Healermancy

I was brainstorming healer abilities recently and came up with this one. I'm pretty excited about the idea, it's likely I'll release a test item soon, although I haven't started coding yet, so we'll see. The idea:

Allow healers to "burst" fallen people who are sharing them, but instead of a normal burst heal it instantly revives the person for X seconds. After that time is up, they die again, maybe retaining some of the damage they took while alive, making them harder to heal. They probably are only returned to a fraction of their health, maybe there would be an additional penalty if they died while this ability was active, but that probably isn't needed if we already penalize for damage taken. Healing received while the ability is active would work while the target is alive, but won't have any effect on how fallen they are (they will always return to their previous level of "fallenness", plus any additional penalty I feel is needed for balance/risk.)

I anticipate the ability largely being used instead of a chain for escapes, but I can imagine some other really cool uses. It's not uncommon for a very strong healer to be the last member of a group who is alive. That healer bursting up the most powerful fighter, and then healing another player while the fighter protects them sounds really exciting. I like the risk that the fighter in that case might end up unhealable as part of the last ditch gambit. I suppose on a routine hunt it could be used to burst weaker players for their last minute tags, which is significantly less exciting, but probably also fun for both the healer and the dead player who otherwise would have had to sit out the fight.

One great thing about this ability is Faustus, Sespus, and Horus can be important ranks. Some combination of Faustus and Sespus can determine how much the dead person is healed, and Horus could not only enable the ability to be used on people who are more fallen, but will be useful when raising fallens who take damage after this ability is used on them.

I'm not sure if it makes sense to make this ability trainable, my intuition is that it does, but maybe it needs a cap. For each rank to feel substantial I think it'd have to be pretty effective, but the ability has some natural caps (it probably doesn't make sense to go above 100% health, or stay alive more than some number of seconds). Or maybe it would end up being best as a consumable item primarily driven by existing stats. I'll probably start it off that way to test it out, that way I can play with balance without screwing up peoples training.

Evolution of Slarty's Spawning Technique

Warning: This post may not be as sexy as the title implies.

I've been wanting to write a bit about my creature spawning strategies for a while, since I've put a lot of thought into it over the past few years. This is one of those things that can really ruin the magic, so I've held back. I'm hoping to go light on the specifics, and just focus on where I've been, what I've learned, and where I'm going.

The first spawns I ever created were for Metzetli. I started with the initial jungle area, with a goal to make "South Forest for 6th circlers". The spawns took heavy influence from South Forest, which contains a very varied spawner, with chances of some extremely difficult challenges (for the level). I added my own tweaks to this style by overlapping very quick spawners that had about a 90% chance of junk and a 10% chance of harder things, with slower spawners that focused on the beefy stuff. The element of danger is always there, with very quick spawns which usually result in 3 vultures, but could sometimes result in 40 rudremau. This got rid of the problem I saw with most hunting areas, where the retreat was either always dangerous (because the tough monsters spawned too fast), or always a cakewalk (because the tough monsters spawned way too slowly). Now it's usually fine, but you never really know what you'll find.

I used something like this style for a while, but I was really starting to question the idea of "junk" creatures. The idea was it allows weaker characters to tag along and still contribute, but that really doesn't scale. What is considered "junk" when you're fighting sazajas? Note the comical grey wyrm spawns in Tepui, that was a junk spawner, it didn't make sense, and it wasn't really fun. The Mountain Glen was a large scale experiment in having a lot less junk, and it was the first (large) area to get rid of my patented "dual spawner" system. This reduces the unpredictability, and lets me focus on a more consistent and targeted challenge. It was pretty successful, I think people enjoyed it a lot. Looking back I think Metzetli's spawns are still more fun than Mountain Glen, partially because I spent a lot more time on Metzetli spawners, but part of the problem was Mountain Glen was a halfway step. There was still junk, but there was less of it. And it largely used the spawning strategies of older areas which has a mix of "always junk spawners" and "always good spawners", which can make things predicatable and boring.

Still, I deemed the experiment a success, and moved even more extremely in that direction, practically eliminating the idea of junk spawns. I try to keep variance by creating lots of different spawner types with slowly increasing difficulty, then you mix the rate and amount of each to keep things interesting. The Lily Pond expansion was the first full on experiment with this style, and then Estuary after that was the biggest high level experiment. You can actually see the spawn strategy evolve as you go deeper into the Estuary, as I learned with each release. I still feel my newer areas are vastly more predictable than my older ones, which saddens me a little. I also think retreats spawn a up with tough monsters a bit too fast with this new style. It makes recovering from a tough situation too difficult, and too reliant on long chain runs.

Bloodmage brainstorming

I've been listening to bloodmage complaints, and one is that you get ready for a big swing to take out a monster only to luck-whiff it and die a horrible death a bit later. My first thought was "Oh, just reduce luck misses on the bloodblade", but then you open it to potential abuse for people without training, and I also don't really see this being needed for high health focused bloodbladers. So I decided I'd decrease it when the blader was low health, which is great and solves the problem, but it isn't very noticeable and cool, and it leaves me wondering whether it should be an ability or just free. It is definitely useful, but the idea of paying a few ranks for something you can't show off and kind of feels like something you deserved all along is lame. It also generally only works if you're able to kill the monster with that hit, which led me to thinking "well what if we let you turn it on and off, and it let's you know if your next hit will kill the creature" (with some tweaks to damage variation). But removing variation COMPLETELY from the game is kind of silly, and besides it still doesn't allow for people to pull off damage over time attacks very well.

I'm currently considering an ability that, when the bloodmage is low health, they get reduced luck misses and luck hits (not that the reduced luck hits should matter), and when they hit the creature it is "stunned" for a short time, probably just enough for the savvy blader to pull back and try to avoid being hit (this would probably have to be accompanied with some timeout so multiple mages couldn't keep something stunned indefinitely). I imagine it as a passive ability that is active all the time, but I'm still not sure of the cost in ranks. It also seriously intrudes on a rework of their crippling abilities I had planned which would grant extreme speed reduction on hit. Maybe I can work around that by introducing some passive element of crippling blows into this ability in addition to potential reworks of crippling blows in general.

For other classes I'd have concerns about reducing variation like this, but by its nature the bloodmage is already an incredibly risky class, adding elements that a skillful player can use to avoid death generally doesn't run the risk of making the class less exciting and interesting to play.

Respia vs Sespus

I wanted to make a general post about the challenges of designing compelling and balanced healer abilities. But it became clear there were far too many elements to discuss. We can save those for another post. Instead I'll talk about one that has been a challenge for me when trying to design anything that isn't a "continuous" ability, and in general anything that breaks from the current healing formula to perform something really meaningful.

Many people lament that abilities don't take enough advantage of sespus, but the problem is without some kind of cooldown system (which is another topic altogether) anything that uses spirit ends up being improved by respia as well as sespus. You end up with the same "problems" as our current system, regardless of how effective you make the ability. Note I haven't done the math for any of this so I'm at "well informed player" levels; take it with a grain of salt.

As a result of this, most suggestions I hear (or come up with) that try to encourage sespus have at the very least a side effect of being a big buff to high respia healers. And in addition any idea that attempts to increase heal speed without including faustus training raises huge red flags, but that is probably a topic for another post.

Just to summarize my opinions on healer abilities that I was going to write at length about. I generally agree that new abilities need to encourage trainers other than what the typical healers train, or at the very least not devalue them. That includes sespus. They should also open up new specialties and options for healers either tactically (on the battlefield) or in a training strategy sense.

It is just a real challenge. One that most other games also face. I think the real solution will end up being branching away from strict "healing" as the only ability of every healer (which is how most other games approach it). But that has to be done very carefully. And it still doesn't change the respia/sespus debate.

Poison

Poison isn't fun. The big problem with it is fighters are generally the ones that have the major defenses against poison, such as troilus and detha. One unlucky shot can mean a healer is poisoned for over an hour. And mystics? Forget it. The only thing that makes it bearable is that you can easily get rid of it by falling, but that isn't fun, just a nuisance.

So how should poison work in my ideal world?

1) It should reach full potency and reduce its effect much faster. Anything close to an hour duration is unacceptable for a "debuff" effect.

2) It should affect all classes more or less equally.

3) It should make things exciting rather than just be a hassle.

The solution? Well I don't have it solidified yet. But in terms how how to reach all points

1) This is just stat tweaking. Speed things way up. Preferably have it reach full potency quickly, stick there for a little while, and then rapidly dwindle. And I'd need to change the effect of potions so they're still useful.

2) There are a few ways to do this, but I don't want to reveal how the current system works. But I've considered having Awaria help out on the healer side. As well as generally tweaking the formula so it is more fair to all classes.

3) #1 already achieves this to some degree. The idea is the effect should be really worrisome during one fight, but after that fight is over you'll probably be fine. Potions might need to be reworked to provide resistance since using a potion in the middle of a fight definitely counts as a hassle.

I'd also like to remove falling as an option for getting rid of poison, but hopefully with the changes you wouldn't usually want to fall. I just don't think you should be rewarded for falling. When phasing in the new system I might keep the falling behavior until everything gets set and remove it when I'm sure the system won't make poison unbearable.

I plan to introduce poison resistance bonuses to people who have trained to make antivenoms. This doesn't fit any specific poison related goals, but it is something I generally like to do with trade skills. Just to give them some real combat related effectiveness to encourage real people to train them.

Fighter Tests

When I took on Fighter Tests I intended to design 7th-10th circle because that was the minimum requirement to give everyone something to strive for. I thought it would be easy, after all you just have to tweak a few scripts and come up with 4 sets of 4 monsters from an already limited selection. It turns out that balanced tests at the correct difficulty level for a good progression are incredibly hard to design and the whole process took many hours more than I predicted.

I also think of circle tests as largely useless since they're incapable of fairly judging people. At best they just feel unfair, at worst they make people change their training styles to suit the test. So it is a lot of work for something that, even if done perfectly, is going to be flawed. It was pretty clear that 9th and 10th would not only be harder (since there were fewer monsters to choose from) but also affect fewer people, so I put those on hold until we had more monsters at that level. We have a lot more now. If I had been smart I'd have been designing the test while I designed the monsters so that I could design the perfect monsters for the test, put them in the world, then just release the test. But I'm not that smart. 9th and 10th circle tests are still just one of a few vague projects that I should do but don't really feel a motivation to finish.

Experimenting

I've been experimenting with new abilities. The idea is rapid prototyping with hopes of getting something fun, then working on balance or actually being useful later. The new Capture the Flag was an outlet for that experimentation as well as working with ideas that just don't work in a player vs. everything context.

Along those lines I was wondering if it would be easy to take direct control of monsters, using your mouse to control where it moves to. I figured the easiest way to test this was to patch it into the befriend AI and see if I could let the player control that monster instead of having it run off an AI. It worked wonderfully and I had a lot of fun just testing it. The best part (for me) was it didn't take much work. Kudos to RangerGM for really clearly written code.

It works surprisingly well: and you don't have to be still to use it (although you can). The monster will go to wherever your mouse is whether you are clicking or not. If you were to move the monster would move wherever you're moving, so they would tend to attack whatever you attacked, retreat when you retreated, and so on. But beyond that there are a lot of new tactics opened up which I'll leave for players to discover.

It can be a little weird. If you choose a menu selection, for example, your friend is going to run towards the north, and since I don't currently limit where you can tell the monster to go, it will keep going until it reaches that point, even though it is off your screen. You can always stop directly controlling the monster, of course.

I'm still considering the original ideas I had in mind that would use this technique. But I actually have to balance those and turn them into proper abilities. And that takes work.

Discarded Abilities

Here are a few of my favorite ideas that didn't quite make it in to CTF.

Illusions/Hallucination - This could let someone toss a projectile at a group of enemies and cause them to see dozens of random sparkles and images (including flags and flag markers) for about 10 seconds. You would usually use it before moving in for a big attack to confuse the enemy.

I was really excited about this idea but never had the time to implement it. I also couldn't think of a class where it fit. Spy was the obvious choice, but they were already the most fully featured class: they didn't need more toys.

Speed Boost - It became clear in testing that speed was a huge asset. If you could outrun your opponent you could usually survive. That is why the flag decreases speed when carried. All too often once a flag was grabbed it was as good as captured. Slowing down the holder encouraged more fighting. It is also why the paladin saw a speed decrease. He used to be very fast so he could stay with groups and heal, but it became clear right away that speed and troilus was a nearly invincible combination.

Along those lines I wanted to give some class a temporary speed boost in order to catch up to someone at a critical moment (or get away). It never really fit the themes or the balance for the classes. Obviously it fits the theme of the Scout, but considering it is more of an anti-scout ability in terms of use, it makes more sense to give it to a slow class.

It came closest to being given to the Pusher. Allowing them to spend spirit to move faster, push further, and not suffer any "push back" from their push. But it never quite got there.

False flags - I thought it would be fun for spies to be able to set false flags on the ground, or carry a false flag. It would appear on the radar just like it was the enemies flag, causing people to chase you while a teammate snags the real flag. I also considered adding an "information" class that had all these information related abilities, including hallucinations.

Team beacons - I considered letting scouts set down a beacon that would direct all players on their team to that location.

I also thought about letting all players toggle an ability that shows where everyone else on their team is currently located relative to yourself: much like the flag markers work. Bonus for paladins: Color coded indicators to check on health. Overpowered bonus for spies: When disguised, you see the enemy instead of your own team. (That would never happen.)

Obviously if you are a disguised spy (uncloaked) this ability would show you as being on the other team, so it couldn't be used to sniff out spies, except that someone might be suspicious when a marker disappears or suddenly appears!

None of this got in because the markers get in the way of flag tracking, we'd need a more obvious flag marker before we could use these abilities well in ctf. But they work really well for the new game mode. Although they're less needed in such a compact space.

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.