Blog update: Woo! Finally some gameplay data!
I'm not terribly satisfied with how this turned out, but I'm not utterly disappointed, either. I was glad to see (relatively) less confusion than I expected, but there's still a lot of wandering going on and I think I could do a few more things to help resolve that.
So uh, got me a fresh batch of to-dos now:
- Add some night-time ambient sound
- Hold game-start mafia list message longer (ensures mafia players know who's who)
- Set houses without a colony ablaze
- Update briefing to indicate minimum mana for cloaking
- Add periodic reminders of mineral drain while armed and moving
- Notify everyone of player death + mafia status
- Notify everyone of mafia count in the game at start
- Investigate ability: Expose more footprints
- Investigate ability: Reveal mana of nearby players
- Reduce mafia's ping rate at night
- Increase unarmed mode HP
- Fix mafia pings for non-existent players
- Increase NPC house colony HP
- Reduce trap cost to 2000 mana
- Reduce Reveal cost to 1500 mana
- Fix vote marker cleanup for leavers over their beacons
- Set unarmed unit to 1% hp while asleep
- End day vote 1 minute earlier in the day
- Increase daytime period by 1 minute
- Ping shuttles faster during start period
- Don't drop fallen players - simply disable their shit
- Make clear indication to everyone to kill voted players
That'll keep me busy for a few more days.
There's only one issue I'm having trouble resolving, though. Wormer had a problem identifying the rule of daytime protect when he tried to kill a player at day. This hearkens back to my earlier fear that players weren't going to 'get' the law protection mechanic. I think I've smoothed out some of its comprehension, but it still seems a bit too blunt.
Need some ideas for how to
clearly indicate protection status...
Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Dec 26 2009, 12:54 pm by Tuxedo-Templar.
None.
Update: I had added a new Mafia ability to place traps around the map. Currently I had it so that it's basically like a land mine: If you step on it, it becomes armed and if you immediately stop moving you'll have a chance to use Investigate to disarm it. But I find it's basically impossible to react fast enough (even with the delay buffer I've added), and it does little to the gameplay but add an element of something to be randomly afraid of for townies (
*technically* the Reveal ability could be used to detect traps in advance, but I can't expect it to be used that well, and it has side effects, besides).
However, I came up with a new idea: I could set it to be a snare trap instead so that if you trigger it,
another player must come and use Investigate to free you from it. But otherwise it's harmless. Gonna try it out soon.
Post has been edited 7 time(s), last time on Dec 27 2009, 9:25 am by Tuxedo-Templar.
None.
One game-breaking aspect is that you unally everyone (unless you're Mafia in which case you retain alliance with your fellow Mafia members) when you arm yourself at night. I've tried taking down houses with other people at night only to have them accidentally kill me.
Too long; didn't read: Alliance toggle plox.
Well that's a tricky one, but I think you're right. Blizzard made a god awful mess of the ally system making it a living disaster trying to work with it dynamically with triggers like this. I supposed I'll just have to use per-unit invincibility instead to control damageability. Shouldn't be impossible to manage.
Plus I think people would understand the mechanic of law protection better with invincibility than with the stupid ally hammering going on now. See? I
knew there had to be a right way to do this. Sitting right in fucking front of me, as usual.
I might also disable Reveal and Snare completely for the first beta. I'd hoped Reveal to work as a defense mechanism of some kind, but I don't think I thought my cunning plan all the way through with that one. And Snare... well I just don't have enough data to decide on that one. Better I leave it out for now and plan the game as if it wasn't there.
Edit: Oh! And as a nice side effect of not having ally hammering, you can once again freely attack footprints and trap units (neutral units). Traps will be disabled, of course, but footprint attacking gives players a chance to clean up their trails at night via. Investigate, should they be so inclined.
Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Dec 28 2009, 9:59 am by Tuxedo-Templar.
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Update: I'm also going to remove that damn virtual mana thing for cloaking. This is just another of those things I can't really fight against Starcraft on and expect to win. Armed mode units (Ghosts) will have to charge up like they normally do in order to use cloaking. The unit's mana will be emptied out upon disarming, though. Figure it out.
Staying armed still requires minerals, though. That still works out to mafia's advantage, since they won't lose minerals while armed if they hold still (but townies do, slowly). I don't think this change will matter too strongly in the grand scheme of things, though. It's mostly just a bit more tweakage for stuff that
could matter, in my usual fashion.
Yeah, I think I'm gonna just wrap this up soon after I get this last tweak out of the way. I can't foresee any more major points of indecisiveness after this.
Next version I'll start planning out a good way to approach special roles. I have a few fun ideas in mind for these.
Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Dec 28 2009, 3:29 pm by Tuxedo-Templar.
None.
That's not that huge of a problem, but yeah I noticed it too. And beyond a few minor tweaks, I'm not really going to do any more than I already have to accommodate this.
Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 29 2009, 2:16 am by Tuxedo-Templar.
None.
There's a good chance I just fixed both of those, but I guess I'll need to find out the hard way now. I'm out of juice for today.
I'll be posting the map soon.
None.
