Man, just when I thought I had a handle on scope.
A friend of mine brought up something interesting this evening. We looked at some footage of Soulcaster, and he remarked that he thinks things would be improved if we took the characters off the grid. (The grid here means the tile-based movement, a la Final Fantasy VI, which all monsters and the player adhere to.)
In the last couple hours I’ve been mulling the idea over, and have a few pros and cons I’m weighing.
One of the flaws in Soulcaster I & II was the lack of information the player got in terms of what the next phase of the battle would be. Enemies would simply spawn out of the woodwork, without warning, and you’d have to deal with them immediately. If you’ve got the skills, this isn’t the end of the world, but on your first run through the game, it’s likely you’ll get overwhelmed, have to burn a scroll and a potion, and run around kiting the enemies while trying to set up a formation. It makes it less about tractical positioning and more about fleeing for survival.
In an effort to move the needle a bit from “action” to “strategy”, I developed a system to hint at the evolution of the battle. It involves multi-stage breakable walls and floors, which change the layout of the room as the battle progresses.
The latest addition to the Soulcaster 3 editor is the Room Tester. This takes a set of parameters (the room recipe) and generates a room to fit the criteria. So long as you specify the same seed, the room is always generated in the same layout given any recipe.
Here’s what the pattern editor looks like:
This is the collection of four room split patterns. When a door is marked as a split entrance, it matches one of these with the door to prevent access to it. The + symbol represents the anchor position, where it needs to align with the door in the room. The pattern area is within the colored rectangle. The tiles marked with diagonal lines are required tiles, meaning they have to be included in the room for the pattern to be valid.
My new favorite YouTube channel is Matthewmatosis, a collection of in-depth game reviews and commentary. In-depth means really in-depth–30+ minutes in most of the videos. One of the most recent is on Pac-Man and scoring, which explores the phenomenon of the “perfect score” in Pac-Man: something made possible by the fact that a) the game is deterministic (the ghosts’ behavior is predictable and reliable), and b) the game has a finite number of a levels (not by design–but an integer overflow enforces this).
So for Pac-Man, there really is just a perfect score to attain, and the leaderboard shifted to who could do it the fastest. But there is actually a fastest-possible time as well, if you execute everything perfectly. So now it’s just an account of people who can attain the fastest time to the highest score.
Matthewmatosis offers a solution in the form of two missing ingredients: randomness, and unlimited time. They are both required, however, because random game elements (such as Tetris or a roguelike) combined with limited time means that top scorers are mostly at the mercy of the random number generator for a good score. And unlimited time without randomness turns the game into an endurance test, rather than a skill test.