{"id":1554,"date":"2010-10-03T23:23:35","date_gmt":"2010-10-03T12:23:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=1554"},"modified":"2010-10-03T23:23:35","modified_gmt":"2010-10-03T12:23:35","slug":"a-new-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2010\/10\/03\/a-new-game\/","title":{"rendered":"A new game"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;ve invented a new game for myself, to fill time while waiting for my AI developers to finish placing monsters every time I want to test the latest developments with the new combat system.<\/p>\n<p>I call this game &#8220;The ground is hot lava. \u00a0If I touch it, I die.&#8221; \u00a0Most usually, I play this game in one of the procedurally generated graveyards, and challenge myself to jump from burial mound to burial mound to cross from one corner of the graveyard to the other without touching the ground. \u00a0Mental note: \u00a0make myself a testbed where the monsters are already placed, instead of building one manually every time I start up. \u00a0Another mental note: \u00a0someday it should be possible to set up terrain types to actually do this; \u00a0subtract health or etc when a character touches it.<\/p>\n<p>Stuff I&#8217;m noticing with further testing of the combat system:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Need to set a maximum range for combat abilities. \u00a0Currently, the &#8220;must get into range before you can fight&#8221; restriction is in the AI code, not in the combat abilities themselves. \u00a0Which means that I can be standing kilometres away from a monster, and snipe him in complete safety. \u00a0Which is cool, but not particularly riveting gameplay (especially for a game that doesn&#8217;t require any FPS reflexes)<\/li>\n<li>Need to make the player stop targeting a monster once it dies. \u00a0Currently, you keep the selection even after the monster dies and is waiting to respawn. \u00a0This means that you can kill the monster again, before it even respawns and decides to resume attacking.<\/li>\n<li>Probably need to switch combat abilities to using floats for costs\/damages, instead of using integers. \u00a0Seems dry and sterile to have things do integer amounts of damage. \u00a0Try changing the health bars to smoothly animate going up\/down, instead of instantly popping to the new value &#8212; see if that makes it feel better. \u00a0(Maybe check a few real MMOs, to see what they do, RE: health and damage values. \u00a0I feel like integers ought to be enough; \u00a0maybe &#8217;10&#8217; is just too few health points, or maybe I just need a better display)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Anyhow, all that&#8217;s in addition to the obvious &#8220;to do&#8221; list of:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Need to write AI to make PCs and Monsters fight each other again, using the new system.<\/li>\n<li>Need to wire up XP-granting again, now that the new combat system has redefined what it takes to kill something. \u00a0(Need to figure out where this goes; \u00a0should people gain XP for killing absolutely anything, including other PCs and NPCs? \u00a0Or should only monsters give out XP? \u00a0Might do monsters-only for the initial implementation, and make it configurable sometime later on.)<\/li>\n<li>Need to update the action bar to show, in addition to the current &#8220;active&#8221; and &#8220;ready&#8221; states, also &#8220;disabled&#8221; and &#8220;charging&#8221; states. \u00a0(Most games show &#8220;disabled&#8221; by dimming the button, and &#8220;charging&#8221; by a slow transition from the dimmed state to the usual &#8220;ready&#8221; state. \u00a0I&#8217;ll probably need to do something like that, too).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Have fixed a number of little bugs, the nastiest of which was the discovery that my procedurally generated attack abilities were actually behaving as monster-healing abilities. \u00a0You don&#8217;t want to know how long it took me to figure out why my attacks weren&#8217;t damaging the monsters. \u00a0:)<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and verified that I could use my attacks to kill PCs. \u00a0They weren&#8217;t happy about that at all; \u00a0they registered complaints about how difficult I was to kill. \u00a0:)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;ve invented a new game for myself, to fill time while waiting for my AI developers to finish placing monsters every time I want to test the latest developments with the new combat system. I call this game &#8220;The ground is hot lava. \u00a0If I touch it, I die.&#8221; \u00a0Most usually, I play this&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[24,25],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-p4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1554"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}