This\u00a0week was\u00a0pretty much all about the slow climb of\u00a0designing all the new stuff for co-op (classes, monsters, quests, etc), and building the new\u00a0systems\u00a0they depend on (scaling encounters to\u00a0party size, adding spawn\/transform battle actions for more gimmick heavy battles that co-op is better suited for, etc).<\/p>\n
When I actually\u00a0sat down to design new classes for co-op I finally had to admit an uncomfortable truth\u00a0to myself: this\u00a0game is just not that well suited to heavy character customization. On a mechanical level you need a certain level of fluidity to make the kind of customization I was pushing for work. But the\u00a0game isn’t that fluid, it’s more rigid. So when I kept trying to inject such heavy customization into it,\u00a0players were just ending up with generic characters built to compensate for each subclass’s shortcomings so they\u00a0could do anything, rather than classes that pushed them into interesting advantages and disadvantages that require using different strategies to compensate.\u00a0It wasn’t\u00a0especially obvious in PVP, but it’s blindingly obvious in co-op where you’re trying to build very specific\u00a0roles for each character.<\/p>\n
I spent a lot of time trying to think of another class system that still offered\u00a0limited customization. Nothing really seemed right. So I just went in the complete opposite direction: players pick one class, that class has a completely static progression. If this works well, I might\u00a0go back and\u00a0inject some mild customization into it. Or I might just leave it alone.<\/p>\n
I’m still in the process of designing these classes. I did\u00a0most of the necessary programming\u00a0additions while deciding on what route to go with classes, so next\u00a0week will primarily be focusing on design stuff. It’s a little harrowing. This is probably the third time I’ve built sample player abilities, and the fifth\u00a0time\u00a0I’ve had to redesign or heavily alter the monster encounters. It’s starting to feel like I’ve been remaking the same game over and over. Here’s to this hopefully being the last time, even though it’s probably not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This\u00a0week was\u00a0pretty much all about the slow climb of\u00a0designing all the new stuff for co-op (classes, monsters, quests, etc), and building the new\u00a0systems\u00a0they depend on (scaling encounters to\u00a0party size, adding spawn\/transform battle actions for more gimmick heavy battles that co-op is better suited for, etc). When I actually\u00a0sat down to design new classes for co-op… Continue reading November 2nd, 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-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","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=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":448,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions\/448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}