I work on LCS because I like the game and enjoy developing it. My response may have made it seem like I'm doing it just to keep up with expectations, but I actually find fans of the game inspirational. I'm not offended or annoyed by AngelXDv's impatience -- I'm flattered by it, and it makes me want to do more. I like making people happy and I love creating things that others enjoy. Additionally, I have an interview about some consulting work Monday, and I'm feeling a bit celebrant and wanting to give back to the world, especially since I took the week off from the zombie game.
Deon's mod is stuffed full of great additions, and I agree with Yannath that it's appropriate for vanilla -- I've been secretly planning to steal a lot of his work back into the mainline build for awhile now. I hope that enhances the reputation of his work rather than diminishes it.
I did make a number of modding-the-mod changes of my own in the integration process. I wanted cyborgs and augments to come in a little bit later, to keep with LCS's current approach of making future tech an easter egg, but I kept it much sooner than the other future tech. Ammunation will be open as a legal gun store until L+ gun control (he has it turn into a black market for C through L), and the display there will help clarify what ammo is used what what weapons. I spent a LOT of time trying to make sure the additional guns don't cause more confusion -- I personally like the detail, but we can't assume players will know what an M1911 is, let alone what caliber of ammo the gun takes. Maintaining usability is pretty important to me. I think we need a way to see details on guns, including their damage, accuracy ratings, ammo, things like that -- playing Cataclysm (roguelike) earlier this week gave me some context on that, they do a great job.
More gun stuff: "Buy a Liberal gun" changes to "Buy a Conservative gun" at Ammunation and only there, because it's a such a Conservative store. Stocks in various stores were changed up. I switched the Glock 18 machine pistol to the less interesting Glock 17, but added a Tec-9 to replace it. 9mm SMGs will now share ammo with 9mm pistols. Right now, that means they must continue to have the vanilla style 15 round clips rather than the larger ones in Deon's mod, but SMGs are really good weapons either way -- they have been for several versions, really, they're just underappreciated because they used to be awful. I've also added the Desert Eagle to Ammunation, and let you buy ammo for it. It'll be quite expensive and slightly nerfed (still great, just a little *less* overkill). The M249 will still be unique and ridiculous.
For interrogation, I started by doing research on brainwashing, interrogation, and deprogramming, going back to the drawing board on how to simulate things under the hood and present that simulation to the player. I'm cleaning up the code a lot, breaking a lot of things in the interrogation file out into separate functions to make it cleaner and easier to maintain. I'm not finished, but my intent is to have a more detailed sidebar with new stats on things like the subject's suggestibility and mental stability, as well as explicit scores on their Conservative views in different areas. The goal is to keep this sidebar up and refresh it throughout the interrogation report, so you can see what the effects of each sub-action are, rather than waiting until the next day. This should help you troubleshoot your strategy in real time -- you'll be better able to guess things like them getting suicidal because you destroyed their mental stability, your conversion efforts aren't working because you haven't increased their suggestibility, or rapport is very low because beating them up keeps lowering it.
The fossil record of the interrogation system in LCS tracks my personal growth as a game designer. Simplifying it was intended to make it easier to use and remove options that had minimal or very hidden impact, ridding the system of weird hidden variables and making it much more playable. My goal now is to add back in the old features, and make it even deeper than it was before, even as the transparency I was going for is extended. I don't want to remove the pixie dust by turning off judgment calls through exposing information -- instead, I'm hoping to make it more strategic, and less about applying blueprints. It wan't necessarily meet these goals, but I'll call it at least a partial success if the interrogation minigame is MORE interesting, to both casual and experienced players, than it was or looked in the time of Grimith's Let's Play.
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Topic: HI and...hi! (Read 3215 times)