Today I worked on rewriting targeting and shooting. It's not completely done, but I ended up with what I feel is a greatly improved system.
This is a picture of the new target selection. It looks the same as the old one, except with a line of asterisks. Why the asterisks? In the new system, bullets don't magically teleport exactly where you're aiming. The follow a trajectory. This trajectory isn't realistically modeled or anything, but it does mean that bullets have a path that they follow to a target and beyond if they miss. Anything along that path has a chance of being hit, although the targeted tile gets a bonus. This opens the door to new combat possibilities. You'll be able to take cover behind furniture or in a group of people. You'll also need to watch your shots more carefully and firing into a group of enemies will increase your chances of hitting one. The final addition is that I've added a primitive animation when you shoot that shows the bullet traveling and then its impact location.
As you can see the NPCs
still stand there in the same exact place. I really need to start fleshing out my Actor classes, but I'm having a little trouble deciding what I want to do about certain gameplay elements. The most important one that I'm not sure about is the health system. I really liked the locational damage from the old version, but I feel like it had a tendency to be a little too random, resulting in too many random unlucky deaths. I'm stuck trying to figure out a good system to use that still allows me to have lots of gore and injuries requiring bionics to fix while not being frustrating. If you've got any ideas, please feel free to post them!
I'm thinking about health system ideas... I'm a bit busy today, but I'll try to come up with something tonight or soon.
ReplyDeleteThis is looking great, the tiles really look good with the lighting and all! About the targeting system, is it only the tiles marked with asterisks that have a chance of getting hit? This is way more sensible than having a "scatter cone" around the target like many other games, with which it would be hard to tell which tiles have a chance of being hit.
ReplyDeleteAbout health systems, you could go with a couple of "realistic" life sign meters, if you want your game to have a bit of a gruesome feel to it (way more gory than "hit points"!). One that I think could be cool would be blood loss (a bar) and heart rate (a pulsating thingie). Hits increase blood loss, and the heart rate continually drops proportional to blood loss.
In fact, it would be very cool to have a sort of "adrenaline" effect: shooting bad guys and getting hit would increase heart rate a bit (but it's a temporary fix), and with a bit of careful balancing it would make for some frantic moments where you throw yourself in the line of fire in a desperate attempt to get a rush of adrenaline and holding on for just a bit longer. Adrenaline shots would be very useful, and bandages and other medical stuff would be the only real cure for blood loss (but they would be more rare). I think it would make for some great combat mechanics :)
That's an interesting idea. I like the idea of adrenaline playing a role in it.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there is no scatter cone. The bullet just has a chance of hitting anything in that path (and actually beyond the target if it misses).
I'm digging the heart rate/blood loss model. So long as it's simple to understand at a glance. More generally I like the idea of life being more fragile, to increase the intensity of combat. If you get some expensive/fancy implants to your chest or something, maybe you can tank some high-powered bullets. Otherwise, I'd be totally OK with a game that killed me after a few gunshot wounds, or knife wounds, or one critical head-shot. It makes decisions around combat much more meaningful, instead of Rambo-ing your way through hordes of bad-guys ala DooM or something. Just my 2 cents.
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