Today, instead of doing homework/reading, I had a long talk with Whales at #rgrd who is working an awesome zombie roguelike, Cataclysm. That got me thinking about my own game, and we threw around ideas until I came up with one that I'm pretty satisfied with. I decided that not only am I sticking with the body part based system, but I am expanding it further. Previously, it consisted of a list of 6 body parts, and a lot of stuff was basically hardcoded in to work with those 6 parts. The new system instead uses a tree system. Each bodypart has the capacity to contain children bodyparts, and each bodypart has a weight for random selection. What this means is I can group together the bodyparts like this:
One of the awesome things about this system is it's a lot more flexible than the old one. I can easily add other parts, such as internal organs. It will also bring about some major gameplay changes. Armor and augmentations will now be assigned on an individual basis to each body part, meaning you can mix and match armor parts (shoulder pads, leg armor, boots, etc). I'm also going to make left and right play a prominent role for arms. Your right arm will be your primary arm (right handedness is assumed for simplicity's sake). Your left arm will be your gear or blocking arm. This means you will be able to equip each hand separately (dual pistols, pistol/motion scanner, riot shield?). Two handed weapons will receive a big penalty if your left hand is not empty or if the weapon is held in the left hand because of a wounded right hand/arm. The left arm will also automatically attempt to block some melee attacks (either by a skill check or by an increased random weight; I haven't decided yet). This, combined with the customizable armor, should make for some interesting situations. I can see a heavily armored left arm and an unarmored right arm being a viable option for characters who plan on getting in close during combat.
Because of its tree structure, I can easily pick a random hit location given a part using recursion. Non-aimed attacks will simply go on the Body and it will choose one of its children, who will in turn choose from their children, and so on. I'll also be able to easily add targeted attacks which will give the option to aim for either the head, torso, or legs.
Each of the parts still has an individual health level and they'll still behave a lot like the parts in the old version. There are a couple key changes, however. There will now be an additional total health, which will reflect the sum of damage to all body parts. For instance, if your total health is 80 and your limbs are each 20, then having all 4 limbs severed would kill you. The trade-off, is that I'm ditching the bleeding out. It will be replaced with Pain, which will be increased when damage is taken and decrease over time or by using drugs. Pain will have a few negative effects, such as a negative modifier to speed.
Sorry for the long post!
I like it. I'm glad you thought of the 'overall' health idea too. You can only lose so many body parts before it becomes ridiculous to keep fighting. And the pain idea sounds cool too.
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work! And for me, the longer the posts the better, no need to apologize!
I agree with Reefpirate, this sort of post is just right! If you feel that it's too long you can always cheat and post it in 2 parts (even if they're posted within a difference of seconds :D )
ReplyDeleteAnyway the content of the post more than justify the (IMO not big) length, since it's all interesting stuff. The Pain stat seems pretty cool, it really fits with the whole cyberpunk theme and injecting yourself senseless to keep moving and fighting :P
Also tree-based parts make sense, especially with pants going in both legs hehe, but don't get too carried away like in DF and define pinky fingers! ;)
Oh, I should probably also mention that I'm most likely doing away with clothing that goes on multiple body parts (pants/shirts/etc). It would be too much of a pain in the ass to deal with. Instead you'll now just worry about individual armor pieces.
ReplyDeleteIf I do eventually add clothing/accessories (and their purpose would just be for warmth and carrying capacity), it would probably go in a separate list that isn't tied to body parts and it would not provide any type of protection.