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3 Things Jack Could Do Right: Part 2 (long)
noxdraconis
Member Posts: 39
Read part 1 here
Read part 3 here
Part 2: Make it Objective.
Let’s create a hero. We will call him Mr. Generic. What can he do? Well, he can fly, he’s like invulnerable and stuff and he’s super strong. Of course, heroes come in all flavors, including no power heroes like Batman. But super strength is so central to so many heroes that any game that tries to simulate the comic book experience has to do super strength well.
The problem is that a strength based hero -- in Champions, what used to be called a brick -- doesn’t just beat villains to a pulp, he smashes walls, crushes cars, lifts buses, tosses around heavy crates like they were tennis balls, etc. All of this means that there must be walls, cars, buses, and crates for him (or her) to interact with.
In practical terms, the only way to realize this is to make a world completely composed of discreet objects. Every wall, floor, door, desk, cabinet, or anything else must be its own object capable of being both moved and destroyed.
Of course, objects are more then blocks that can be picked up and tossed around. Objects need have properties which define how they respond to their environment. Fire a bullet at window, for example, and it should shatter. Fire a bullet at a steel door and it should leave a dent. Fire a bullet at a tank of explosive gas and you should get a nice explosion.
Heat and cold is another area where material properties become important. Heat glass and it should melt. Freeze it and it should become opaque from condensation. Heat rubber and it should burn (producing lots of smoke). Freeze it and it should shatter. Bricks, concrete, and metal should basically be impervious to both fire and freezing.
I am not sure I agree with the idea that everything should become a block of ice the moment it gets cold, but this should at least be possible if something stays cold enough for long enough.
Material properties are important because how objects react to their environment determines how a hero’s powers affect their world. Heat, cold, explosions, and radiation should all have very different effects, and a battle with energy blasts should be very different from a hero trying to ram a villain through a cinderblock wall.
This has a payoff for more then strength based heroes. Because everything, including, buildings, is built from objects, destroying the central supports in a tower could, for instance, send the entire structure crashing down. Alternatively, removing the battery from a bomb might be enough to deactivate it.
DC Universe Online is already doing this, at least to some extent. So far it looks like a good start, but it’s unclear how far they will take it. They have already said you can freeze a villain and then toss him around like any other object. But if he hits a brick wall, will he shatter?
Of course the code to implement this can get very complex, very quickly. If the state of each object needs to be checked and possibly changed every frame, that is lot of calculations. Some simplification should be possible, however, and in the case of explosions, only a very rough approximation is either necessary or possible.
However, I believe the effort to implement objects would be well worth the extra work and processing cycles. Objects are the key to letting a player become a comic book hero. For without them, Superman is just another tank-mage.
~nox
Comments
Nice ideas. You should mail them to Jack. He's not that hard to reach. Posting them here, you'll only fall on deaf ears, mostly. Good luck, and good job thinking and writing this up clearly.
Thanx!! I guess I will email him the whole thing once I have written part three.
~nox
The latest GenCon videos shows ChampO as having quite a bit of potential interaction with in-game objects. There are some bugs on show, but the idea is there.
i hope so. To me, its really hard to get a sense of a game from a video that someone shot of a screen while it was being played.
Meh. One of these days I am going to be able to attend in person.
I beleive what your looking for is called "simulation based gameplay", other games like what your thinking about are force unleashed and cellfactor revolution ( the force unleashed with objects breaking nice and cellfactor with it's wonderfull physics system), personally I would love to see a MMO with something like DMM and havok mabye even euphoria. It would be undoubtably cool, though I would just be happy if a MMO had DMM and some sort of physics so you can break things and have a use for DMM.
Hi Dracain, thanx for your comments!
Yes, I am definitely for simulation based game play. If there was anything I was trying to get across it is the need to get rid of the static world that MMOs seem to be built around.
As for physics, I guess, the more comprehensive the physics engine, the better. I come at this from the perspective of an amateur game developer (although I have been coding for most of my adult life, I have never worked for a professional game shop. Wah.) and am not familiar with every physics package out there -- just the free ones! So I will take your word about DMM and euphoria. Honestly, though, they sound way cool.
Anyhow, I tried to address physics specifically in part 3 (you can read it here if you haven't already). My main point is that physics, regardless of which engine is used, has to be central to the game play. It is physics, after all, that lets a super hero be super.
I haven't had the chance to play The Force Unleashed yet. I don't own a console, so it may be while before I do. But from what I read, it seems like it embodies the type of combat I have in mind.
~nox