15/08/2008

Manufacture sees the light of... private online testing...

So, we had a test of the gamemode as of yesterday evening. It was... interesting. It flagged up some coding issues (odd stuff happening with weapon dropping resulting in players seeing themselves holding rifles when they have crowbars; health regen occurring instantly) and some gameplay issues (rifle research beats SMG research hands down; pistols are too inaccurate to be useful). Which is great. Solving problems is satisfying work when it's so quick to do (Lua being easily wielded).

Weapon dropping is something I've obviously just fixed outright, but the gameplay balancing is a completely unique barrel of sharks, to subvert a metaphor. It requires careful consideration, because it's hard to weight what impact one change will have.

Something I'm implementing that I hope will help is weapon weights. Pistols are light, SMGs also quite light and rifles (usually) heavy. More weight, slower movement speed. The interesting factors will be upgrades to your sped, upgrades to your ability to run with heavy weapons, and upgrades reduing the weight of weaponry. Though the base weight values for weapons are somewhat plausible, I have no intention of making the upgrades realistic - expect 1kg SMGs and suchlike.

Something else I think would help is utilities. Take, for example, the situation of someone sitting on top of their base with a rifle, picking off players with superior accuracy upgrades. Right now, the only solution is to nick an enemy rifle (tough when you can't get close), research rifles (not fun or interesting from a variety standpoint) or get really lucky with an accurized SMG (rare). A fun solution would be a cloaking device, similar to the C&C Renegade stealth troopers ability - you are completely invisible beyond a range of 40-60m, but once you get closer you become more visible. This would allow players with short range weapons to get within their effective range before the enemy can start accurately shooting them. This sucks for the rifle users, though, so why not allow them to research a tool allowing them to scan for cloaked opponents? Of ourse, this would make cloaking useless, unless it required holsterig your weapon, and reduced your field of view so you are vulnerable to ambush...

This gamemode could be very, very interesting, I think. :D

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