I've made up my mind (again) about the few but important combat situations in this mod. Earlier I've implemented some creature ability scaling to make the encounters suitable for different PC's and different stages of the game. But I have not been fully satisfied with how it worked out. Most of the times it works fine but in a few situations with very weak characters or parties bigger than two PC's everything gets unbalanced and really boring.
Then I remembered: Zork isn't DnD. It's a conversion of an old text based adventure and it's really, really turn-based (for real). So I've discussed with some of the smart guys out there and decided to take on the idea of making the combat based on the original Zork rules and make it turn based, driven from a conversation. This will remove the strange behaviors of standard combat. It gives me the opportunity to play with cut-scenes too. The scripting will be hellish and make the custom tokens run hot but I'm looking forward to see what I can do with it.
And it'll give the nostagicophiles lots of classic lines as:
"You charge, but the thief jumps nimbly aside."
"The thief rams the haft of his blade into your stomach, leaving you out of breath."
"The quickness of your thrust knocks the thief's weapon to the floor, leaving him unarmed"
"Finishing you off, the thief inserts his blade into your heart."
The already slow pace will be a bit slower because of me beta testing the Halloween Module. It's really fantastic that all those developers (and little me in smaller portions) have come up with such huge module in just a few weeks. I had lots of fun last night. Fun to beta-test? My R&D department would never believe me ;)
Thanks for reading, as always!
/A
ZORK RtGUE now on The Neverwinter Vault!
9 years ago
4 comments:
Wow - I really like the idea of convo-driven, turn-based combat!
Good luck with the scripting side of things - judging by your Halloween submission, I know you're more than capable of tackling it! :)
I have some experience with turn-based combat for NWN, but probably *not* in the way you intend. ;)
One problem that occurs to me, however, is how will you manage this in a MP game (especially without a DM)? In theory, you would have to jump between conversations for each player involved in the combat, which may be quite a headache to implement.
Still, I am looking forward to hearing how you get on. :) Just be sure to have the system fully implemeted "in your head" *before* you start coding it. Make sure you know exactly what you want your players to be able to do and not do as combat actions and then stick with it. It can very easily get extremely complicated. ;)
Lance.
Tackling the combat in Multiplayer sort of solves itself because of the game-setup. One have to forget the DnD combat rules completely. Combat in this game is just a small (almost insignificant) part of solving a bigger puzzle so only LifePoints and AttackChance is used. And only one character can be involved in the fight at the same time which make sense because there's only one Elvish Sword in the game.
Very exciting! Only 1 day left until we get to experience it all!
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