You know, looking through all these posts about the mechanics of the game and whatnot, I'm starting to feel a bit nervous about how this game is going to turn out as a whole. I don't mean that the entire project will be a disaster; the fact that you already have most of the game playable speaks for itself in how great this is going to be. The problem I'm seeing, though, is that there looks to be too much game.
From the sheer amount of choice of what you can get your agents to do, the reaction they get and the general goings-ons about the world, the sheer dynamics of this game seem so great that, when the demo comes out, most players will probably have no idea what to actually do for even their first action.
What sort of tutorial is there for this game anyway? Is there a hint system? Maybe some sort of encyclopedia/logbook you can look at and even write notes in to keep track of everything? Maybe I'm just looking too far into this since you've been explaining all the mechanics of this game, but it sounds to me that there is going to be some serious commitment required from players just to keep track of everything important happening. I can imagine the first few games a new player would have not even get to the "conquering" part simply because they have so much difficulty keeping track of all the infiltration aspects of the game.
Don't take this as outright criticism, I want this game to succeed so badly, I'm just starting to get an idea of how too much choice can actually be a bad thing.
The game is actually shockingly simple to play - I am a fan of games I can play "quickly" so that even if there is great depth I can figure out my strategy, implement it, and see the result - and our design reflects that. Despite all the questions we've had on this thread, we haven't actually discussed how you "play the game" which I do spend an entire video on (Video 4) going over.
In brief, there are two major player use cases that make up 95% of the game. 1) Challenges 2) Combat. When an agent wants to do ANYTHING he must do a challenge, which takes time based on his skill vs the difficulty (modified by the POI) - which is represented at the bottom of the screen when you click on any agent. The agent sits there, performing his challenge, and while doing so Heroes may be drawn to investigate based on the fame of the agent, threat, and a few other factors. If the Heroes find the Agent, they may attack him, bringing you to combat - or you may decide to attack the heroes - or even more likely if they are about to discover you, you mihgt say "forget about it" and move to another spot. That's the core of the game, a relatively simple mechanic.
The meat of the game comes from two things 1) the variety of actions emerging from a challenge and 2) the AI. The AI is fairly unique in how it behaves, and also because you can "interfere" with any action it will take, but you will never have so many "infiltrations" going on that it will be overwhelming. A lot of this AI work is meant to be in the background, it's meant to create a realistic world that you don't have to "game" to understand, you can pursue your strategy and expect the world to react relatively as you would expect.
The variety of actions is certainly something that is more gamey, but is again part of learning the game organically. Maybe you rush to ally with the Necromancer's Cabal and give your minions Necromancer minions, and then you see what options that brings - maybe you ally with the Storm Giants and see how having high threat but high power minions works - it's strategic, gamey, but also should be easily understood because we deal with typical fantasy tropes.
I think you may have gotten a distorted impression of the game based on the questions being asked here - people have been asking about a lot of fringe cases, and yes those are possible but they are part of the very tightly integrated "challenges" and "combat" mechanisms. Let's take hero capture for instance. How do heroes get captured? Random percentage knockout on kill, utilizing special skills, having them be the last combatant and immobilized (all part of combat) - what does that result in? An "enhancement" on your agent with Status "Captured Hero" set to the hero, also showing the fame and threat of the quest being generated. Want to torture him? When you do an Infiltration challenge it checks "has Captured Hero == true" and now you'll see that as an option - want to Corrupt him at the Seal? IsLocation == OldOneChannel (coding term for any place that channels the old ones power) and has Captured Hero == true. Most of the complexity, as you can see, emerges organically - the game is as complex as you let it be.
You can choose to play it as thematically as possible and barely concerned yourself with the "Gamey" aspects, or you can figure out the min/max method of rushing the most powerful agent. It's completely up to you.
Author
Topic: That which sleeps- Kickstarted! (Read 372809 times)