{"id":435,"date":"2014-10-26T13:36:54","date_gmt":"2014-10-26T20:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/?p=435"},"modified":"2014-10-26T13:42:31","modified_gmt":"2014-10-26T20:42:31","slug":"october-26th-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/october-26th-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"October 26th, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week’s entry ended in me trying to decide whether to go with a row system or a threat\u00a0system for mitigating damage in team battles. But neither solution really felt right. In the case of a row system you end up with characters with stats\u00a0built for team situations being completely overpowered in non-team situations, and in the case of the threat\u00a0system you also ended up with abilities that are useless in 1v1 situations. And that core problem is what the solution was born from: the need to make a primarily 1v1 system still work in 4v4 situations.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>T<\/a>his is the lane system. It’s quite simple. When two combatants are opposite each other, they form a lane (the lines in the diagram). Most\u00a0attacks can only target enemies in a character’s lane. So in this case 1 can only attack 5, 2 can only attack 6, etc. Effectively a 4v4 becomes more like\u00a04 1v1s occurring at the same time, so the possible damage range\u00a0for each character remains\u00a0about the same as it would be in a 1v1. Naturally allies can still target one another freely, and the extremely\u00a0valuable\u00a0attack-all abilities will still\u00a0target all enemies regardless of lane.<\/p>\n

In the case of unbalanced teams, multiple lanes get formed:<\/p>\n

\"lane2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Most lane attacks are still single target, so the disadvantaged player gets\u00a0to choose which enemy they want to attack.\u00a0There were ideas to still only create one lane in cases like these (making the second character on the 2 side just\u00a0be support), but it was decided the majority deserves an advantage in these\u00a0situations. In some rare circumstances this can actually be advantageous to the minority side by exposing a weaker character to them, but the double damage they end up receiving still\u00a0makes this a minor advantage.<\/p>\n

With this much positioning being introduced to the system it only made sense to introduce multi-target attacks that are directional.\u00a0For instance, “attack all enemies left of your lane”:<\/p>\n

\"lane3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This creates situations where the far left and far right slots become more valuable than other slots.\u00a0Since position is now\u00a0important, I had to start introducing abilities to let characters\u00a0move around. There’s a whole lot of\u00a0flavors available: move left\/right of my current slot,\u00a0move to the slot of a certain enemy, move an enemy\u00a0into my lane, swap my slot with a specific ally, etc.<\/p>\n

From this roles start to emerge in battle. Tanks want to keep damage dealing characters aligned with them instead of fragile allies. Fragile healers want to keep their slot away from the damage dealing characters.\u00a0Damage dealers want high maneuverability so they can align themselves with weaker characters. Attack all characters want the highly valuable far left or far right slots,\u00a0the enemy team wants to keep them away from those slots, etc.<\/p>\n

For the most part I think this is awesome and adds just the right amount of depth that the game was missing. It doesn’t really slow down pacing since position changing abilities will have the same rule as everything else in the game: “you can do something special, but always deal damage at the same time!”. What I worry about is\u00a0how the\u00a0battle system’s turns operate: everyone\u00a0picks their action, and then the turn happens. This can create some extremely hard to follow\u00a0position changing depending on the turn order and the enemy team’s influence. Changing\u00a0the turn order to be one player at a time would\u00a0fix this problem, but it would also cripple the game’s pacing so it’s not really a viable option.\u00a0For the time being I plan on going full-tilt with\u00a0the system and seeing how confusing it gets in testing. If it becomes too much, there are probably rules that can be imposed to make it less confusing (no moving enemies, only 1 move per turn, etc)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

You might recall the threat\u00a0system\u00a0having the\u00a0problem of introducing mechanics for team battles that become irrelevant in solo combat. On the surface the positional system sounds like it has the same problem. Who cares\u00a0where you are when there’s only one enemy? But there’s actually lots of cool stuff that\u00a0can be done with it. We could\u00a0place bombs on the battlefield, if you swap a bomb directly\u00a0opposite an enemy’s slot, then it\u00a0would explode on them. Another option that is also beneficial to team battles would be to have status effects that are bound to specific slots. Suddenly being able to move to the right becomes very important when it means getting out of poison or into a defense bonus! So as it turns out the positional system can add just as much to 1v1 as it does to 4v4.<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

I was reluctant to add another system to the game this late in development. But the reality is that this fixes the problem. Not only does it fix the problem, but it also adds exactly the right amount of extra depth that\u00a0I was looking\u00a0to add to battles. So I think it’s worth it. In that general vein, I’ve started to go into more of a crunch schedule so\u00a0I can get this thing done already. The first fruit of this schedule is that I’ve already implemented\u00a0the\u00a0system I just outlined above in the same week that I\u00a0came up with the design of it. The 1v1 enhancing features I described haven’t been implemented yet, but my current plan is to build\u00a0co-op classes and battle encounters around the new system in order to test it out. If it works well in co-op, then I’ll add the 1v1 features and rebuild PVP around it. So that’s my goal for this week. See you then!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week’s entry ended in me trying to decide whether to go with a row system or a threat\u00a0system for mitigating damage in team battles. But neither solution really felt right. In the case of a row system you end up with characters with stats\u00a0built for team situations being completely overpowered in non-team situations, and… Continue reading October 26th, 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-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","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=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":445,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions\/445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}