The question this time is simple. When I say "large" scale I am not talking about the size, scale or epicness of the game.
I am talking about how much stuff it has in the game.
Just a few rough numbers, but at the moment there is going to be around 450 enemies in the game, 300 weapons (of which 200 or so can be customized, making potentially hundreds of thousands of different weapons), 150 skills and maybe 200 magic spells.
Despite those numbers the game will consist of 1 island made up of 9 100x100 maps, which includes 3 dungeons (one randomly generated) and the average player will never even see a fraction of everything in the game. This is partly due to the game being randomly generated. An island could be inhabited by dinosaurs one game, but by standard wild animals another. If an island is not inhabited by dinosaurs then the likelihood of you ever seeing one is as close to 0 as makes no odds.
It is a similar story for items. Lets take a super rare sword... EXCALIBUR because it is nice and generic but rare. It will only ever be generated towards the bottom of a dungeon (and the game plays similar to a hardcore roguelike, so 98% of people will never get this far into the dungeon). Weapons will be generated 5% of the time, of that there is a 5% chance of a rare weapon being generated, of which Excalibur has a 10% chance of being that rare weapon. In short, the chance of you ever seeing Excalibur in a game is 0.0005%, or not very high at all.
The second problem with everything is redundancy. I am trying to make everything as unique as possible, but it is hard to not have 10 different spells that to very similar things (deal x damage, but with a different element!). Or "Short Sword", "Long Sword", "Big Sword", "Really Long Sword", "HUEG Sword"... The only differenced between them is the name and each one is only marginally more powerful than the next (the difference between using a short and hueg sword is maybe... 4 damage).
Similar story with enemies. What is the difference between a Ghost, Wraith and a Spectre? (In gameplay terms, nothing, they are all simply ghosts)
And what is the point in all these different things when half of them are the same?
Obviously the downsides tot his are that it is a lot of extra work for what could be nothing extra added to the game.
But on the other hand variety is the spice of life (and if I ever wanted to make the game bigger I'd have most everything I need to do so).
So what do you people prefer? Lots of things even if they are all similar and you might never see half of them, or fewer things that are all different and varied?
ID:40581
 Mar 20 2008, 9:25 am
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Mar 20 2008, 9:44 am
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Hazman
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You should have loads of variation. That way players can find something that they like the look or sound of whatever level they are.
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Just remember that a small finished game is better than a large unfinished one.
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Foomer wrote:
Just remember that a small finished game is better than a large unfinished one. True enough, but with a lot of what I am or might be adding it is nothing more than copying and pasting then editing a few numbers. The only exceptions to this are enemies that use unique AIs and magic spells (good lord, I really dislike the fact that magic spells are so horribly random in nature that adding a system that can take a bunch of names and numbers and work out what effects the spell will do is no different than coding each individual spell). But, I intend on finishing this game, because I work on it while I am at work (I work at a very... Not busy at all place, and if I didn't take it in to work on everyday I'd be sat around for 6 hours doing nothing), and I really want to make a RPG type game! (I've tried in the past, buy get easily bored of thinking of and adding all the content a RPG requires :[). | |
I am so rooting for this nut.
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