phill

phill makes a game

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11/03 to 15/03 Review

 

1. At least one new enemy as per the two designs I mentioned in previous posts.

I didn't do this, but it's okay! So it turns out I'm bad at not getting sucked into high level thinking about how my game will operate. With enough-for-a-vertical-slice bits done for my inner and middle loop, I kind of got stuck into thinking about how my outer loop would operate. The more I thought about it the more I realised that the outer loop will affect how I implement enemies, so I decided to do more of that.

 

2. Map out how to structure the outer loop of the game, i.e. bonuses, worker scaling, building and destruction loop, etc.

I thought a lot about this! I spent a lot of time sketching out various systems that I could use for the outer loop. Eventually I came to one that I think might work as a first draft, I'll give an overview here (in spoiler tags because it's long):

 

Spoiler

 

DAY

Before day starts:

  • Player receives per-day salary based on number of buildings that were completed and not completely destroyed overnight.
  • Player bets on how many buildings they can complete extra to the schedule (i.e. 1 building required, player bets 3 extra buildings) before day starts.

During day:

  • Player uses the number of waves they have to try and complete as many buildings that they’ve bet on as possible.
  • If you perfectly use a wave (TBD what this means) then you get a refund on that wave.
  • If the player has waves left over, then they keep some fraction of them for next time (is this enough punishment for not playing optimally?)

When day is complete:

  • Player gets completion bonus for any buildings they completed.
  • Player gets penalised for any buildings they didn’t complete.
  • Player gets extra penalised for any buildings that have remained incomplete for X days, increasing daily.
  • Player also kind of gets penalised for overbetting, as all buildings are able to be affected by mob.

NIGHT

Before night starts:

  • Player decides which building they (and, later, their hired help) will sleep in.

During night:

  • Buildings are affected by drunken mob.
  • Player’s building (and, later, player + hired help buildings) is immune to mob.
  • Mob can do a bunch of random things to buildings.
    • Deal damage;
    • Place environmental hazards in it;
    • Add enemies that are not workers and can’t be used to build;
    • Increase level of workers;
  • Mob additions stay until the building is completed.
  • If a building is destroyed, player loses income for that building the following day.
  • If a building is affected by the mob in any way, it automatically gets added to the must-do schedule.

 

 

The aim for this is to feel a little bit like a worker placement board game in between rounds in the arena. Anyway! I'm going on to shift tomorrow so I'll be taking a break until the end of the month (and possibly beyond as I have recently bought a house and need to do IRL stuff there).

 

 

 

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phill, have you considered making the drunkenness another thing the player has to make a decision about? Ie you somehow affect the drunken mob, either through pay or placement. Like, you could choose to put out a keg/kegs at the end of the night for worker satisfaction, and that would give you a higher percentage chance of the mob starting at that building, or of spawning different building effects than a mob spawned by unsanctioned alcohol.  

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23 hours ago, Rilen said:

phill, have you considered making the drunkenness another thing the player has to make a decision about? Ie you somehow affect the drunken mob, either through pay or placement. Like, you could choose to put out a keg/kegs at the end of the night for worker satisfaction, and that would give you a higher percentage chance of the mob starting at that building, or of spawning different building effects than a mob spawned by unsanctioned alcohol.  

 

Yeah for sure! I'm glad you went there (and it means a lot that you spent time thinking about it and typing it!), because part of the interaction between the middle/outer loop is that I really want there to be a lot of itemisation/upgrades/things the player can use their cash to buy. Ultimately I want to ride that tension between making things easier (or possible at all) in the short term versus easier in the long term (through persistent upgrades). It'll hopefully suit the looped narrative too; I have a vision of the 'between jobs' section (i.e. you failed and the minesite got destroyed) being our hero sitting on the couch and drinking beer and the pile of upgrades in the form of terrible bogan shit, slowly stop-motion-disappearing as he has to pawn it off.

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1 hour ago, Rilen said:

Nice! Very "Cart Life". 

 

I (somehow) hadn't heard of Cart Life, and now I know what I'm going to play next week. :)

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So, when you bet a certain number of buildings, that number of foundations are instantly built and, if you can't finish them, you get penalized. What happens if you under-bet? You simply can't build any more that day because there are no foundations left?

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11 hours ago, Dewar said:

So, when you bet a certain number of buildings, that number of foundations are instantly built and, if you can't finish them, you get penalized. What happens if you under-bet? You simply can't build any more that day because there are no foundations left?

 

Hey, it's my chemistry bud! I think that would make sense, yeah. I'm also aiming create an exponential (or maybe not exponential, but certainly accelerating) destruct-o-meter for how badly the drunken mob will kick your buildings' butts/structural integrity. So while under-betting is safe in the short term, in the long term you'll be undercutting your ability to deal with the damage that the mob is putting out. That's kind of where the rogue-like element will shift into gear; players that aren't able to use their waves effectively will be able to prop that up with buffs that carry over between jobs, they'll just take longer to get to the end game than someone who is good at betting and being efficient in combat.

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01/04 to 07/04

 

Hello! I'm back for another short week as I'm heading back to my home town for a much-needed holiday for most of my off-time this shift. Also I've moved into my new house, so there's going to be a lot of time spent organising things and determining just where everything should go. I think I may have three, possibly four days to work on this before I jet off, so my goals will be correspondingly modest. Also by gosh it's bloody hard to get back into this project after a couple of weeks of not touching it. :/

 

My one and only goal for this period will be to put a basic structure of the outer loop into the game, including a win/lose condition so that I can really begin knowing the boundaries of the game and working to expand them. It'll be something like what I wrote up in my last review post, but obviously much more simplified to just get it in there and working to be able to test it. With the short amount of time I have I think that's more than enough!

 

 

 

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01/04 to 07/04 Revision

Quick revision time! I ended up not being able to do basically any coding since I left my laptop charger at home and in general I don't spend my holidays holed up coding. I spend them holed up playing my new Switch with Zelda. Since everyone I know is working up until the Easter holidays, I have instead been able to do quite a bit of Deep Thinking about how I want my moment-to-moment and outer loop to interact to produce meaningful decisions for the player. This will be the last wordy post before I actually start diving back into the code to render some of this as gameplay mechanics, so hopefully this time next month I'll have some interesting gifs/vids to show. I'll spoiler it too, so there's one more barrier between my shoddily thought through mechanics and people's eyeballs.

 

Spoiler

So after a lot of thought and a bit of play testing, I decided that I needed a mechanic that would give the player a bit more space and time to be tactical, while still providing an action-based system. To achieve this, I'm going to be introducing an extra state for the enemy to be in: the stun state. Here's the scoop:

  • Diving into enemies causes them to become stunned and knocked back. Previously, diving into enemies immediately picked them up. This made it difficult for the player to be more strategic about when they actually wanted to pick up an enemy.
  • The enemy will remain stunned for X frames (individual to each enemy and affected by powerups) once they come to a stop from the knockback. This gives the player the opportunity to choose to move towards them and dive into them again to lift them and then throw them.
  • Each enemy will have their HP replaced by a max number of stuns. Stunning an enemy beyond this number will cause them to be removed from the arena and be unable to be used to build up any buildings remaining.
  • The player will have their HP replaced by a non-traditional health system. When the player is hit, they will also be knocked back themselves in the same manner that they would knock back another enemy. During this time, the player will become uncontrollable, or barely controllable, and if they hit any other enemies during this time they will still cause them to be stunned/knocked back too. So the player's health isn't really health: it's control.
  • This tension between needing to pick up enemies before they run out of 'stun HP' and needing to avoid being hit can be reinforced by environmental objects that can damage enemies' 'stun HP' so that the player really doesn't want to lose control for fear of the enemies being knocked by their flailing form and ending up being wasted on the environmental hazards.

Introducing this mechanic also means that I now have the...means to provide another source of tension to the player in the form of how they 'spend' each enemies' stun HP.

  • Where this intersects with the outer loop is through the idea of the player trying to build up the overall building site that is torn down every night in a drunken overnight rampage. There are two rules that will make this more interesting:
  1. The more stuns they have experienced (i.e. the less remaining stun HP they have) the less likely (but not zero) they are to engage in the drunken rampage
  2. The more stuns they have experienced before being thrown into a building, the less building points they will contribute to that building (individually).
  • To explain it another way: a skilled player will be trying to live on the edge by keeping enemies stunned down to their last remaining stun HP before picking them up and combining them with at least one other enemy by throwing them together when stunned to raise their building point contribution, then throwing them into the building. This keeps their stun HP low so that they are less likely to participate in the destruction overnight, but keeps their ability to finish off buildings within the overall site high.

 

I do not expect this to make sense to anyone else, since it's kind of impossible to explain all this without moving pictures. So that's what I'll try and get done for next time which will be around the start of May. See you guys then!

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Your mechanics sound really interesting and it seems like mastering them will take a lot of practice, but be rewarding.

 

I am behind on reading this, but also see that you promised an update about now, so consider this harassment to do so! We need gifs!

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Whee, long time no post. So as may have been evident in the last few posts I made, I let my theory-crafting get ahead of making the game. The systems I was building in my head vastly over complicated the game; what a surprise. A combination of that and my day job getting more intense and leaving town more than a few times on my time off meant that I basically let the project kind of trail away.

 

But! On a train from Tokyo to Nikko on my first real holiday in three years, I decided to find a good GDD and set out some rock-solid foundations to complete this year. So I have! I won't list it all here, since it seems silly to start wandering down the path that got me into trouble in the first place. But I think I'm on a more realistic pathway now, so hopefully I'll have some updates in the next quarter. Thanks again all for the encouragement and help, sorry I haven't followed completely through yet!

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Hopefully the gif below works! It shows:

  • Selecting an area of the overall work site to build;
  • Going into that work site and seeing the buildings that need to be completed by throwing an enemy into them;
  • Small throws that can be done at any time vs. large throws that need to be powered up while standing still;
  • The completion of a work site by completing two buildings within it (actually only required one in this test room, but will require more in the future);
  • Bouncing an enemy off two buildings to complete them with one throw (important once enemies are used up on throwing);
  • The work site being completed in the main menu.

I think I've got a much more straightforward mechanic (banking enemies off buildings) to incentivise smart play and I'm very near a vertical slice that I can give to players to try and see how it feels to them. I have the old AI from earlier versions that I can easily implement to provide more of a challenge.

 

Unfortunately, now that I've gotten back into the project I'm going to have to put it on hold while I go work for two weeks and then get married and then work some more! But really looking to coming back to it and continuing on with this sometime in May. :)

2018-03-28_20-22-03.gif

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I managed to have a bit of time before I go and get married, so here's a progress gif!

 

2018-04-17_11-49-07.gif.396b502647a483d210a8a4d8dc30c367.gif

 

In this gif:

  • added the bounce-grab ability of the player to make throwing an enemy more of a strategic decision;
  • importing an old-but-new-again 'dasher' enemy that attacks and then retreats, with a small chance of chain attacking;
  • the player hit mechanic whereby any enemy that hits the player pauses everything else in the arena and then leaves, meaning they can't be used to build things;
  • new 'bouncer' environmental object that throws bounces any enemies that are thrown into it back harder.

Next I'm going to work on:

  • importing the old-but-new-again diver enemy;
  • introduce long-range attacks that provide an additional layer of danger that isn't tied to the enemy/building economy (but can be disabled by throwing enemies into them);
  • trying to figure out what a good amount of enemies on the screen might be;
  • replace some of the greyboxing art with something at least a little more interesting.

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Maybe I'm the only one but I have hard time understanding what is happening :(.

It's an arena fight when you can use ennemies to build things ?

 

But I don't get why the dongas get -X ? When you throw an ennemy on the donga, the arena get builded ? Symbolised by the number decreasing ?

 

And congrats for you wedding ^^.

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1 hour ago, Woum said:

Maybe I'm the only one but I have hard time understanding what is happening :(.

It's an arena fight when you can use ennemies to build things ?

 

But I don't get why the dongas get -X ? When you throw an ennemy on the donga, the arena get builded ? Symbolised by the number decreasing ?

 

And congrats for you wedding ^^.

 

Heh, yeah it's not very visually legible at the moment. I'm going to try and make the next update be very focused on making it easier to look at a gif and know what's going on. All the numbers are mostly placeholders as well (so that I can guarantee a building will be built in one hit for debugging).

 

Thanks, it's going to be fun! :D

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