I had an idea (Though I'm sure it's been thought of before) of players of a game somehow being able to set up their own skill.
Say you had a skill system based off of skill cards that were draggable objs to an on screen HUD and what not. Wouldn't it be neat at some point in the game, a player were given the ability to devise their own? Perhaps they would get to choose from a list of 3-4 generic style skills:
-Beam
-Projectile
-Melee
-Buff
From there, they would be given a new set of options pertaining to what they chose. Such as for beams, it could be like:
-In your direction, wide but slow.
-In your direction, narrow, faster.
-Two small ones from your right and left side
ect.
Then, depending on the game creator's efforts, they would be able to choose an element for it, with the animation for the attack changing with the element. Each element having a different effect while they can choose no element for a slight boost in damage.
Once all is said and done they can choose from a list of skill card graphics for the skill, name it, and be done!
I'm sure this is possible, I just wonder if it's practical.
ID:151469
 Oct 20 2010, 4:25 am
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Oct 20 2010, 7:38 am
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Garthor
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Devolves into somebody putting up a list of "ideal skill combinations" on gamefaqs and everybody following those to the letter. You give up the ability to easily balance your game in exchange for frustrating players who don't know where to look up how to win.
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Don't you find that in most games though? People posting their "Perfect" builds for specific classes. Happens all the time.
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Garthor wrote:
Devolves into somebody putting up a list of "ideal skill combinations" on gamefaqs and everybody following those to the letter. You give up the ability to easily balance your game in exchange for frustrating players who don't know where to look up how to win. Min/Maxing comes into place in any game where anything can be customized. Some people just insist on squeezing out every single possible bit of potential for whatever purpose. | |
It's definitely possible. Practical? It'll be more work than a simple system, but you'll have a much more advanced system.
The challenge with highly customizable systems like this, is keeping everything viable. If you give players a fire bolt and a fireball, and the fireball is in every way better, no one will bother with that fire bolt. So maybe the fire bolt does 20 damage, and the fireball only 10, but is area of effect. Now you have fire bolt being better for a single target, and fireball better for multiple targets. You don't necessarily have to keep things 100% balanced (it's impossible in a game with any degree of custimization, so don't bother try), but you need to actively keep up with balancing things and making sure to keep as many options as possible the player, while at the same time having them actually be viable options. | |
This.
Also, when I tried making a similar system, it ended up being boring. The range of different abilities was... Limited to say the least. Sure, you could have a million different spells with the system. But in the end every spell was some variation of... Deals [x] damage. Heals [x] damage. Inflicts [x] status effect. Or some combination of the above. Adding unique effects is possible to a limited degree but you still lose out on the feeling of being unique, because anyone and everyone can have that exact same skill. | |
You can also change the icon(s) involved, the number of targets it affects, the range, and any other aspect of it if you so choose.
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Lol, yes. That of course would be any sensible designer's intent. I feel like people read me post thinking that I would have zero intentions of balancing it.
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No. I would not say that anywhere near "most games" allows you to arbitrarily say, "You know what? I want to just kill everybody."
I mean, unless there are cheats or mods of some manner. | |
If I thought you had zero intentions of balancing it I would say "it doesn't matter, whatever you are going to do is going to be an unbalanced mess, so who gives a crap?" The point is that you will not tools necessary to be able to reasonably balance this. It may be possible, but it's almost certainly outside your capabilities and the effort required would far outweigh any potential benefit.
Don't do things just because "LOL ITD BEE KEWL OMG". Have a reason. | |
Xioden wrote:
It's definitely possible. Practical? It'll be more work than a simple system, but you'll have a much more advanced system. This reminds me of discussions on robust magic systems in RPGs. It's hard coming up with something of sufficient complexity while also keeping it balanced. One central feature of all such systems though is the concept of cost. In the physical world, if you want to get energy from a reaction you need to have at least as much energy put into it. If a firebolt can do 20 damage and a fireball 10, the firebolt should cost about twice as much, with some fudging allowable for different losses for each spell. If a fireball does 10 damage, two fireballs doing potentially 20 damage should cost just about exactly twice as much. Some idea of loss, e.g. the Second Law of Thermodynamics, should be factored in, but that often improves on large scales; one simple example is that a fireball might have an extra "loss" cost of 2 mana units, but N fireballs would be N+1 because the losses per fireball go down. This however is just the extra cost, and the main cost should still double. In physics you can get energy input by storing it beforehand in a fuel or some other form of potential energy. The simplest examples of potential energy are a boulder at the top of a cliff, and a loaded mouse trap which has a tensioned spring, but potential energy can be stored in chemical forms as well. There's a magic system I read about once where you can do something similar with sympathetic elements, preparing those in advance to supply the energy for a spell. Such energy could also come from anything that takes time to do, like incanting words of protection N times over a sword or growing a particular magical plant or raising a creature to harvest some kind of essence (like a phoenix feather or dragon blood, to use a popular reference). Lummox JR | |
Garthor wrote:
No. I would not say that anywhere near "most games" allows you to arbitrarily say, "You know what? I want to just kill everybody." Now that is something that most people want to do at some point, but giving that option to players.... meh, it would cause widespread ruin and decay. now, high level of custimization, ya it can for the most part be balanced, bucause not everyone will choose, using the prior example of fire bolt, vs fireball, not every will choose firebolt, and same with fireball, if they are balanced, as in, something is taken away from one, but that same thing has something better, and the dfference of the two changes, roughly equals Zero. | |
I did not make my reply to a statement about somebody just logging in one day and on a complete whim wanting to kill everybody.
What I meant by my question was that in the case of most games, you can log in to sites such as Game FAQs and find builds of a similar manner that you've described and follow those to a T. This doesn't necessarily lead to an unbalanced game. Take for example Maple Story [Not everybody's favorite game, I know.] Much like finding the "ideal skill combinations" in your example, people can find the "ideal class builds" in which they follow to a t somebody else's design in order to come out on top. This is in fact the case in most games. However the result of this is not an unbalanced game, and with enough balanced variety (within reason) there should be no reason for any combination to be better than another. If one skill can deal high damage, another can stun a user for a short period, which ever is used and is used properly gives it the potential to be better than the other. I know it probably isn't your intention to make me feel like you're trying to belittle my comments, you really do, and with what feels like not an adequite enough reason to. I don't try to offend people and I am usually quite gracious about peoples help and comments when I receive them. So if I was coming across as though I was disregarding what you were saying I'm sorry. | |