The Power-Coding Sprint Is Over -- So What's The Agenda Now?

[Hearteater]

Just want to second this.  Emit Light can be an enchant, but the slot it occupies should be for Light producing enchants only.  So maybe I can select which type of light enchant I want, but I never feel like I should deal with a lack of light in exchange for some combat boost.

[superking]

Original: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/12/power-coding-spring-is-over-so-whats.html


Enchants


The whole idea of enchants is something that we've revised a lot from our original plans.  Emit Light is the first example of an enchant that is already in the game, actually, but at the moment it's all very freeform and nonstructured.  You put on emit light and it lasts a certain amount of time, then you put it on again.  Yawn.





What we'll actually be doing once we add some more enchants, is making it so that each enchant can only go into a certain Enchant Slot on your character.  You'll have a finite number of enchant slots, and each one would have a certain type.  So you might have a movement enchant type, which would let you run faster or jump higher, etc.





And you might have a couple of body enchant slots, which could hold a light source or some sort of defensive modifiers.  Suddenly ball of light and the other light sources actually have some attractiveness, versus emit light beating them all out, right?  Emit light would mean only one defensive enchant rather than two, potentially.

Please don't do this. Having to choose between a logistical nicety and a gameplay boost always sucks, because it means you need to choose to be annoyed by having to diddle with logistical trifles, or be annoyed by knowing you're playing a suboptimal game. Indeed, I'd call that a good universal game design rule: playing better should never be a matter of willingness to engage in annoyance.

If you really want to force that kind of choice, consider something along the lines of WoW's glyph system, where you get multiple categories: One set of slots for cosmetic/logistical effects, other sets for combat effects.

But why do you make the player deal with light? I'd hardly say that AVWW sticks to a gritty sort of realism where you do it because it's accurate, nor is there a set of atmospheric limitations and constraints like there are in Minecraft (monsters spawning in the dark, torches/lamps determining the ultimate extent of your expansion and are thus an essential part of your personal economy). Light just seems like a hurdle you jump over. If light is really important, consider making it into a real choice. Maybe light becomes a tradeoff with stealth; if you deactivate your lights, enemies can't track you as effectively.

+1

also, if we have to pick between run faster and jump higher, dosnt that mean we'd default to faster and have to go into the inventory and swap in jump higher whenever we need to jump higher (because otherwise we will want to run faster)? and if we cant switch while away from town, wont we be forced to use jump higher if its needed for gameplay, and otherwise go with run faster?

[zebramatt]

I may be in the minority here, but the planned system of enchants sounds immensely interesting to me!

[Bluddy]

I agree with zebramatt. I think it's a good idea to limit what the player can do in some way. If lighting is important to you, you can use a slot for that. If jumping high is what you care about, you can use that. Not having all movement powers be used by all players at all times is an important part of balancing the dynamics of the game.

This is actually a bit of a problem with having an open beta. Players have gotten used to having e.g. both storm dash and ride the lightning freely available to them, and now any limitations are seen as unenjoyable. Imagine that Super Metroid had an open beta where initially all powers were available. Then, as the devs figured out the proper puzzles and gating, they took away players' movement options. Players would be upset, but that wouldn't necessarily reflect a good reaction to the game.

[Hearteater]

The problem is, if I can slot +20% damage or light, I need to learn to play without light so I can run +20% damage.  Unless the game is unplayable without a light enchant, this is the optimal way to play.  You'll crush content much easier and everything will need to be balanced assuming no light and a +20% damage enchant.  Which just means running with light, which is the natural choice new players will make, will be really tough.

Trade offs are really good in a game, but combat trade-offs vs utility trade-offs are very tricky to do well.  If you've ever played pen-and-paper RPGs you'll see it with players picking all combat skills and nothing else.  Why?  Because you can generally role play your way around non-combat stuff regardless of specific skills, but in combat every point to hit matters.  Really, who picks the Knowledge: Arctic Half-Demon/Goblin Cuisine over Ranged Dual-Polearm Backstab?

[Bluddy]

The problem is, if I can slot +20% damage or light, I need to learn to play without light so I can run +20% damage.  Unless the game is unplayable without a light enchant, this is the optimal way to play.  You'll crush content much easier and everything will need to be balanced assuming no light and a +20% damage enchant.  Which just means running with light, which is the natural choice new players will make, will be really tough.

Trade offs are really good in a game, but combat trade-offs vs utility trade-offs are very tricky to do well.  If you've ever played pen-and-paper RPGs you'll see it with players picking all combat skills and nothing else.  Why?  Because you can generally role play your way around non-combat stuff regardless of specific skills, but in combat every point to hit matters.  Really, who picks the Knowledge: Arctic Half-Demon/Goblin Cuisine over Ranged Dual-Polearm Backstab?

True, which is why light should have some other effect that makes it more worthwhile. The skills should be fairly balanced in terms of utility since they'd be competing with each other. So some enemies could be sensitive to light, or perhaps going to certain dark areas with light will prevent certain enemies from attacking you, or maybe certain areas are just so dark that you have to have a strong light source and therefore give up on one other power.

[zebramatt]

The problem is, if I can slot +20% damage or light, I need to learn to play without light so I can run +20% damage.  Unless the game is unplayable without a light enchant, this is the optimal way to play.  You'll crush content much easier and everything will need to be balanced assuming no light and a +20% damage enchant.  Which just means running with light, which is the natural choice new players will make, will be really tough.

Trade offs are really good in a game, but combat trade-offs vs utility trade-offs are very tricky to do well.  If you've ever played pen-and-paper RPGs you'll see it with players picking all combat skills and nothing else.  Why?  Because you can generally role play your way around non-combat stuff regardless of specific skills, but in combat every point to hit matters.  Really, who picks the Knowledge: Arctic Half-Demon/Goblin Cuisine over Ranged Dual-Polearm Backstab?

Although what you say is true, I do believe that Chris's (admittedly intentionally vague) hypothetical proposition was that defensive modifiers can occupy the same body slots as light spells. The implication here is that being +5% resistant to, say, fire attacks may be useful in levels where you intend to fight fire monsters; but not as useful as a light spell if you're travelling underground in an ice region. On the other hand, a +5% resistance to melee attacks will always be competing with the light spell whenever you intend to travel underground (since not being able to see will probably result in more melee attacks making contact - and not to mention that shadow bats emit darkness anyway).

As I say, it all sounds very interesting to me - even at the speculative stage!

[ColdPrototype]

This is actually a bit of a problem with having an open beta. Players have gotten used to having e.g. both storm dash and ride the lightning freely available to them, and now any limitations are seen as unenjoyable. Imagine that Super Metroid had an open beta where initially all powers were available. Then, as the devs figured out the proper puzzles and gating, they took away players' movement options. Players would be upset, but that wouldn't necessarily reflect a good reaction to the game.

That's different; you're talking about gating vs. choice. Gating is an appropriate "fun mechanism" when that's what you're actually doing, but it's unlikely that light is like that unless some radical changes are made (light doesn't really prevent you from doing anything, it just hurts your eyes, and you don't have to work to find it). As I said above, you really shouldn't make light a choice against combat buffs; either the combat buff will end up being so trivial it's a wash (AVWW isn't really a game where 5% matters, in my experience), or people will never pick light. There's a teetering edge where you can try to balance it to kinda be worth the tradeoff, and some people will go one  way and other people the other, but I think that would be perceived (by me, at least!) as an annoyance, not a good choice.

[zebramatt]

This is actually a bit of a problem with having an open beta. Players have gotten used to having e.g. both storm dash and ride the lightning freely available to them, and now any limitations are seen as unenjoyable. Imagine that Super Metroid had an open beta where initially all powers were available. Then, as the devs figured out the proper puzzles and gating, they took away players' movement options. Players would be upset, but that wouldn't necessarily reflect a good reaction to the game.

That's different; you're talking about gating vs. choice. Gating is an appropriate "fun mechanism" when that's what you're actually doing, but it's unlikely that light is like that unless some radical changes are made (light doesn't really prevent you from doing anything, it just hurts your eyes, and you don't have to work to find it). As I said above, you really shouldn't make light a choice against combat buffs; either the combat buff will end up being so trivial it's a wash (AVWW isn't really a game where 5% matters, in my experience), or people will never pick light. There's a teetering edge where you can try to balance it to kinda be worth the tradeoff, and some people will go one  way and other people the other, but I think that would be perceived (by me, at least!) as an annoyance, not a good choice.

I don't imagine the intent is to only have an extremely limited number of slots. If you had three body enchants, for example, you might choose between +15% defense against melee, or +10% and a light, or whatever.

[keith.lamothe]

I agree that choices that give gameplay boosts at the sole cost of player annoyance (and/or player wall-clock time) are best left out of a design.  I'm pretty sure Chris isn't intending to have a system that would result in that.  And if it does in practice (by design or accident) I'm sure we'll all be having this conversation again

Some buffs, perhaps particularly movement/convenience buffs, would probably be better accessed via a modal "aura"/"aspect" system (speaking in terms of the WoW Paladin or Hunter, respectively) where you can switch on the fly.  Kind of like the bat-form in AVWW right now (vaguely along the lines of the WoW Druid shapeshifting).  But however it's done: easily switched in and out at need, so the "gameplay cost" of (for instance) abysmal magic power as a bat isn't really a big setback, you just stop being a bat when you need that power back.

For lighting specifically... yea, if all it ever does is what it does now, then it should probably either be automatically always on (which seems to be missing an opportunity to put something fun in there, but better than being annoying) or consume some kind of resource that isn't a competing opportunity cost like "slot I could put a +damage buff in".  But I haven't tried any of this in practice, so it's hard to say.

[Martyn van Buren]

About Emit Light, isn't the idea that giving up a defensive enchant slot for it encourages you to use the other, less effective light spells?  This seems kinda fair enough, tho for me personally I think it would have to be more than 5% to get me to give up convenient lighting.

[KDR_11k]

Then it depends on how difficult those other spells will be to use and how important light actually is (won't mean much if you can just turn up your screen's brightness to see everything). In Terraria the Miner's Hat was much more crucial before all those things like glowsticks and the shift key were added since falling into water in the dark was a death sentence until you got to all the late game gear that can emit light in other ways (as torches couldn't be used underwater). However in Terraria you just can't go without light, no light in a cave makes the cave absolutely black, in AVWW it's dark but not completely black.

[KDR_11k]

BTW, what's going to happen with lower level areas? Currently all rewards get stripped from them as soon as they're 2 levels below you, right? That's probably not terribly intuitive either. It seems like most of your continent will be dead weight at any given time with only a handful of tiles really playable at a time.

Also wind shelters are location based but we have no influence on where wind shelter missions pop up. Once more mission types are added that may get even worse as you can't even be sure that a wind shelter mission will be active at all.

[x4000]

I agree that choices that give gameplay boosts at the sole cost of player annoyance (and/or player wall-clock time) are best left out of a design.  I'm pretty sure Chris isn't intending to have a system that would result in that.  And if it does in practice (by design or accident) I'm sure we'll all be having this conversation again

Yes, for sure.

Some buffs, perhaps particularly movement/convenience buffs, would probably be better accessed via a modal "aura"/"aspect" system (speaking in terms of the WoW Paladin or Hunter, respectively) where you can switch on the fly.  Kind of like the bat-form in AVWW right now (vaguely along the lines of the WoW Druid shapeshifting).  But however it's done: easily switched in and out at need, so the "gameplay cost" of (for instance) abysmal magic power as a bat isn't really a big setback, you just stop being a bat when you need that power back.

Right.  At the moment the bat thing is a scroll so that's a less-good example.  But if it was an enchant, then you could be a bat in the dimness for a while, using balls of light to see... and then switch back to an emit-light-wearing human later.

A lot of it comes down to how this stuff is specifically balanced, too.  The reason emit light should be a not-auto-default thing is that the darkness is actually fun for some players (including myself), and I've had requests to make it more interesting.  And people noting that they pretend emit light doesn't exist so that they can just use ball of light.

Making light-providing enchants have an opportunity cost of DPS-increasing enchants would really be a bad thing, as several folks have pointed out above.  That said, it could be really interesting if there were other kinds of light-providing enchants that had different secondary effects ("Emit Flame" makes you light, and burning, and damage enemies that touch you or something, and so on), AND if there were some other... logistical enchants of some kind that were in opposition to those.  For instance, maybe some stealth-related enchants that actually make your character harder for enemies to see from a distance (if you're not already engaging them).

That sort of thing feels like a logical tradeoff against a light source enchant, especially when you've got balls of light and other non-enchant-related light sources that can let you have a slightly-less-convenient (but in some ways more fun for some folks) form of light.  And also, remembering that it's easy to switch between stealth and emit-light modes anytime you want, just like it is with snowsuit and heatsuit, for instance.

There could even be some movement-related enchants lumped in there, too, for that matter.  Do you want to emit light, or do you want to have a mana-free double-jump?  You could always use emit light and then just keep on with ride the lightning (the mana-costing spell), for instance.  But now you have some interesting choices on how you customize yourself, and what is "built in" to your character versus what has to be used through external spellgems.

For me, the trick is figuring out how to align the various slots so that it feels like players have a lot of cool enchant choices and they can choose a satisfying number of them, without it being so limiting that it's frustrating or so permissive that it's frustrating in a different way (for hardcore gamers, anyhow).  DPS-related stuff... well, that's got to be the least interesting sort of enchants for me, personally, and I almost think I wouldn't even put them in.

Maybe one way to handle that (that would be fun) would be having a Movement/Stealth/Logistical enchant slot, as described above, and then having a DPS-enhancing/Health-enhancing/Elemental-defense-enhancing enchant slot.  So then you have to choose between various forms of defense and offense in that second slot, and different forms of getting around (which I include seeing as part of, heh) with the first slot.  And of course, there are spellgem alternatives for all of these general sorts of things, but the enchants you choose provide an extra bit of bonus you can't get any other way, hence the interesting choice of them.

That's the general direction I'm currently thinking in, but it's all in my head at the moment, not even yet to the point of being on paper properly (well, digital paper, I guess).  Having just two enchant slots does seem a bit on the slight side to me, I'd rather have more like four, but to do that would either require four categories of enchants, or a new interface for applying the enchants versus just using an ability.

If a given enchant can only ever go in one slot, that's really simple because just using it replaces whatever is in the slot.  If an enchant can go in one of two slots then you could do a queue, but then you wind up really feeling hassled every time you need to swap out one of your two enchants.  But if that was only four slots, then it could just be right on the inventory screen (kind of like Minecraft, come to think of it), and you could just drag and drop the enchants you want into the slots you want.  So that could still work out really simple -- you could emit light while still being stealthy, or have extra health as well as being fire-resistant, or something (or just have extra health).

That's a lot more flexible and interesting, without getting too complex or having nonsensical opportunity costs that people would complain about.  So... yeah.  I guess that evolved a lot just from writing all this out.

BTW, what's going to happen with lower level areas? Currently all rewards get stripped from them as soon as they're 2 levels below you, right? That's probably not terribly intuitive either. It seems like most of your continent will be dead weight at any given time with only a handful of tiles really playable at a time.

When it comes to any non-awesome rewards, things like wood or iron or whatever, you can get those things in any level of region.  For gems and the vitality stones, that's one of those things that I think people will figure out pretty fast -- they find tons of them when they are playing at or above level, but never find any of them when they play too far down.  I think that most people will figure out that pattern pretty fast, but playtesting will certainly bear that out one way or the other.  If it turns out to be an issue we can definitely do something, but right now it's theoretical either way.

Also wind shelters are location based but we have no influence on where wind shelter missions pop up. Once more mission types are added that may get even worse as you can't even be sure that a wind shelter mission will be active at all.

With the wind shelters, you're absolutely right on that.  And we don't have that all worked out yet -- too many cogs in motion all at once.  But via in a lot of ways that's the sort of stuff that the NPCs will be letting you do if you help them out.  Whether that will manifest as secret missions or some other mechanic I'm not yet sure, and I think there are other things that need to be nailed down before that can even really be decided upon. 

I can only see around so many corners at once, so to speak, and that one is a bit beyond my line of sight at the moment.  However, Keith and I have been talking about some of that sort of thing, and I think that we'll be able to work out something fun that fits in the base structure we have -- which is why I'm not overly concerned about that yet.  I think that one way to make this work would be to have certain missions grant you some sort of wind shelter item that you could deploy anywhere at will on the continent.  Another way would be the secret missions route in the region of interest.  And there are some other ways that could also work, albeit with requiring minor interface extensions unlike the above.

[Gallant Dragon]

The thing is, Emit Light in its current form is kinda _too_ effective.  When I play I just use it every time it wears off and the room might as well not be dark.