/p>\n 3. Dealing with Damage<\/strong><\/p>\n Of course even when we implement one of the above systems to cope with focus fire, we still have problems going between 1v1 and 4v4. If we build a tank\u00a0designed around withstanding\u00a0the focus fire of 4 other characters, then they’ll be practically invincible in 1v1 (albeit take more turns to kill their enemy,\u00a0and have a bunch of threat management abilities that are now useless in 1v1). In theory we could do stuff like multiply damage output by 4 for 1v1 to make up for it, but that doesn’t seem right. It’s something I need to think about. It’s a problem that MMOs encounter a lot when dealing with solo vs grouped content, and it usually results in solo content being extremely boring since enemies have to be flatlined to be defeatable by all roles.\u00a0The solution may be to just have specialized classes\u00a0exclusive to co-op (and expecting everyone in co-op to always be in a party of at least 2), while making everyone more of a generalist in PVP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week went pretty well.\u00a0Everything needed to support a single client controlling multiple characters wrapped up without\u00a0a hitch.\u00a0All the stuff needed to support multiple scenarios was\u00a0also finished, including globally enabling\/disabling PVP (and all the related stuff of having pve\/pvp-specific classes). It’s now all about actually building the first co-op scenario itself. At this point I… Continue reading October 19th, 2014<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":434,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}