After reassessing the state of the project it's clear that we need to focus on the gameplay demonstration - the space side of things - right now; and work a lot harder towards that. With the release of Torque 3D 1.0
(even though it still has several bugs). We should be able to get things in easier.
The game play discussion this morning, prompted by Tim; has lead to this new focus. It has also produced a few miscellaneous design ideas for the battle-field. Such as:
- Mine fields / Radiation fields
- 3rd Party Turrets / Other
- High Debris / Misc. Clutter Objects
- Sudden Death Timer
- Elimmination Games
The actual game play was not realy discussed as it is hard to gauge, when we don't have a solid product to even test; in any case its quite bare and simple at the moment; so the focus should be refining and editting that. Rather than moving on.
One flaw and simple statistic of the space-combat is the speed at which you travel. There's a slim chance you will hit anyone at realistic speeds. For game play we will have the ships quite slow, with thrusters working as an escape / travel mechanic that burns a very high amount of energy - making it very unappealing unless absolutely necessary.
Another game play issue is controls and physics calibration of the ships. This requires a LOT of tweaking, id prefer that once the game has a more stable speed / a few more things to do, we have everyone test and calibrate ships / controls - I'll update once I think this is necessary.
Last, for now. The amount of things you can actually do. You want to be able to use lots of tools, but not too many of course. We need to start coding the more simple changes
(things we've avoided doing ... I suppose for the sake that they ARE easy, thus we (programmers)...avoid them.. makes sense huh). These changes
(to name a few)...
Shields - This one requires a little explaining. From my view there are few ways we can go about this. Now, idealy id like a scenario where... a player hits a shield and that area lights up for x duration with some kinda 'shield decal' then fades away; having the shield as a relatively 'light' transparent bubble around the player's ship.
This would involve having every ship with a custom collision mesh object in a bubble shape around their ship, having it under a new class that collides with projectiles; and then using it's onCollision() call to drain energy for x damage from the player it is mounted to - and rendering then setting a boolean to false so the shield is no longer used, when the player has less than the required energy to sustain it - all this variable information can be set in the datablock.
This has its complicated areas on how to set up, but ultimately it is not that great a challenge. A ripple decal can be made for lasers hitting shields, im sure you'd get a nice effect off it.
Secondary Weapons - A simple change really, its just another trigger call, another trigger bind and another mount for the ship. We dont have that many weapon models, we can use placeholders it's fine. We need to call back on the original weapon ideas for this
(this is all script).
Battlefield Setup - The actual scripting for the battlefield. This is a tedious piece of simple work. It's just lots of tweaking to get things working smoothly. We can leave room for where AI would be. But for now we just need a new type of game that can be created, a battle; we'll have things such as a start up time perhaps. Or we could have it so players join, do not enter the game immediately; but are first put to the queue - waiting for the server to start
(this is how it is usually done).
We will probably have the team chosen before entering, in the initial GUI after connecting to a server. Once in the game, a new GUI dialog will be placed after the player is put as a orbitting camera around the first spawn sphere. This dialog would give the option to select a class/job/role for the player to carry out. Each time the player respawns
(if they are able to) - they would be able to change this. Additionally spawning would be done via a 'map' with spawn points available as buttons. A five to fifteen second wait time should be put on respawning; and possibly a few seconds of immunity after respawning to avoid abuse of spawn locations.
To avoid any 'what the hell do I do?...'. The objectives should be clearly visible, the player should be able to guess whats going on. The current target GUI can be changed to only pick up 'objective points' (major things), rather than players. As we would most likely use a different targetting GUI for player enemies etc
(Enhanced Weapon Resource by Ron).
Players will at this point be going somewhere, and will be able to notice coloured ship icons on their radar - identifying enemy or allied ships
(It would be a cool change to make enemies always the same colour; like red). Control points and player combat are next.
Control points would have an icon identifying them at a distance - something unique of course. Upon entering the field surrounding one, the player would gain a new GUI dialog. This dialog would display who currently owns the control point, as well as how much control they had over it
(100%, 75% etc). Only when a team had 100% would they gain resources.
General Debris Physics - I'm not sure on this one; I'll look it up tonight. Debris was broken in the beta, its quite a vital visual for this game. If a ship explodes... it kind of needs to actually explode. Otherwise we're left with the impression that our lasers are just flashy lights, without any real punch.
The Battle Areas - These areas need to be put together, simple art can be made to fill in the blank spaces. Simple mechanics can be used to make things that little bit more interesting as well! We have acquired a visually awesome setting
(Atleast the idea of it) and hopefully it can come to light.
Battle Types - We don't have to keep to one standard. We can make a few other types of games. Relatively simple ones like '
Juggernaught'
(where one player has all the power and survivability, but in turn is the enemy of all). '
King of the Hill'
(one location that is dominated by a team - after a given time something happens such as points or an immediate win).
We need to focus on the simple things first; namely the player's ship combat. I'll update this post tomorrow.
Oh and nice character modelling everyone :O
Edit: 6:39 PM, 05/10/09
Has anyone seen Aaron? No post was made on the forums for absence. I havent tried using his gmail; was wondering how things were going with him.
