Hello fellow co-conspirators,
If there is one single action in my game which encapsulates the core of the whole game, this is sending units on missions. Just like in an RTS sending commands is the 90% of what player do, so it is here.
If you think of other great games and their core actions (i.e. the jump in Mario, shooting in CoD, breaking stuff in Minecraft), they are inhearantly enjoyable. The sounds, animation speed, visual effects, etc.. are all finely tuned so that these actions are ones players will want to do over and over again. In Puppetmaster, pretty much every game interaction: from bribing and intimidating, to contacting or assassinating others is via missions. As such this is a system that has to feel silky smooth. The player experience using it has to be as pleasant as possible.
This week I dove down and started working on making missions work. In a game like this sending a unit on a mission is quite a complicated system. Not only does the unit itself need to know it’s going on a mission, but it also has to check if the target is valid, if the player has enough money, if it will succeed and what the consequences of success/failure are, and give legible feedback for every step of the way. It’s a lot of moving parts. One of the issues I had with the prototype is that the mission structure was way too interconnected; changing one element, would mean changing 4-5 scripts and not really knowing hat the effects would be….
This is how it felt when I realized I needed to change some of my code
So this time I’m taking it nice and slow. I’ve divided the mission into parts (setup, target aquisition, mission validation, etc…) and running tests after each one. It’ll take me a few weeks to get the first version running, but if it’s what players will be doing 90% of the time, I want to make sure I get 100% right.
I’m focusing on interface first. I’ve got the radial menu working and now I’m making sure it’s buttons reflect the missions the unit can perform. Next up, making sure attacked units know what’s happening.
I’ll have more to show you soon!
Happy conspiring!