Gameplay Discussion

Summary:

Discussing several gameplay ideas to see where people stand on what features should be implemented.

Gameplay Discussion

Brett208 14 Apr 2016 14:36

Would like to see opinions about the following gameplay options.

Multiplayer Coop

I realized that creating multiplayer coop, we will have to define the rules, since it is beyond Xevious. The choices to me are:

• Reset the game when either player runs out of lives.
• Reset the game when both players run out of lives. When one player runs out of lives, they are out for good.
• Reset the game when both players run out of lives. When one player runs out of lives, they get the next bonus life.
• Reset the game when both players run out of lives. When one player runs out of lives, they get an extra life at the start of the next level/round.
• Combine the last two options, so the out of lives player is revived either on the first bonus life or when the next stage starts.

My opinion would be to revive the player at the start of the next round or when you get a bonus life. What fun is a coop game if your buddy dies at stage 3 cause he stinks at it and now you play for 30 minutes by yourself while he watches? Plus I think it is fun/funny if your buddy stinks bad enough, they constantly drain all your bonus lives by stealing them when they die.

Bonus Lives

I was reading that there are 'flags' in the original Xevious that give bonus lives:

There are four secret flags that occur in the first 16 stages. They always appear along the same horizontal strip of the stage, but their location within that strip is random. In order to find it, you must carpet bomb the particular strip in order to expose the flag. Finding the flag earns you 1000 points, but touching it earns you an extra life (or 10,000 points depending on the arcade dip switch setting).

I don't know if anyone has any opinion on how bonus lives are done. I would be happy, as a place-holder, basing bonus lives on Asteroids where you get bonus lives based on points and the points required rise per life. We could also go with the Xevious hidden flags or enemy drops for lives. Any suggestions?

Bonus Points

Another hidden target is the Sol Citadels, which are worth up to 4000 points each - 2000 points for uncovering one, and 2000 more for destroying one. Unlike the flags, Sol Citadels will cause a red glow in your bomb targets even though they are not visible on the screen. A direct hit by a bomb will uncover a citadel, and another bomb hit will destroy it.

I think it is important to have some kind of bonus point system so the score isn't simply who blows up the most ships. Don't know if we want to go with the Sol Citadels or not.

Ship Upgrades

So in Xevious, there is no way to upgrade your armor or cannons. This is a pretty common feature in vertical ship shooter scrollers (VSSS for short in the industry by the way). Does anyone have a preference one way or the other? Just thought we should talk about it if someone has a strong preference. I think adding new weapons is a fun game dynamic, but it would pretty much kill the Xevious clone part… I also don't plan to work on upgrades during this collab.

Re: Gameplay Discussion

PiscesMike 15 Apr 2016 00:14

I'm good with any or all of the above suggestions. My only addition would be that if we are following the code from Asteroids where the points required increase every time an extra live is earned, we would probably need to adjust that code slightly. If I remember correctly (and there's no guarantee of that) it seems like I did that code. And it was based on increasing the point requirement 10% each time. So, 1st extra life at 10,000 points, second at 11,000 points, third at 12,100, etc. Not that there's anything wrong with that I just feel like it should probably increase a bit more than it does currently. Just my thoughts.. ..

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Re: Gameplay Discussion

rbwhitaker 16 Apr 2016 00:51

In all of these aspects, I have no strong feelings. So if you're interested in implementing any of these ideas, as far as I'm concerned, implement them however you want to implement them.

It would be nice if this were all designed in a way where not everything was piled into the GameState class. Consider this as me expressing great nervousness about how people are thinking about incorporating their features. If everything is done by just tweaking GameState, we're going to be in a world of pain when it comes to merging things back in.

I'll probably be mostly off in the 3D renderer, so if that happens, it probably won't affect me all that much. But it seems like it will affect other people.

As a general rule, good designs tend to mean adding new features requires adding new classes, rather than modifying existing ones. Dumping your stuff in GameState might seem the most natural place to dump this stuff, but it would be nice if we could come up with ways to prevent everybody from having to modify GameState for every new feature.

That's not to say that "we can't modify GameState at all" or anything like that. There will obviously be times for that. But when we go to add new features, see if you can't come up with a way to add them without modifying the GameState code, or any other "core" code.

For example, something that might help with this might be to provide events for when various… events… happen in the game. Then rather than putting your code inside of an if statement when that event happens in GameState, maybe your class lives outside of GameState and just sort of monitors the GameState changes by subscribing to the events it needs to see, and then invoke methods on the GameState to make things happen in response.

I haven't thought that through all that well; I'm just throwing it out there as something for us to think about.

At any rate, I do like these suggestions. I'm getting excited to see where this game goes tomorrow!