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Author Topic: That which sleeps- Kickstarted!  (Read 370631 times)

KingDinosaurGames

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #270 on: September 09, 2014, 01:01:46 pm »

Infiltration is a major topic of the challenge video, but it's definitely a good thing to talk about.  When you infiltrate it can take either very little time (Tier 3 Infiltration, generally an innkeeper) or a long time (Tier 1 - Corrupting the Minister of Defense, a High Priest, etc) with the options in the middle being the most Common (Tier 2, Corrupt the Town Watch, Guildmaster, A Lesser Noble).  These infiltrations are almost ALWAYS permanent as long as you don't "use them for favors" OR the heroes/nations are ACTIVELY hunting your influence down (late game).

We came to this design after many, many tests - we originally had it as a "currency" that you kept up by doing Infiltration actions, and then you "expended" the currency to do certain actions or events, then we had it as a "Rumors" system where you could get more/less information based on the importance of the action and how far it was.  This system offers the best combination of risk/reward, and prevents it from being tedious.

The other element added was the "using them for favors" as I mentioned above - this came relatively late but really solidified the approach.  Basically whoever you have chosen to infiltrate can perform a favor, but if you use this favor it generates a quest (possibly very low threat so no one will come, but it is additive).  For example, the guards can arrest a pesky adventurer, a Noble can temporarily lower the Security for Tier 1 actions, or an Innkeeper may cover up a clue for you.    It's a great blend of theme and functionality while also forcing you to leverage your most fundamental plans (infiltration).

As far as actions, each Agent can do any number of things and then perform a challenge.  That's not to say they will often have a lot of things to do outside of challenges - almost anything you gain adds an "action" to the challenges, this includes skills, artifacts, and imbued powers.  You may use any number of Old One powers (also sometimes referred to as Ancient Powers) in a turn as long as you can pay the cost.  You may also activate any number of agents as long as you have a free slot and enough Ancient Power to pay the cost.  On turn 1 you will almost always summon in the three "early" heroes, which brings you immediately up to 4 challenges being performed. 

All that being said, getting blindsided IS a major element of the game - we tried to invert the standard idea of heroic gameplay and lay you in the role of a stereotypical villain.  Random interlopers is part of the joy (frustration) of the game, but here is how we "tempered" it.  When a Hero shows up in a POI you are performing a challenge in, he doesn't immediately attack you - if the threat is sufficient he begins to "hunt down the source" of the disturbance.  His skill is increased by your Profile - if you are a famous hero from publicly murdering several kings and burning cities walking around with some frost giants he will find you almost instantly - as you might expect.  If you are a crafty corrupted nobleman who has maintained a low profile by performing only low tier tasks or obscuring your higher tier ones it would take them some time to find you, allowing you to finish up with your fiendish challenge and then escape. 

What does this accomplish in gameplay terms?  You will have an idea of when an Agent is going to be pursued, found, or otherwise forced into uncomfortable situations.  Perhaps you'll only use this agent tactically, in areas you have either reinforced or have infiltration around, or maybe you'll embrace his reputation and send him with powerful minions to a trap-filled ruin, hoping to lure in and kill his pursuers (increasing his danger even further).   It also adds a "time bomb" effect to Agents, forcing you into these difficult decisions instead of being able to coast with a consistent strategy. 

If you get interrupted and defeat the heroes, you can continue as if nothing happened.  Of course, they may rally and return but hopefully you'll be done by then.  You can always opt to Flee (after 1 round of combat, and losing all your minions) or retreat (after 2 rounds, and escaping with your minions).   You have two major means of casting "spells" in combat, one is Old One spells which are generally rare - we didn't want global instants being a component of the game - the other is teaching your agent spells, which once equipped can be cast during combat.  Some of them are suitably devastating, though most have some kind of drawback.

EDIT:  We may be making all "Champions" (powerful heroes at game start) visible on the map at all times, it currently only shows them if you have mid-tier infiltration in the capital of their country.  These are your "big threats" early-mid, because they can stomp on your early agents.
« Last Edit: September 09, 2014, 01:12:13 pm by KingDinosaurGames »
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That Which Sleeps
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Puzzlemaker

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #271 on: September 09, 2014, 03:40:00 pm »

Man I want to play this game, it sounds awesome.
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dennislp3

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #272 on: September 09, 2014, 03:43:54 pm »

Bets for how long it will take someone to make a Middle Earth scenario for this after release?

It is a rather perfect system and setup for that to be fair
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lemon10

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #273 on: September 09, 2014, 04:46:58 pm »

I've been thinking about trade, and having actual caravans would be awesome because of the possibility of being able to ambush and loot them for resources or to increase chaos in the POI's they are going to and from. AFAIK that isn't how it works at the moment, because trade is more abstract, but it would still be awesome if you ever do implement it. I think it would be fairly easy to implement though, just have cashing in a trade point create an actual caravan that travels to/from wherever they would get the resource they want.
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KingDinosaurGames

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #274 on: September 09, 2014, 08:41:05 pm »

Bets for how long it will take someone to make a Middle Earth scenario for this after release?

It is a rather perfect system and setup for that to be fair

A major element of our inspiration was the board game "War of the Rings", if you haven't played it - it really is one of the best melds of Theme and Mechanics.  http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/115746/war-ring-second-edition

As for Trade - it may be revisited later, but I would guess the initial release would not change given how much we've done to make the current mechanic integrate into Events, AI, and the GUI display.  I think you'll find plenty of satisfying methods of disrupting trade and destroying routes as is.
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thepodger

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #275 on: September 09, 2014, 08:50:27 pm »

when demo
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dennislp3

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #276 on: September 09, 2014, 08:52:53 pm »

Apparently uttering the word that there is to be a demo was a mistake lol...endless eternal questions of "when"
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i2amroy

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #277 on: September 09, 2014, 08:53:50 pm »

when demo
Sometime a while after the kickstarter releases IIRC, which as I recall is coming up in a few weeks (I'm sure there was a more exact date given earlier, but I can't recall it ATM).
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thepodger

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #278 on: September 09, 2014, 09:00:28 pm »

WHEN DEMO

haha sorry! :P
I have not been so enthralled with a game concept since Crusader Kings or Ultima Ratio Regum.
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KingDinosaurGames

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #279 on: September 09, 2014, 09:38:19 pm »

haha, I don't mind - I'm the same way when it comes to a game I want to play.  Our timeline is:

Kickstarter - 22nd
Demo - Sometime after the 22nd - really as soon as we can because it will be a big boost to KS
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Mithras

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #280 on: September 09, 2014, 09:46:00 pm »

So many interesting mod ideas for this that hopefully wont be too hard to implement (if I end up having time at all) I wonder how this game design will port to historical events without fantasy elements, the idea of a spirit of the revolution mod where you use spies, priests, officers, philisophers and public speakers (or 1 of each to conform to the archetypal way minions are imagined) to prepare the way for revolution in France (the old one awakening) then after hopefully taking France over, defending the revolution from all of Europe's monarchies, who suddenly realise a great evil has awakened! Or perhaps a tribal invasion scenario, where you must use your agents to clear a way (or push out) tribes and destabalise one of the two Roman Empires, so that when the great horde appears (again the old one awakens) you can fufil the goal of carving your own little kingdom out of one of them. Pipe dreams.

On a more practical note, there was a discussion over a week ago about pooling resources between nations you had a certain amount of control over. Having read about your trade system, I wonder if you could keep the resources of each nation seperate, but pool the trade resource and the trade resource only, this allows you to avoid the rather gamey abstraction of pooled resources while allowing for a certain amount of flexibility to be maintained in terms of what each nation can produce- without taxing agent turns being glorified couriers, it's not as if you're going to use the trade to improve relations with your neighbours is it? (I assume that's a good guy only thing)
« Last Edit: September 09, 2014, 09:53:56 pm by Mithras »
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thepodger

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #281 on: September 09, 2014, 09:54:02 pm »

Awesome.  In case the KS explodes, you folks have solid plans ahead of time to avoid stretch goal overstretching?
When I see procedural map generation as a community choice addition, it gives me pause.  A game and its systems really need to be -built- around that paradigm from the ground up.
If y'all include a good 4-5 scenarios of 10+ game hours each and release an editor, you're still going to have more game content than most of your community is going to get through, and that content is going to be hand crafted and interesting.  That's the only thing giving me the heebies about this project.  I don't want it to get sucked down a development limbo that it doesn't need to service a trend in gaming that the community is projecting onto a project that is not built around a core compatible with procedural content.
Procedural is great for games that play through in under an hour, games that rely on iteration and set resource exploitation efficiency.  For a game with a more narrative focus, where a single scenario will last much longer than that, hand crafted strategic scenarios are vastly superior.  Anyway.  I am sure you're aware of that issue already.
« Last Edit: September 09, 2014, 09:57:58 pm by thepodger »
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KingDinosaurGames

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #282 on: September 09, 2014, 11:36:13 pm »

Historical Mods - certainly doable, we are planning a Roman Era campaign.  The configuration is all in place but the AI currently has significant difficulties operating without magic - the options we have in place are either rewrite the AI to better handle variant global settings (like no magic) or that scenario is supplied with a lot more actions that supplement the decision making.  We'd probably go with the latter, but with a minor tuneup to the overall AI as well.

Oh yes, causing the frontier to be overrun with hordes is a major element of the Rome campaign - so much fun.

Trade has.... special actions if you control a friendly nation that is trading with another.  I think that once you get a chance to see how trade works now, you'll see how it still allows the kind of creative freedoms without creating a tedious overlay system. 

I do agree that the way we approached scenarios is the "better way", but I do also have a lot of experience with procedural generation - and when we discuss integrating it into the game the approach is actually much different than you may think.  Instead of integrating it into the engine (rendering textures/tiles and the like) - we would be essentially tagging it to the "Scenario Generation" portion, assembling a background sprite, and then configuring POIs in the same way one might in the editor.  That being said, I still prefer not to do it (though the POC we did involving a very simple genealogical generation was fairly promising) and though its place on the stretch goals will be determined by the votes it will have a correspondingly high price given its significant art assets required. 

I wouldn't say we have solid plans - we have several artists and a few sound engineers on notice with proper bandwidth and we believe we have budgeted properly for time and money for the stretch goals.  I think the only significant delay we'll hit is with the KS itself - though I really can't imagine it's as bad as everyone says (plan to have 0 development time??) I'm assuming we may go down to 50% efficiency.   

Based on the metrics we're seeing (our mailing list, twitter, website hits) corresponding to other KS postmortems we're not really expecting it to explode.  If somehow it did go crazy, we would approach the stretch goals as "to be added after the base game is 100% solid."   That is to say, we would certify the base game as complete and fully playable, and then continue to add any of the additional content packs and features.

We plan to have 3 scenarios at launch, and we expect mod tools to be available in advance of the proper launch.  I personally believe the scenarios have significant replay value - but then again I do love the game. 
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i2amroy

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #283 on: September 09, 2014, 11:44:11 pm »

I think the only significant delay we'll hit is with the KS itself - though I really can't imagine it's as bad as everyone says (plan to have 0 development time??) I'm assuming we may go down to 50% efficiency.
From what I know (and have seen/experienced) a lot of that is tied up in handling physical goods for reward levels. If all you are doing is virtual rewards it's still very time consuming, but nowhere near the level that anything physical requires.
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It would be brutally difficult and probably won't work. In other words, it's absolutely dwarven!
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - A fun zombie survival rougelike that I'm dev-ing for.

thepodger

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Re: That which sleeps- in development
« Reply #284 on: September 09, 2014, 11:45:33 pm »

Yeah, I think the KS craze has leveled itself off to a point thats more predictable now.  For about a year it seemed like a lot of projects were getting drastically overfunded completely out of the blue due to the novelty effect but that hasn't happened for a while now.  I wish you a modestly successful campaign!
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