Week 7 – Tamarrion – Post-Beta

The world of Tamarrion, created by the talented Måns Löf

Post-Beta

We’ve been so.insanely.god.damn.busy this last week. We’ve crunched 4 out of 7 days this week. On the upside, A LOT of things have happened with the game. It looks gorgeous now!

The game is basically finished in the sense of being a vertical slice. This means that all features we want to be in the game is done and ready to be tested on a large audience. What we’ve got left is polishing, iterating on the already implemented features, balancing and play testing. Oh and bug testing (easier said than done).

This week we’ve been able to finish the trailer, we’ve added all of our currently finished art assets, we’ve created a presentation and we’ve had massive play testing from outside sources (i.e. people who had not tested it before).

A person even spent the entire weekend just to beat the boss on brutal (the hardest difficulty). Which he did – after about 50-60 tries. It was streamed as well, and I was glued to my screen, watching, taking notes on bugs and tactics. I love creating games.

My work

I took it on myself to create a audiovisual script for our trailer, which I did. Me and my coworker Mikaela then sat down and juggled ideas around, worked out camera angles and created a specific build with special Camera Angels. We wanted the trailer to mainly focus on Combat with a cinematic intro. The result can be seen below!

Other than that, I’ve been hard pressed to balance, play test, tweaking and generally finding bugs in our game. It takes A LOT of time to get everything to feel “just right”. The abilities has to be tuned, the spells has to feel right, all spells has to have a purpose, there can’t be any glaring over powered abilities and god powers. This takes time, and it takes iteration. Mostly, we’ve come to a stage in development where rather going off of numbers and statistics (as I did earlier), I’m trying to work a “feel” angle. It has to feeeeeeel right, not just be statistically balanced.

I’m still working on finishing the balancing of the God powers, and we’ve got a working version of all god powers except the support god power, which is tricky. I’ve also had to change a few game design decisions to make the combat feel smoother to play, and visually more impactful (or, just HEAVIER in general). I’ve worked closely with the Programmers to make sure that I’ve been given all the tools needed for small level tweaking.

The game is shaping up to be what I envisioned it in the beginning of the project, yet it’s taken a lot of strange, but wonderful new twists and turns. It’s exactly what it set out to be; a mish-mash of RPG’s such as Dark Souls and the mechanical heavy World of Warcraft raid bosses, with the nose-down-to-the-grindstone replayability that Super Meat boy offers. But then again, I could be wrong, and we’ve gone the entirely wrong route, and should’ve separated ourselves more from the other genres. Time will tell.

I’m also going to present the game infront of an audience at the GGC. This takes a ridiculous amount of time that I’d rather spend on the game. But, It’s going steadily forward, so hopefully our presentation won’t be shit.

That’s about it for this week! See you at the GGC!

Our new effect for the holy god power

Week 6 – Tamarrion – The Pre-Beta

Pre-Beta

This week, we had our first of two pre-beta play testing sessions (Which is great for my thesis, as I’m basing my thesis on the feedback to design decision process).

We’ve worked all week to implement as much as possible into the game. A Beta version of a game means that all FEATURES has to be implemented, and I’m happy to say that they are, and we also managed to get a lot of new assets into the the actual scene.

We’ve also improved several Gameplay aspects, such as new Dash ability (removed Jump), added health orbs in the alcoves for players who choose to play without healing abilities (players who wants to heal in general I suppose).

Another thing we’ve worked hard with during this period is to add any and all feedback we could think of to create in a short amount of time. We’ve added everything from simple spell animations, to new UI/HUD components that alerts the player.

All in all, the game is starting to shape up. Take a look at the picture below and take into consideration the huge leap from the previous weeks (look below).

My work

I’ve been put stationary on Game testing, balancing and tweaking the game. I spent on average 4-5 hours a day just playing the game, finding bugs, trying to abuse the game systems and working on new solutions to game play issues.

We’ve completely finished two out of the five God Powers (one of which was crazily overpowered), which was testable in the pre-beta version. After testing the game over and over again, we’ve found most of the kinks and straightened them out.

As mentioned above, we’ve finally put the alcoves to use by adding health orbs inside of them (randomly spawns in one of them), and are working on creating additional use of the game space.

We’ve got a internal document that entails all bugs, patch-fixes and wishes (From me, the designer) as well as proposed solutions to the issues as we encounter them.

The basic mechanics of the boss is now finished, and I’m about the run into the finish line with the last tweaking; but we’re about to add difficulty levels, which the boss has been designed around to be modifiable.

That’s about it; as I mentioned, most of my job has been the good old game development grind of “Implementing, Testing, Iterating”, which takes an insane amount of time. I’ll leave you with our Main Menu theme and a picture of the game, in-engine:

>>> Main Menu Theme, a collaboration between me and Zlatan Karamustafic (our out-sourced audio engineer)!

Week 4 – Tamarrion – Spells and balance!

Physics – archenemy of Tamarrion

This week has been all about working on the boss fight and the player spells.

What we’re trying to do, is to give the player a wide range of customization, both in itemization and spell variety.

After we introduced the God Power system, we started looking at combinations of spells<->items<->god powers, in an effort to create as many interesting “builds” as possible. The main thing we are looking at doing is removing the need for a cookie-cutter rotation build.

Spells – how do they work

Spells are split into five types (as mentioned in the post below):

Holy, Melee, Magic, Support and Defense.

For the GGC build, we’re going with 3x spells across the 5x types, totaling in at 15 spells.

There are also two different categories of spells, Actives and Passives. The player equips 4 active spells, with a Passive ability. A player may equip any combination of spells before entering a fight. As mentioned below, the spells are supposed to give the player an interesting choice in creating Combos, as well as creating the most effective builds after figuring out  the boss mechanics being faced.

Let’s talk a bit about passives for a second here:

The passives provides a specialization; a way for the player to give the player a specific play style. Example being the Melee Passive called Berserk. Let’s look at how it works and what kind of play it favours:

Each melee HIT; the player gains 1x Berserk. Each hit within 2 seconds of the first attack adds +1 berserk. If the player does not hit again within 2 seconds, the stack is lost. Maximum stacks are 5. Each stack gives the player 5% attack speed.

This obviously favors a melee heavy build. But the fact that Berserk has to be maintained, it’s worth investing in defense heavy and damage mitigating spells, as to give the player a way of actually stacking the Berserk Buff. Otherwise, the buff quickly becomes super fluent, as the player would never be able to reach the full stack.

There’s currently a interface in the menu that allows for full customization of spells. Although we have had some issues in streamlining the experience, the spell-menu as well as the inventory menu is looking to become extremely well-thought out and user-friendly. We’re still working a lot with the way we present information to the end user, and the amount of “clicks” (the amount of hassle it is to navigate through the menus) it takes to perform an action.

Now, let’s get back to the nitty-gritty of the spell balancing:

Each of the types of spells (holy etc) follows a general theme:

Holy is all about healing/damage – typical paladin traits.

Magic is all about heavy magic damage – typical Mage traits.

Melee is pretty obvious, slow and heavy or quick and mobile – typical Warrior traits

Support is all about mobility: movement speed and teleportation

Defense is all about damage mitigation, allowing the player to survive longer

Balancing

The spells have to be balanced as well. “Why should I choose this spell”. This is hard enough as it is. But, we’re trying to build each spells to fit a specific purpose: a specific play style.

We’re working on coming up with a damage calculation that allows for scaling, as right now we’re only working with a static base damage model, which can only be scaled up by modifiers such as critical hits.

I believe we’ve got to add a weapon slot in the items as well, to give the player more customization (this is fast becoming a buzzword) when it comes to building your own plays style.

The table showing all spells and how we’re balancing the spells. A lot of this is Work in Progress, so don’t mind the arbitrary numbers.

That’s about it for now. I’m off to create an Alpha build. Thank you for reading! I’ll leave you with Lord Valac.

Alpha Fever

Week 2/3 – Tamarrion – God Powers!

Hi again!

I’m back to talk a bit about the progress of our new game, Tamarrion.

I missed last weeks progress update, so I’ll try to be a bit more thorough this week!

These last two weeks has been all about creating a functioning prototype where we, the development team, is able to test out features and functionality. Examples of this would be the characters abilities/spells and the bosses abilities.

We’ve been focusing on making sure that all base functionality is implemented before starting out with the actual design of the boss fight. The reasoning behind this is that we’d like to find a general way of making sure that each boss created within the game is easily modifiable; i.e. all bosses follow the same base structure. This will, hopefully, help immensely when we’re ready to start pushing content.

Focus of the Week

So, what have I been focusing on this week?

Besides working with the programmers to make sure that the feature list is being built from the designs documents that I’ve been working on (There’s about 10 different Design Documents now, totaling about 40-45 pages), I’ve been focusing mostly on improving on the main aspect of the game: The combat.

What I decided to do was to completely overhaul the Combo Point system, because in the end this is what defines and what sets the combat apart from any old Hack’n’Slash.

I started out by looking at how different games solves their combat. Most importantly, how our main inspirations solved it (Dark Souls, Diablo and Torchlight). After mixing around with different types of rotational-based combat systems, and creating several Build-Spend Rotations I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t what the project was looking for.

First off, we’ve got to make sure that the combat fits the aesthetics (both MDA wise as well as the graphical aesthetics). Tamarrion is a Paladin, a proponent of her gods. This was not reflected anywhere in the game before; it was a afterthought rather than a main component of the game.

This is how the God/Avatar Power system came to be.

God Powers (or, Gods – how do they work?)

The God powers were born out of the idea that in the world of Tamarrion, there’s several Gods. And the Paladins worship these gods fanatically. This gives them the ability to summon the powers of the respective gods.

We’ve already got a working system that separates spells into types (Holy, Melee, Magic, Support and Defense). These could also correspond to each God. This is where I decided to build a new system that allowed for customization and freedom within the combat of Tamarrion.

So, how does it work?

• A combo point is earned by casting a spell.
• Each spell has their own identifier, depending on which type of spell it is (defense, holy, magic, support or melee)
• First Combo Point gathered is put into the Defining orb. This means that this orb will dictate which God Power the player will get when the combo point counter is full.
• Second, third, fourth and fifth combo point gathered is put into the bonus combo point orbs. These defines what bonuses the player will get when the combo point counter is full.
• When the combo counter is full, release the God Power for X seconds, and add bonuses for same amount of seconds.

Early Concept of the new Combo Point and God Power System

Defining Orb

The defining orb is the orb that will define which God power will be granted at the end of the combo counter.

Each spell has their own identifier, this means that each spell is from a different spell tree.

By casting a spell in the beginning of a empty Combo Point Counter, that spell will then define the defining orb (That’s a mouthful).

Bonus Orbs

Bonus Orbs are the orbs that fills the vacant spots are the defining orb.

Bonus Orbs does not give you a God Power, but they do give the player bonuses based on the spell-type they are connected with.

 

This gives the player a chance to tailor-suit their rotations.

 

Name	Type	Bonus (per Orb)	Spells	Misc
Holy Orb	Holy	+10 HPs	See Abilities and Spells
Melee Orb	Melee	+2% AtkSpeed	See Abilities and Spells
Magic Orb	Magic	+2% CoolDown Reduction	See Abilities and Spells
Support Orb	Support	+2% MovSpeed	See Abilities and Spells
Defense Orb	Defense	+2% Damage Reduction	See Abilities and Spells

The table of content is taken from the Design Document and shows early work done on the numbers put into the bonus system.

God Powers

Tamarrion is a paladin. Meaning; the she’s heavily involved with the five gods. Aesthetically, this makes more sense then having a gather->spend system.

Hence, the new God Power system allows the player to customize their own rotations.

 

The God Power is defined by the first spell cast with an empty Combo Bar.

The god Powers comes with their own abilities for X amount of seconds.

Each God Power synergies differently with different Bonuses.

 

God Powers are still very much a work in progress. The Table below shows how the balancing of the God Powers will work. Also note that the “Ability” field is empty. We’re still working on balancing spells->bonuses->god powers so that each God Power fills a required slot.

Think of it as any other spell in the game, except that the cast is dependable upon which Combination of spells the player choose.

 

Name	Type	Ability	Feedback	God Name (haha)
God of Light	Holy		Wings	Ak’Divinum
God of War	Melee		Red Hands/Body (Berserk)	Ak’Vishina
God of	Magic		Particles (perhaps the Eye of Wisdom above the character)
God of	Support
God of	Defense

The bonuses and God Powers calculation works as follows

EXAMPLE:

Where:

GP = Good Power

BO = Bonus Orb

M = Melee

H = Holy

M = Magic

 

(GP (M)) + (BO (M) + BO(M) + BO(M) + BO (H))

=

God Power = Magic (No Bonuses except God Abilities)

Meele bonus + Melee Bonus = 2% + 2% + 2% = 6%

Holy Bonus = 10 hps

 

=

The player gains the god ability whilst also gaining 10 hps and 6% attack speed.

So, that’s about it for this week. I could speak forever about our new systems and the progress of the actual game. I’ll try to talk a bit more about the actual Boss next week.

Take care!

Spelprogrammering III – 1st post

So, we’ve started out with a new Game Programming course, called Game programming III. We’ll be focusing on 3D programming this time around.

So, let’s have a little chat about something I’ve studied this week:

I’ve started looking at our first assignment, which is to create a binary search tree using C++. (I’ll be writing this to help me understand how a Binary Search Tree works myself, whilst also hopefully help anyone reading this understand it as well)

What is a binary search tree, and how does it work?

A binary search tree is a node based data structure that categorizes each node after their size on a left (the smaller size) and a right side (the larger size). Each node has two child nodes, one smaller (left side) and one larger (right side).

Each time a new node allocated to the tree, it first looks at the root value: Is it larger or smaller than the root value? If it is, go to the right side node. If not, go to the left side node. Secondly, it checks again is it larger or smaller than the child of the root? If it is, go to the right side. etc.

Here’s an example:

So let’s use letters for this example; if we were to introduce, let’s say Z to the tree (assuming A has the value of 1, and B the value of 2 etc.), we first check,

Is it larger than the root, F? It is, so let’s go down the right side child of F.

Is it larger than G? It is, so let’s go down to the right side child of G.

Is it larger than I? It is, so let’s add it as a new right hand child of I.

The tree would now look like this:

The assignment requires us to create the following methods: insert, erase, search, size,
traversal_pre_order, traversal_in_order and traversal_post_order.

As I’m still just starting out with this assignment, let’s have a quick look at how to create an insert method:

So I’ve started out by defining what my method should do:

• Check if we have a root node.  If not, we have to create a root node.
• If the element we want to inser is less than the element in the root node, go down the left sub-tree until the element becomes a child of another node.
• If the element we want to inser is greaterthan the element in the root node, go down to the right sub-tree until the element becomes a child of another node

Now, what if we want to insert an Element that has the same size as the Root? The element has to be ignored.

How about deletion?

This is what I’m currently trying to wrap my head around, as there is at least three cases we have to consider before deleting a node, Nodes with no children, Nodes with one child and Nodes with two Children (look at the example above, Z has no children, D has two children, etc).

This means that removing a node with no childs is quite simple, by just removing the pointer from any element linked to it, whilst when you have to delete a node with a child (that sounds morbid come to think about it), we have to re-point the value of the element we want to deletes child to the root of the element.

Example:

Deleting the letter I:

That’s it for now. I’ve been busy writing a new concept document all week, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around this subject (I haven’t programmed for months!). Anyway, that’s a small introduction to Binary Search trees.

Board Game Analysis: Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game

Introduction

Last Night on Earth the: The Zombie Game board game, is a survival horror game, set in a typical American small town for up to 2-6 players. The basic rundown of the game is to complete your objective before dawn, depending on your current objective, and fight off the hordes of zombies that just does not stop coming at you (which is also played by one of the players).

Setup

 The Game board is split up in a main piece, that covers the middle and four L-shaped map-pieces that can be randomized for maximal replay-ability (more of these can be obtained by purchasing the expansions).

You are then dealt an objective/mission to accomplish. (either randomized or collectively decided) I’ll get into this later on in this analysis.

The players are split into two groups; either you play as a zombie or as one of the heroes. Worth mentioning is that this game can still be played by two people, one as a zombie and one as a hero (the hero then gets to discard his hero if it dies and randomly pick a new one, it’s all turn based either way).

Let’s get in to the gritty-nitty; the underlying systems of the game.

Players and Zombies

Players/Characters

Let’s talk a bit about the characters that the player are able to choose.

The vanilla game has 8 character to choose from (but, more than often you are randomly dealt one of the characters rather then choosing freely). Each of these characters has their strengths and weaknesses, including special rules and mechanics attached to them.

Example, Sheriff Anderson:

The Sheriffs character card

At the top right corner, you can see the starting zone of this character, in this case the Police Station.

Sheriff and Man of Action are the sheriffs two special abilities, these special abilities defines what this character’s role in party will be.

Below that, is the wound counter, after taking three wounds, this character dies and the player has to draw a new character that spawns at a random location on the map.

This character is also a Law Enforcement character and a male. This matters, as certain Hero or zombie cards has special events that only affects the characters profession and gender.

The players round

1. Roll a D6.

2. Either move (movement = 1x square for each number on the D6), or Search.

3. Shoot (If you have a ranged weapon)

4. Combat (if you end your turn in the same square as a zombie)

Searching or Moving.

The player starts of their turn by either Searching or Moving.

Searching means that you jump over your turn to draw a Hero Card. Character Cards ties the game together in such an elegant way.

There are two different TYPES of Hero Cards. They are Items and Events. You may only have 4 cards at any time and a maximum of 1x Ranged Weapon 1x Melee weapon.

Item cards have to be turned up, so that the zombies can see what weapons/items you have. They are used either in combat or as a mission objective (example, “Escape the truck” scenario, where you have to bring Gasoline and Keys to the car in order to escape).

Melee weapons often influences the dice rolls that you have to do in order to resolve a combat. Whilst ranged weapons can be used at any time before entering combat, with a range counter printed on the card, during the hero turn. (But only once).

The events card is where the game gets really interesting. These range from immediately cancelling a fight between a zombie and a player to giving a priest +1 dices to roll during combat. The game has such simple core mechanics, that these cards are able to influence so much of the actual round to round events, and seeing as how the game boils down to combat and movement, they are able to change the outcome in so many different ways. I can’t print out all of the event cards, as there are a massive amounts of them, but I’ll be giving an example of a game round later on in this text.

Zombies

The zombies starts off the first round by rolling two D6. Depending on how much you rolled, you may place zombies evenly at the spawning zones around the map. (There’s at least one in each L-shaped zone, the outer 4 maps).

The zombies then draws their Zombie Cards, always making sure that they have 4 (which is also the maximum amount) zombie cards in their hand. I’ll get into the cards in a bit, as they are one of the core mechanics (arguably the core mechanic of the game).

The zombies may move one square per turn, and may move through walls and closed doors.

Combat

Besides, moving, combat is the other major mechanic of the game; as mentioned, the hero cards only affect these two aspects of the game in one way or another. Combat can be split into two, melee and ranged (ranged being the least advanced).

Melee

Melee combat occurs when a zombie and a hero ends a turn on the same square. The combats are resolved by rolling D6.

The player has a base value of two dices which can be modified by the hero cards.

The Zombie has a base value of one dice per zombie in the square which can be modified by the zombie cards.

The basic rules of combat are as follows: The zombie player and the hero player rolls their dices. The highest number on any of the dices wines. The zombies always wins at a tie (apart from special abilities that at least one of pick able heroes possess). Ex. Zombie rolls a 5, Player rolls a 4 and a 3. The Zombie wins.

If a player wins a roll, and has a double (same value x2), the player does not only fend off the zombie, he also kills it, removing the zombie into the zombie pool.

This is where melee combat weapons (which, once again, are gathered by drawing random hero cards). The melee weapons modifies how you play during combat. For example, the baseball bat adds another dice to the hero. If the hero rolls a 1-2, the baseball bat breaks.

So, In short, the melee combat is nothing else but calculated risks and leaving yourself exposed to lady luck.

Ranged Combat

Ranged weapons, just as melee weapons are picked up by searching buildings and, by pure chance, receiving a ranged weapon. Ranged weapons has a Range (amount of squares from the players current position), and a chance of breaking/running out of ammo.

Ranged weapons differ from melee weapons, as they can be used after walking, and can be used at instead of fighting a zombie in melee. Meaning that you do not have to put yourself in harms way in order to kill a zombie.

Now that I’ve covered the core systems of the game, I’ll talk a little bit about my personal reflections of said systems.

Most Interesting System

Let me first say that the game feels so incredibly smooth. The fact that the game only really relies on movement and combat and sheer luck and yet is able to be so darn fun, is absolutely astonishing according to me.

The system that intrigues me the most is the way the Hero and Zombie cards interact with the round to round events. They are absolute game changers in some cases, but they never deviate from the basic formula; either they bolster the heroes movement, or hinders them, bolsters their combat ability or hinder it (depending on if its a Hero Card of Zombie Card).

The fact of the matter is that it elegantly creates an illusion of depth, by actually making rolling a pair of dices intriguing, even though it’s just luck.

Worth mentioning is that the game has this absolutely gorgeous George A. Romero aesthetic look and feel to it. It perfectly captures that 80-90s horror flick feel. The cards has actual actors that has been photographed, and they’re all extremely stereotypical (albeit a bit sexist at times, but for some weird reason I’m willing to see past that); you’ve got the sheriff, the sheriffs boy, the high-school jockey and the prom queen. They are all instrumental in winning the game as a hero. What makes it even more typical of the genre is that the less ‘likeable’ characters seem to have special abilities that favors sacrificing themselves for the greater good. This approach strikes something deep within me, and I fudging love it.

Target Group Interpretation and summation

The game has a suggested age of 12 and up. Now, this is open to interpretation, as the more conservative American (I’m not trying to sound like a sociologist now), would probably want to put the game at a much higher age, as even though the game is a bit of a satire, it still deals with heavy subject matters; you’re able to chainsaw enemies and throw sticks of dynamites on your friends. But, if you’re like myself and do not see a correlation between video game violence and actual violence, i’d say that 12 and up is a pretty accurate age group, especially seeing how basic the game mechanics are.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, the game caters to an audience that grew up with George A. Romero styled horror flicks, or just B-horror flicks in general (like myself, I’d watch 2-3 horror flicks every weekend for years upon years straight during the early 2000’s). This is a game that absolutely fits ANY person who has any interest in cinematographic horror, or just enjoys the shitty horror flicks of the 80s and 90s. You couple that with a smooth as all hell game experience, and you’ve got yourself an all-around good game.

The game mechanics are about as simple as, if you know how to roll a dice and you’re literate, you’re able to pick this game up in no time at all. The thing that makes this game what it is, is the way it (and I’ll be referring to literature I’m reading right now that pretty much explains this “phenomena” ), is the way that it reinforces the character’s two main verbs, moving and fighting (this includes the zombies) – mainly the cards. This creates a smoothness (turns goes extremely fast), that, coupled with the aesthetics emerges the players in a movie-like experience. It’s like playing a horror flick.

Thank you for reading my blog. I’m sorry if this particular analysis seems a bit forced and rushed, as I’m currently at Dreamhack with one of my projects.

That’s it for now, take care y’all.

P.S

That’s George A. Romero, looking all kinds bad ass.

Project Totem Update #2

Totemic Banner by Camilla Jacobsen

Update

Hi again!

The project is finally entering full production as off today. We’ll be having a stand-up scrum meeting, detailing the plan for our alpha build. The group has been working on defining content, building frame-works for said content and creating place-holder (first drafts) animations and graphics.

As we’re entering production, we’ve got our focus set on making sure that the Alpha covers our core-mechanics, level-structure and most importantly, seeing as how we’re creating a theme park game that focuses on original input-devices, we’ve got to make sure that the control feels tight. This is done through separating our project into two different programs; one called the prototype that has our controls fully functional and where we try new technology, and one known as the Main project where we’ve created a map editor, an object editor (for collisions, animations etc.); this is where the the approved concepts are put.

Most importantly; we’re making progress!

Design

Totemic Design Diagram

So, this is where I’m personally most involved. There’s quite a challenge in making sure that such an easy and lightweight concept is interesting enough to keep an audience interested.

First off, we’ve gone from being time-based (as in, spend enough time in the middle, and you’ll win) to being score based. And, as most of us would agree; it’s far more satisfying to gain a thousand points, than it is to gain one point of score, even if the amount of progress is relative to the same victory condition.

To tackle the issue of creating a mess in the middle of the map with the totem being the focus, we’ve added an out ring around the map that will consist of small items that is to be picked up by the gatherer’s (quick note – the gatherer is one of the character’s that the player controls, and is responsible for picking up power-ups, score multiplier (as mentioned in the text) and controlling the middle. They’re fragile and will be eliminated immediately upon contact with the other character from other player’s, known as the defender) and controlling the middle.

The “Score Multiplier’s” are basically coins that a player can pick up with their gatherer. They serve as a way of getting in to the match without having to hold the middle, and also to reward the player with points even if they’re not currently in control of the middle. As a matter of fact, most things will now reward score. Awarding time to player’s is too much of an abstract arbitrary value; gaining 0.25s worth of time is not as “fun” as gaining 100 score per second; there’s a reason why you, for example, critically hit for 15 million points of damage in Diablo. This is to give the player a constant sense of progress, even when thing’s are not looking out his or her way.

GUI/HUD

We’ve gone with a simple approach to creating a HUD. We’ve boiled the most important things that the game have to communicate to the player as being:

• Amount of Score – Shown by a score bar that is activated by being in the lead.
• Leader – Shown graphically by both the totem and on the progress bar in the top. The Totem consists of four blocks, each with the player representative colour. The Blocks move up or down, depending on your current status in the game. The progress bar also tracks the current leader.
• Progress – The progress of a player is shown on the top bar. There will be small arrows on the bar that will show the players progress relative to each other.

 

Mock-up of both the Game Space and the HUD/GUI

 

That about sums it up for now. I’ll make sure to update more often as we’re now starting to pump out new content to the game.

Take care!

//Team Lingonskogen