So, for a while I've been feeling like the time is ripe to create a new version of Hedgerow Hall. BYOND's capabilities have grown, I've grown, and games like Minecraft and Terraria show that the general concept of a sandbox building/digging RPG is viable.
The original game stopped being fun for me because most of the interested players weren't interested in playing it the way I meant it to be played, though really my limitations as a coder/developer had a lot to do with it as it made everything having to do with the game 100x more frustrating.
So one thing I would definitely do differently is develop it with more of an eye towards a multiple server model, where people who don't want hardcore RP can go play on (or host) a server that doesn't require it.
Some of the problems were definitely systemic, though... the griefing was a big problem, and sadly one of the things best remembered about the game.
This is the kind of thing that requires a systemic solution, which I propose to approach in three multiple ways.
ALIGNMENT/ALLEGIANCE
Rather than being assumed to be members of the reasonably benevolent Hedgerow Society, you can choose that or either of two other organization: the freewheeling Mercer Freehold and the cutthroat Redclaw Clan. Each org has its own color associated with it: green, yellow, and red. These colors would correspond to how "safe" they are to be around. Members of the HRS can't attack anyone except "outlaws" (which is all Redclaws, and Mercers that have attacked Hedgers in a certain timeframe) Mercers can attack anyone but other Mercers, though the outlaw flag affects them if they attack Hedgers. Redclaws can attack anyone.
You can change your alignment by going to the HQ of the group and pledging yourself to them. There is no restriction on dropping "down" (from green to yellow or red, or yellow to red), but you can only go up one step at a time, there is a significant time delay each time before you can do so again, and any time spent with outlaw flag while in yellow resets the time before you can become green.
You can steal from anyone that you could attack. Stealing only trips the outlaw flag for yellows if they're caught doing it (they blow the check; if a green player just notices something missing after bumping into a yellow, they might not trust the yellow, but the game won't let them attack. It's the equivalent of having suspicion but no proof.)
SCAMPER MODE
When you are KOed, when you regain consciousness you move into "scamper mode". In scamper mode, you are hidden, faster than normal, immune to attacks, and able to pass through enemy-occupied space for a short period of time. Scamper mode ends if you attack. If you are motionless when scamper mode expires, you remain hidden.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
By making it harder to attack and move at the same time, I hope to make combat much more of a voluntary part of the game... i.e., you can only really effectively fight someone who's willing to stand there and be fought at. So if you're playing as a bandit, you can block access to an area, you can chase people away from a resource, you can send people scurrying back to their holes... but by and large, if they stand there and fight you, it's because they have chosen to stay and fight.
Any ways around this (sneak attacks, traps, magic) require diversifying your skill set further. A character who is narrowly optimized as a striker is mainly going to be useful for intimidation and duels.
SEPARATION OF HP AND PHYSICAL CONDITION
Lately I've been subscribing strongly to the notion that HP doesn't represent your character's overall health but the amount of "fight" in them. A character with 1 HP isn't necessarily almost dead, but they are almost out of the fight.
This distinction is important because it allows for a model of combat where an opponent who was recently defeated can have full HP. The same shot of adrenaline that enables Scamper Mode also refills your HP. Long term wounding as a result of being hit/KOed will be handled in a different way, but the temporary penalties it gives will also be covered up by adrenaline when you are attacked or when you get back up after a KO.
The first level of injury would happen basically when you get hit, so even if a big bully badger bandit can't make you sit there and fight them and can't take you down with a single hit... you still don't want to let them get in that first hit.
ID:1803900
 Mar 7 2015, 9:59 am
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If I have a source to share, I'll consider sharing it.
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AlexandraErin wrote:
If I have a source to share, I'll consider sharing it. Cool, thanks! Can't wait to see what Hedgerow Hall revisited is like | |
Why would anyone be anything except yellow?
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Because of their preference for a different game experience than the one accorded by yellow.
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The way you described, green would be a horrible choice. Yellow gets immunity until they start attacking a green. You'll need to offer greens a different advantage to counterbalance that.
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NNAAAAHH wrote:
The way you described, green would be a horrible choice. Yellow gets immunity until they start attacking a green. You'll need to offer greens a different advantage to counterbalance that. Isn't the point to give a visual indication of who to avoid IE:Yellow if you're a Green? | |
NNAAAAHH:
"Advantage" implies that there is a goal that yellow is inherently closer to completing on the basis of that mechanic, which there isn't. This isn't a capture-the-flag game. The factions aren't in direct competition with each other to secure some point on the map or whatever. Goals depend entirely on what you want out of the game. If playing yellow suits your goals better, you'll play yellow. If playing green suits your goals better, you'll play green. Enough players of the original version played characters who were committed to not fighting or only fighting in self-defense for me to be sure that green will be a well-represented choice. So will yellow and red... I've based the three factions on how different people came to approach the game. I don't have to do anything to convince people to see the benefit of a given faction, because each caters to a different play experience. That is the benefit. I actually expect a lot of people will have alts in multiple houses. Want to go build a community and run a tavern or a clothing shop and just be social with your neighbors? Hop on your green character. Want to cause mindless mayhem and fear for a while? Hop on your red. "But you can do both of those things with yellow," you might say. But you can't, really. You can do either of those things. Unless literally no one picks green, going outlaw will shut you out of some of the social aspect... and if no one picks green, then there's no point to yellow's "immunity", as you put it. A lot of people who've never seen the game will pick yellow on the basis of the rule alone, expecting on the basis of game theory to have a crushing advantage... I expect a lot of those people to leave fairly quickly due to the game not having any point they can discern. They'll feel like cold logic promised them an advantage to their choice that never quite materializes The one change I'm thinking about making is allowing the yellow Freeholders to attack each other, with the same "outlaw" consequence if they attack a non-outlaw yellow. This way people in the Freehold would have to be a little bit warier of each other than people in the Hall... they'd be able to see who hasn't turned on anyone lately, but would have no guarantee that anyone wouldn't, and no protection from thieves. If I do this, the outlaw flag will probably be faction-specific, so you could be an outlaw to the Freehold but not to the Hall or vice-versa, or separately be an outlaw in both of them. But this is less about changing what people thinks is the "optimal" choice for some nebulous game balance purpose and more about more accurately shaping the desired play experience. Under the system described above, only Hedgers would get the full meaning of green-yellow-red as "safe, caution, danger". Yellow would effectively be green to each other. I want life around the Freehold to be a bit more like life in the edge. Maybe not exactly a wretched hive of scum and villainy (that's up to the characters who populate it), but the potential should be there. There will also be some differences in geographical distribution and level of services available in the base, as each group's headquarters will reflect their attitudes towards self-reliance versus community. Because of this, I think green will be the best position for newbies to start in, but even if the three groups had identical HQs in identical copies of the same locations, I'd still be very surprised if no one picked green. Liens: Exactly! In fact, I don't think it got mentioned in the above, but the outlaw flag will consist of your yellow becoming orange. The cooldown on the flag will be long enough that you won't get much out of it as "immunity" if you plan on open banditry (or straight griefing), and progressively longer each time. It will take a week of real time with no transgressions to reset your reputation. | |
The big thing you gotta remember, though, Lexy is that sometimes griefers find ways to make anti-griefing measures hell for carebears.
Because of the hole HrH left in my life, I got into Sandbox MOs. I picked up Wurm, and in Wurm we had two factions at first: White and Blacklighters. White lighters worshipped the trinity of light Gods, while the Black lighters worshipped the one Dark god. The white lighters had the ability to cultivate and farm very well, as well as had an easier time of taming animals for use in battle. The Blacklighters were able to eat human corpses for nourishment, cultivate the mycelium, which was a terrain type that could be used by blacklighters to nourish themselves and restore their wounds, as well as being an ecological disaster as it slowly spread over the map blighting anything it touched. The irony is that at the time I was playing heavily, there were two servers: Home and Wild. The Wild server was where you went to PvP and Home was a safe area where PvP was forbidden as Home was same-faction only. (Meaning you couldn't go back to Home as a blacklighter). The irony comes in with the fact that griefing was actually more common on the Home server than on the PvP server. The PvP safeguards actually became a shield for griefers rather than keeping them at bay. How the grief shield worked, more or less was theft, vandalism and assault decreased your alignment. Given enough time, your alignment would descrease into outlaw status and you'd be flagged as a hostile for NPC guards that littered the game. Unfortunately, because of the nature of game systems, griefers would simply do their damndest to cause indirect hindrances to one another, such as "dirting", where you dig up a bunch of dirt and carry it into another person's farms, thus destroying the crops, or drop a bunch of dirt onto roads other players had built to make them difficult/unsafe to travel. This became so much a problem that the developers made it so that you couldn't drop dirt on roads to change their slopes without destroying the road in the first place. Then they made road destruction take several minutes. This led to a new griefing technique, which involved "roading" people and turning their surrounding fields into parking lots. The griefers became much worse because they knew they were safe from harm. They pretty much couldn't be attacked without the attacker risking going outlaw and being murdered by his own guards. Griefers also took advantage of a large number of systems intended to make the game safer, such as deed guards. Some clever players would claim a section of road that was commonly traveled by merchants, then they would set their guards to Kill on Sight people they knew frequently traveled these roads. The guards would kill anybody who stepped into the deed who was on the KOS list. Another fun problem with the anti-vandalism system was that griefers would fence in huge areas of land to deny them to other players. The fences took a few seconds each to repair every day and few resources to construct. Being indestructible due to anti-griefing safeguards, entire biomes and their resources would be denied to other players. This wasn't against the rules, but it was in bad faith and poor spirit. Particularly when someone figured out that monsters had a much higher chance of spawning in specific biomes than other biomes, and the server had a limited pool of monsters that could be spawned in the world at any one time. It was possible to fence in one of these biomes and wind up with a significant majority of monsters on the server living inside of this biome within just three or four months. I think with sandbox games, that it's always important to remember that the more you try to control griefing, the more you also limit your genuine players. Griefers are always going to find a way to game whatever system you set up to control them. | |
Yes, I'm aware of the law of unintended consequences. My goal in the rules outlined above isn't to make griefing impossible, but to change the combat paradigm so that griefing behavior doesn't emerge naturally among what you'd call genuine players from what seems like legitimate in-game opportunities... I think a big part of the problem in the original system was that if you wanted to play a combat-heavy character, beating someone into the ground repeatedly and taking everything they had became the most obvious "win". The system channeled you towards that by making it the easiest, most rewarding thing you could do.
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Not to mention the fact that combat was inevitably an all-or-nothing sort of thing. But I'm sure you are well aware of that fact.
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That's not really a "not to mention" so much as a factor in the problem I described. On top of my own memories, I did read all the available forum posts by old players before I started redesigning the combat system.
I don't have the actual hit/miss and damage mechanics in, but what I've been playing with is what I call the "melee" system. I don't want to get into the specifics as I think it'll be easier to understand in practice, but basically, attacking someone will shift you into another mode of play. If the other character fights back, they'll also shift into "melee mode"; until they commit to the fight by attacking you back, they have an easier time escaping than you have chasing them, because they're still in normal mode. | |
Also, I might just have located my backup of the original source and graphics.
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...boo, it's not the original source, it's my circa 2007 attempt at a re-do. But I think it has all or most of the original graphics. Not that they're any great shakes, but they're good enough for me to actually start putting the game together.
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@Lexy: Honestly I doubt it'd take you long to rewrite the actual source. The toughest part of writing an HrH-like has always been your original burrow-saving algorithm. Which honestly, there are sufficient resources out there to get you started.
Also, I've revised quite a bit of the knowledge that was passed down from your generation of gurus and come up with cleaner/faster approaches for a number of things. Just to name a few: Using the map editor: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1620724 Smoothing out tiled movement: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1573076 Instance databases: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1626900 Better use of layering: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1613721 Less wasteful use of savefiles: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1187245 Smarter use of images: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1797736 Collider objects: http://www.byond.com/ forum/?post=1545242&hla=Ter13#comment10296734 Buff/debuff tracking: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1806324#comment14287955 Grammatical function parity: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1791274#comment14099011 Things about turfs nobody ever told you: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1668114 List ordering with pivot insertion: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1606593 Screen object offset abuse: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1443657 Iterating through a large number of turfs quickly: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1356227 More appearance abuse fun: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1409008 Modular design via hooks: http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1226646 I've actually got a ton more stuff in my private experiments folder, but most of it's too obscure or circumstantial to serve much use as a proper tutorial. Anyway, cheers! I'm really looking forward to whatever you churn out, and my offer still stands. If you run into a specific code problem, I'd be happy to be of service. | |
...I was a little confused why you would be telling me this when I thought it was pretty clear I was recoding it from scratch, but then I realized I didn't actually say that here and I did just mention looking for the source.
I've actually already started coding the new game, just using really obvious placeholders for the graphics until Nadrew could get me the extracted icons. If I had the original source, I doubt I'd recycle a single line of code from it if I found it. The main reason I'd like to have it is so that I have something to use as a model so that (apart from changes I'm making deliberately) things are as close to the old players' fond memories as possible. Yeah, I know the broad strokes (the colors of magic, the animal types), and I'm planning on changing/streamlining/improving some of the details, but I'd still love a refresher. I'd also like to be able to compile a slightly tweaked version of the old source... if I could change the opening to reflect that it's a legacy version I no longer support and that server rules are the responsibility of the people hosting it, I'd give the people who've been hanging onto copies permission to host the legacy version freely. ...although actually, now that I've said this, it occurs to me that I could just get the compiled game from one of the old guard and play it myself to get the refresher. | |
...although actually, now that I've said this, it occurs to me that I could just get the compiled game from one of the old guard and play it myself to get the refresher. Hell, have them start hosting it until you get finished to help build hype for 2.0. I'm certain it would still be extremely popular on BYOND today. Also, get in touch with Hobnob, Slurm, or Tobba. They are the resident experts on DMB decompilation/bashing. Tobba might be able to help you change the text of the HTML popup I remember you were showing to people on login. That's of course, assuming the HTML was passed to browse() as a text string rather than as a file from the RSC. If you passed the HTML file to the user using 'file.html' resource single-quotes, I can actually hex edit your RSC and change the text of it for you. If it's a string, though, you'll have to decrypt the string table in the DMB, change the text, then re-encrypt the DMB file. Unfortunately, my current attempts to decrypt the DMB file format have been extremely limited and primitive. I do know my way around the pre-4.0 RSC format pretty well, though. | |
Heard only good things about HrH, but it was a bit before my time. Best of luck to you!
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AlexandraErin wrote:
...although actually, now that I've said this, it occurs to me that I could just get the compiled game from one of the old guard and play it myself to get the refresher. Yeah that would be as good as having the source for any competent programmer :) Ter13 wrote: Hell, have them start hosting it until you get finished to help build hype for 2.0. I'm certain it would still be extremely popular on BYOND today. I second this, mainly because I want a refresher too! I last played Hedgerow Hall when I was 14, now I'm 28 and it's hard to remember the details, I just remember thinking, 'I've never played anything like this before.' | |
However, if you find you can't continue working on Hedgerow Hall again (for the Nth time) in the future, I won't be adverse to receiving the source and bringing it up to scratch :)
Lacking this game makes BYOND a poorer place to be, truly.