forked from ohayo-jacob/takunomi-blog
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26 lines
4.3 KiB
HTML
<p><time datetime="2021-06-01">2021-06-01</time></p>
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<p>Alright, it didn’t feel like there would be a lot of progress. I took at trip with my son to see family. This was wonderful, but didn’t get anything done on the trip (except play Final Fantasy VII with that fan translation. So good)</p>
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<p>Then yesterday I couldn’t help contemplate a design problem I had been mulling over many times before, yet again. It’s the problem of what is going to be a levels win condition.</p>
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<p>See, KeruShoujo is fairly deterministic in the levels where you do not yet interact with all the systems. This means, that to simply “kill all enemies to win” is ( at least to me as the designer ) quickly very boring. And so, over the years, I’ve tried out many ideas ( most in my head ) to what would be more interesting. This often involves comparing to other games.</p>
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<p>Some games simply ask you to kill. The thrill of interacting with the game, makes this acceptable in many. Ironically even a complex game like Starcraft, simply wants you to kill. The strategies and tactics don’t concern themselves with a unique objective dictated by the game.</p>
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<p>Many games ask you to gather points of some sort, either to have more than an opponent when the game ends, or to reach some winning threshold. A great example is from that game I mentioned in my initial post, Auro. It asks you to keep a kill combo going to get increasingly more points as you succeed.</p>
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<p>There are games that ask you to survive, like Tetris or Puyo Puyo. Into the Breach uses this for a genre that normally asks you to kill, and it is brilliant.</p>
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<p>And then there are games that ask you to reach destinations. Whether it is a racing game, or an adventure game pointing you to a location.</p>
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<p><em>EDIT: I forgot to add this, cause I'm not really sure where to place it, but Chess deserves its own mention. While not actually that thrilling to execute (IMO, of course), putting an opponent into a checkmate position is a really unique mechanic, since it's not really killing. Is it like a wrestling move? Oh and the game prevents you from doing it on your own, it's simply not a legal move (right? maybe I'm not well-enough versed in Chess rules). I actually find it perhaps the most elegant aspect of chess. Point systems can seem sort of separate from the rest of a game, and the clock in Chess is especially an inelegant solution to the problem of moving the game ahead. The checkmate position is entirely a part of the internal mechanics of movement in chess. Okay that was larger edit.</em></p>
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<p>Much like these latter ones, I think KeruShoujo is served well by changing requirements depending on the level. Some levels need you to kill specific things, maybe even in specific ways, others need you to gather and hold onto items dropped by enemies.</p>
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<p>We already had a system in place to handle these objectives, but I gotta admit I accused my coder buddy of working for Big Callback, cause the way he had implemented that system made me wanna tear my hair out (and if there’s one good aspect to this pandemic, it is that it has made me realise I have FANTASTIC hair). So I spent the last two evenings reimplementing it in way that was general and versatile enough to handle the various objectives I could think of (kill 3 enemies, kill 1 of this type, 2 of this type, gather n numbers of this ingredient, craft this spell, regain this much health), and seeing it working is really nice.</p>
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<p>About 2 years ago, I had come up with this system, that two of the items the enemies could drop were unique, in that they were “catalysts” for crafting. Either one would work, but the good kind had no side-effects, while the more common one, caused unique level-dependent side-effects. The problem was, to win the level, you needed 5 of the good catalysts. I liked this system, but I also came to realise it was too complex on many fronts.</p>
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<p>Nevertheless, the idea of collecting special items, and then having the conundrum of whether to keep them to move closer to victory, or spent them to improve yourself, was still a decent idea. This simpler version still fits with the other systems of the game, and primarily requires that I design levels such that the problem of whether to slow down your progress or take the chance and hurry towards the goal, becomes the real problem. Hopefully I’m right.</p>
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