Designing Capture the Flag

Making Capture the Flag was the most fun I've had designing for Clan Lord in a while. It was refreshing after countless hours of NPC/quest writing and testing pushing the Ash Island expansion out.

The design evolved over the past year from idle player vs. player planning. The decision to focus on a April Fool's Boardwalk inspired homage to Team Fortress pushed the majority of the implementation into a few busy and rushed weekends. Before that my designs focused on a more RPG like environment where you gained skills and built up your base over the course of the battle. Area-specific and time specific buffs for completing quests was an integral part of the design. I had hoped to include those elements in the actual game world, too. Imagine getting group stat buffs from defeating certain bosses. Kind of like ethereal items, but shorter lived and affecting the entire group.

The entire game exists because of the Spy class. I really enjoyed the concept and thought it would translate well to Clan Lord. I also wanted to see how possible invisibility and disguises were using the Clan Lord engine. Invisibility worked out well, but disguises were a lot harder. I ended up turning off name tags to make them more convincing. By the way, I intend to include a message telling you who you just killed sometime soon, so you can still taunt your victims.

Of all the classes, Spy and Fengineer probably took a bit over 50% of the total work to implement. Even so I took a lot of shortcuts and hacks to get them working, especially where the Fengineer was involved. Fengineers not being affected by any Fengineer buildings is largely out of coding laziness rather than for design reasons.

I was pleasantly surprised with how fun the Fengineer ended up being to play. Walls were a last minute suggestion from a play tester, and they add a nice spice. While they probably aren't as powerful as fountains or mines, they give a Fengineer something to build once they've built their main structures.

I've been working on a smaller map with the intention of releasing it with a new game mode. The small map will be much better for the typical sizes of games we're likely to get. The current map is suited for 10v10 or larger, but feels pretty barren in smaller games.

The new map and game mode focus on funneling people right into the action. They should never be more than 45 seconds away from a fight after spawning, and usually a lot less. It is probably less advantageous to play lighter more mobility based classes in this format. While there are a lot of alternate routes and special scout shortcuts and back doors, it remains to be seen whether there will actually be a point in using them.