Medieval fantasy sounds good to me. We'll want to experiment with how many characters work well onscreen at once. I agree that four is probably a good number, and I think we should start with four and see if scaling it up or down from there works well. One of the game mechanics I'd like to introduce is reinforcements. In a longer level, you're likely to have some of your units die, so periodically you can get additional units to come and supplement your surviving units. This should make for some interesting gameplay, as a player that loses a unit or two adopts defensive tactics to hold out until he can get assistance and resume offensive action. Also, I think everyone involved in this project should pick up the game Lion Pride (or the Lite version if you're short of dollars). Right now that game is probably the most similar to what we'll be developing (in that it's a teamwork-based line-drawing game), and analyzing what's good and bad about it will help us make a good game.
It is a great game, but doesnt get close to this until the 7th and 8th levels. Wha t i thought would be good if the defenders couldnt die, it just takes some faster moving charchters longer to defeat the bad guys.
Well, that segues nicely into a discussion of the combat style we want. Many games have gone the route of certainty in their combat systems. Do such and such an action (place tower X in position Y, use a swordsman to engage an orc, have two archers gang up on one archer, etc.) and you will win. In my opinion, this is a bad thing. I believe that randomness and unpredictability of combat is both a reflection of the nature of combat, and an intensely fun feature. When a battle can go very differently even if you try to use the same tactics twice, that enhances the replayability of a game. When a swordsman charges an orc, will he win? I believe the answer should be 'maybe'. The other thing that games unforgivably lack is an interesting damage system. Hitpoints were a good thing back in the days of Pen and Paper RPGs, as they gave you a simple and straightforward damage system. In the days of computers that can perform calculations and handle complex underlying systems without batting an eye, hitpoints are a simplistic and over-used crutch. What I am about to propose is different. When an archer fires an arrow at a target, any of these things may happen: 1. The attack may miss entirely, depending on the speed of the target. A rogue, for instance, has little armor but he can 2. If the attack hits: 3. Determine location of the hit. Locations are: Head, torso, left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg. 4. Check armor on location: Heads may have helmets and visors, torsos and limbs may have a variety of armor, from chainmail for footmen to plate armor for knights. For example, chances are here if you fire an arrow at a knight, it will simply bounce off almost no matter where it hits. But there is a small chance it will find a chink in the armor or go straight into the visor slit. So a knight being fired on is still at risk, but less so than, say, an unarmored peasant. 5. If the attack doesn't bounce off armor, harm the target area. Effect to the warrior depends on different levels of harm. a. Scratch. Some weapons just aren't very damaging (daggers, darts) and so even if you get through, you may not significantly wound the target. Poison weapons, however (if we go so far as to use them, we may not) only need a scratch to have the poison take effect. b. Light wound. The limb incurs a minor penalty. Lightly wounded arms may be slightly less effective with the shield or sword they hold. Light wounds to legs slow you down for a short time. Lightly wounded torsos may indicate that you are simply pushed back a few feet to recover from the blow. Lightly wounded heads mean you've been knocked for a loop, and the character may be stunned for a short time. c. Heavy wound. These type of hits cause lasting effects, and a soldier with a couple heavy wounds should probably withdraw from the field. Heavily wounded legs induce permanent slowdown. Head wounds may cause bleeding and lower the overall effectiveness of the character. d. Incapacitate. The damage is so bad that the limb can no longer be used. Incapacitated legs reduce soldiers to crawling away. Incapacitated arms force that arm to drop whatever it was holding. Incapacitated heads and torsos usually mean that the soldier is knocked out and must be carried off the field. e. Sever / Lethal. Big weapons like claymores are more prone to effects like these. A severed head or torso results in death. Severed limbs may also result in death or incapacitation. The chance of getting any of these effects should be small for any given attack, but should always be there. The very first sword stroke of an enemy could be the one that kills you. A player who wants to go after an archer should be aware that even though sending his knight out as a distraction while the less armored rogue sneaks around to the back is probably a good choice, it still puts the knight in mortal danger. He may get away with no casualties. Or the archer may get extremely lucky, plug the knight, and then turn around and plug the rogue with a second shot (but in 95% of cases, the knight / rogue should still win due to probabilities). The end result, I hope, is a combat system that stays interesting as you play it. While there is always risk for your troops, it also affords the opposite - that even a single one of your troops could turn out to be a hero, and defeat many more opponents than he would be expected to. The use of different damage effects also give rise to changing tactical situations over the course of a level. Can you afford to risk a heavily wounded soldier as a delaying tactic until reinforcements arrive? Since you managed to give the enemy knight a leg wound, now you can avoid engaging him with melee troops and just have archers run around him until an arrow gets through. And now you're down to just a rogue and your enemy has a knight, but the battle is not yet lost for certain if your last option is to have them fight each other. Do you feel lucky? The cons of such a system are that it is indeed harder to program than a simple hitpoint system. The pros? Much more interesting combat in a game that focuses on combat, and a feature we can boast that is sorely lacking in many, many games. The only other games I can think of off the top of my head that benefit from a detailed damage system are Classic Battletech, and IL-2 Sturmovik.
Personally, I like to know whether my guy will win or not. With the way you sayit, you then must also have levelups,and that makes it more complicated. But i agree with the archer part about depending on the hit or miss. One other thing: One of the users was wondering why we are giving 50% of the profits to arn when he is already making six digit figures off this site. The user thought he should get at least a little bit of the profits. So why?
Come on indulge on the full version of Lion Pride in all seriousness you all will want to see our 1.3 update with night mode. I'm also more than happy to chat about our process and what did / did not work. Ed <- designer and producer on LP.
Agreed that having some luck involved in the combat mechanics could be a good thing. This will help level the playing field slightly, and also force players to react when things don't go their way. Not sure if it's worth the hassle of having a complex damage system. Hit points aren't a bad thing. It's probably more than enough if fighters can also be entangled, distracted (i.e. blocking), or stunned. There's some really fun things we could do. Consider an ogre character that picks up a knight. That ogre will be very vulnerable if attacked while he's got his hands full, but also capable of hurling that knight into his comrades. As for the other subject, I don't love or hate Arn. As someone recently joked, it's probably harder for an independent developer to get featured on Touch Arcade than to get featured by Apple. I just thought it would be a nice gesture if the developer didn't eat all the profits, and instead gave some of the money to a worthy cause. Touch Arcade is a site we all enjoy and are happy to see updated on a regular basis by its hardworking staff.
have we decided if it is going to be real-time or turn-based? If turn-based, this all sounds very familiar to a Sega Genesis game I played ages ago called King's Bounty: Forgetting about the story of the game for the moment, the basic premise was: 1.) Choose an initial hero (barbarian, sorcerer, paladin, etc.) that will give some initial special capabilities 2.) Explore Continents and destroy local warlords (approximately 4-5 per continent) 3.) To destroy the warlords you enlist troops by paying them. Stronger/more troops = higher cost. 4.) You earn money by capturing warlords, finding treasure, etc. 5.) You or your enemy can only have 5 different kinds of troops at the same time in the fight screen and are positioned on opposite sides of the battlefield (shown in the screenshot above) Troops come in multiple flavors: Forest: Sprites, Gnomes, Elves, Trolls, Druids, Archmages Hill: Wolves, Orcs, Dwarves, Giants, Dragons Plains: Peasants, Nomads, Ogres, Barbarians Dungeon: Skeletons, Zombies, Ghosts, Vampires, Demons Castle: Warrior, Archer, Pikemen, Cavalry, Knight I'm probably forgetting some stuff, but we would probably adapt most of it to fit on the iPhone. And I suppose, the same format works if you want to make the battlefield "real-time".
Definitely real time. Though coincidentally, one of the projects that's keeping me busy right now is a turn-based fantasy/tactics game, World to Conquer.
Yes they are. But I'm amenable to what other people want, and I recognize the relative ease of working with them programmatically. We can still do an interesting combat system with hitpoints and status effects, no problem. We also need to discuss the depth to which we intend to pay attention to unit statistics. For instance, do we want to go simple and give every unit standardized statistics and a standard weapon, or do we want to include RPG elements and allow units to increase in power over time and / or include different equipment that's interchangeable among units / characters. There's definitely a tradeoff to be made here. More depth means more programming / design work, and some people (especially with iPhone games) may actually not want to deal with too much depth (there's a lot to be said for 'pick up and play', a la lion pride. But as a whole, more depth increases replayability and interest in a game.
Well you are all at a fast clip hard to tell what would be relevant. I'd also recommend looking at Gama write up of the Spider gdc talk. They made their game fully distributed.
Just combing through the critical user reviews for Lion's Pride, there are a few lessons I'd draw that may be relevant: 1. don't categorize a game like this as "strategy"; there's plenty of tactics and fun to be had in Lion's pride, but strategy game connoisseurs are offended by the suggestion that it's a strategy game. On the advanced waves, it's more of a fast reaction game than anything else. 2. some folk found the variable speed line drawing clumsy or confusing. It's an interesting part of Lion Pride gameplay, but probably not needed for the theme discussed in this thread. 3. some people found Lion's Pride "too slow" or "boring" - no game is for everyone, but I suspect Lion's Pride would have have ended up being more mainstream if it was faster-paced, more bloody, and less realistic, i.e. super-powered lions dashing about and batting prey around like plush toys.
Ok, so i think we have the basic idea(post if you think otherwise), so can we get some concept art or something?
______________________________________________ l*****************************************l l******************X**********************l l********X**********************X*********l l*****************Q***********************l l*****************************************l l*******0*****************0***************l l**************o*******************o******l l***************___________****************l l________________l**********l__________________l l****************Castle********************l l______________________________________________l text concept art: *=background 0=basic defender(you control these) Q=powerful yet slow warrior(controlled by you) o= fast but weak warrior x= enemy
I'm not sure we're quite on the same page regarding what game we're making here. I was under the impression that we were going with a gladiator-themed tactical line-drawer (See Stroffolino's game concept) as opposed to a castle defense line-drawer. We should probably hash this out before moving forward.
