Ho hum. The wheels in my head are heavily gunked up with various matters of disillusionment at the moment.

My Teen Years And Giant Robots

After viewing a certain trailer, I have been playing quite a bit of Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries over the weekend. (I hear it will soon be released for free.) In much of my teen years (and perhaps into my early twenties) I spent a lot of time hanging around on Battletech MU*s. I've still a bit of a flame for the idea of being a pilot behind a death-dealing vehicle out there in a shared virtual space...

The lesson that burnt me out from the Battletech rules was that it was a tad too random. While you could improve your odds by operating at ranges that grant you a favorable BTH (base-to-hit - odds of hitting) versus your opponent, there was really nothing you could do to stop your opponent from lucking out on their roll and sniping off the head of your Battlemech. Even if your head weathers the game in tact, shots may well simply distribute where you don't want them.

There's something fundamentally wrong with a game where you could land 200 damage while your foe lands 12 damage and you still lose. (The odds of dice rolls dictate this would happen over 2% of the time, in fact. Even 20% of the time if you had the audacity to try to use partial cover.)

Of course, the nice thing about BYOND is that this is my game that I'm working on, and consequently I could very well come up with my own rules which aren't nearly as random. Which got me thinking...

The Next Big Project...

Unfortunately, I have a tendency to overcomplicated things. What I actually come up with during the first half of the weekend was a game that was built of these parts:

• Personal Level -- Plays as a fairly standard BYOND model RPG, hopefully interestingly executed.
• Vehicular Level - Plays similar to a RTS (in BYOND terms the control scheme is similar to Space Castle/Gold Guardians). This is my Battletech-like game. Or maybe make it play more from a driver-like perspective, like Fire Power. I'm not sure how BYOND's Tanks looks like, but I imagine the execution is similar.
• Space Level - I did away with the idea of modeling solar systems and instead space travel plays out a bit more like Gyrus with a pinch of Psi-5 Trading Company. Space travel happens in instanced maps, but nary without incident. In BYOND terms, presentation of this stage would be similar to Skywurm.
• Cash In - The "Escape Strategy", whether through death or retirement, you cash everything you earned - you essentially start over again - in exchange for points. These points aren't just spent upgrading your equipment for your next outing (though that's certainly a possibility) but rather to make actual changes to the game world. Why have a score board when you could impact virtual history instead?

Overall, that's a relatively complete game right there. Lots of interesting times to be had, just have to stitch it together with a lot of fancy instancing. (Maybe 15x15 grids with view=7 and the eye stuck in the middle for the space level instances, for example.)

...Probably Won't Be Coming Any Time Soon

So, why ruin my motivation by tipping my hand early? Because this way too much. There's no way I'm doing all this. The devils being in the details, it's just way beyond me to try to tie this mess together. I haven't even delivered one game yet, why do I think I'm going to deliver four in one?

More importantly, I don't feel there's an overall purpose to it. This still seems somewhat inherently unsatisfying on some important level, like I'm throwing in everything but the kitchen sink on a wild goose chase in an entirely wrong direction.

So the reason I'm not worried about psyching myself out by tipping my hand is because I've already psyched myself well out of range just considering the sheer scope of the thing.

Again: ho hum. My cognitive dissonance is at an all time high. A compelling theory as to why is that, as a Mastermind, I seem to want to research everything and find a sure bet before forging out, and game design is one field you cannot. As Jesse Schell was saying in The Art Of Game Design, our Mendeleev hasn't come.

And Yet...

What if I were to work on something much simpler, and change my expectation from developing the perfect game to simply creating a mildly fun game that actually operates more on the personal level of being a homage to happier days?

For example, lets say I simply rip out #2 from the list above: the vehicular layer alone, resist all temptation of complicate it, and create it in mind of all those excellent days I spent in the Battletech MU* of the past - what then?

Then... perhaps there's hope yet.