Tactics Game Online

Its time to reveal some information on our first two characters in TGO, the knight and the brute.  The interaction between these two tactical characters is going to be interesting.  The brute is just like he sounds, one of the stronger blunt attacking units.  He is a barbarian type, preferring to worry less about taking 3 arrows in his chest and more about how quickly he can slash that pesky fly.  Sometimes, the best way to take out those flies is with a cannon, right?  It doesn’t hurt to be thorough, and this guy will definitely make sure to put a quick end to his threats.  Strategies for the brute involve a strong offense, softening up higher defense units, or quickly finishing off low defense ones.

The knight lives to serve his companions, by offering his shield and even his own body if necessary to protect them.  He detests evil, especially deceptive units, which we may see in the near future (wink).  Knights are tough to knock down, due to their high defense, making them excellent tanks.  Don’t be fooled though, they pack a good punch as well.  Maybe not as strong as brutes, but they can hold their own against more than one enemy if necessary.

Another important decision that was made this week was how these characters influence your ability to customize them.  Each character has a starting attribute set.  Each of these attributes can be increased or decreased from their starting values.  Each character is also one of three types: melee, ranged, or support.  As you may guess, both our knight and brute are melee units.  Since these units cannot shoot, they cannot increase range, or splash for that matter.  Only ranged and support units can modify these attributes.  A huge benefit of the melee units is there higher values of strength, defense, and speed.  This makes them your main damage dealers, as well as damage takers.  Not only are starting attribute values determined by each character, but their maximum values are too.

The fun never stops here at TGO.  As I have been working on the army creation section of Tactics Game Online, the thought occurred to me that it would be great to offer you a way to suggest unit names that can be randomly chosen for new character units users are adding to their armies.  How cool is that!  So, expect a fun AJAX character name form here soon that will allow you to add names to use in the game.

Over the past couple of days I have had some wild and crazy ideas about the characters and what each of their roles is.  Here is a working list of some of the starting characters with general information about each one.  These guys are for the most part balls that that have weapons and attack each other, a lot like Worms, if you have played or heard of any of those games.  Another great thing about Worms is the humorous spin they put on their characters, something that would be great to incorporate here.

Basher – melee

• high strength
• mid defense
• mid speed

Knight – melee

• high defense
• mid strength
• mid speed
• detection
• protection

Ninja – melee

• high speed
• mid strength
• mid defense
• camouflage
• double attack

Archer – ranged

• high range
• mid strength
• mid speed
• low defense
• low splash

Bomber – ranged

• high splash
• mid strength
• mid range
• low defense
• low speed

Frosty – ranged

• high splash
• mid strength
• mid range
• low defense
• low speed
• slow

Healer – support

• high strength
• mid range
• mid speed
• low defense
• low splash
• heal
• cure

Grouch – support

• high range
• mid strength
• mid speed
• low defense
• low splash
• weaken
• poison
• sleep
• curse
• slow
• blind

Lets say for a moment that we are on the right track with our characters, battle system, and battle field approaches.  At this point, we can put some of our decisions to the test by seeing how they interweave with each other through the creation of some of the characters, on a conceptual level of course.  Well, lets cement down some basic building blocks of that they all have in common.  As proposed previously, their essential traits are: health points, strength, speed, range, and splash.  After some deliberation, two additional traits that will create a paper, rock, scissors strategy are defense and resistance, which allow characters to absorb damage from physical and magical sources.

Since we are planning on adopting a point-based approach to army creation, it is important to begin thinking about whether we want every character in the game to have the same point allocation needed for all traits, or if there should exist different character types that have varying levels of point cost for their traits.  If you think about some of the different character types, like melee, ranged, and magic, then it leads to a quick conclusion that each type should have different point allocation.

Now is a good time to discuss game balance.  Game balance is essential in the creation of a good game, but how do you develop characters that are different, yet balanced with each other equally?  Ultimately, we want to give players a fair chance at winning against other players no matter what strategy they incorporate in the building of their armies.  Establishing a perfectly balanced game when you are dealing with different characters with different strengths and weaknesses is impossible to do, but if we consider the elements we need to analyze success of players utilizing different characters, we can adjust and balance the game over time relatively efficiently.  I met another game developer who was preparing to release a game with huge off balance characters and abilities.  When I asked him why he wasn’t spending more time on the game balancing, he stated proudly that he was so confident in his game balancing formulas based on data collected over time, that he had no worries about releasing an unbalanced game at launch.  I was amazed, and am now a high believer in incorporating the right data collection formulas to ensure effective balancing over time.   This is especially helpful if you plan on releasing new content for a game, after its launch.

Getting back on track, lets take a look at what the trait point costs would be for some of the character types we mentioned above: melee, ranged, and magic.  Before we can do this, however, the trait ranges should be decided on:

Now that we have some concrete numbers to use, we can decide how each character type will prioritize these traits.

Melee

Ranged

Magic

Character Costs

Army Points

Based on the above data, we can start with a total army point value of 1,000 points.

Character Attributes

Rather than bury you in a sea of questions regarding every aspect of this tactical, turn-based game development, I thought it would be a good idea to share of the thoughts I have been having regarding details of the characters.  I have always been a point-based character fan (refer to yesterday’s post for details).  It creates an even playing field for entry players as well as veterans, who have been playing for a while.  Everyone has a fair chance, using the same amount of points as everyone else to build their army.  One of the questions to ponder is the genre of this game, but that has no effect on the core character elements.  I am more of a fantasy medieval genre lover, so these thoughts encompass this kind of environment.

First, lets discuss some goals of the characters in this tactical online game.  The characters need to be:

• Easy to understand
• Quick to customize
• Extensible, offering variations and more options over time

Game characters are the sum of their attributes.  To meet the need of quick and easy to understand, we should minimize the number of attributes needed to describe each character, while also allowing for unique qualities to be given to characters that make each unique.  With these thoughts in mind, here are some of the attributes I propose:

• Health Points – The amount of damage a character can sustain before death
• Strength – Determines the amount of damage this character inflicts with attacks
• Speed – How far this unit can travel each turn
• Range – Distance from potential targets this character can attack
• Splash Area – All characters within this distance from the target are affected

Some optional attributes that may also be incorporated are:

• Initiative – How quickly this character acts, which determines when it gets its turn
• Defense – How much damage this character absorbs from attacks before health points are drained

In addition to attributes, each character can have a type associated with it:

• Fighter – These units use close-range weapons to attack enemies
• Archer – These units use long-range weapons to attack enemies
• Mage – These units use long-range magic to attack enemies
• Clerics – These units use healing magic to restore allies

Finally, each character can have 2 to 4 ability slots, giving them special powers, limited by the type it is.  For instance, the fighter would have abilities available to it that relate to enhancing fighter-type attacks, and defense too, of course.

So, there are a variety of choices the players would make for each character they add to their army:

• Character type
• Each attributes value – raising these costs points / reducing them gains points
• Abilities – adding these costs points

Tactics Game Characters

One of the most pivotal areas of tactical, turn-based games, that largely influences the general gameplay and player involvement, is the characters themselves.  Take Final Fantasy Tactics, for example.  In this game, players begin with a couple of characters, starting out weak, and developing these characters as the game progresses.  This approach to character development is what I call experience-based character development.  After each battle, the characters gain levels, and in turn unlock more powerful skills and abilities.  They also find treasure as they progress, giving them more useful equipment, items, and weapons.  You could also call a game like Final Fantasy Tactics an RPG, or role playing game, in which the characters go through a story and develop and grow as they travel around in an epic adventure.

The alternative to allowing characters to develop by acquiring experience is to use a point based system.  In this approach, each character, as well as each skill and equipment and benefit characters can receive, are assigned a point value.  Players assemble their armies by spending a set amount of points to create evenly balanced armies.  Tactics 100 is such a game that implements this type of system.

There are advantages to each, as you may surmise.  Experience-based approaches allow players to invest more time and effort into developing their perfect army.  Every battle makes their army stronger, and levels up their characters.  An obvious disadvantage to this approach is that it does not guarantee fair battles.  A more leveled up army has an obvious advantage over a lower level army.  Point-based systems overcomes this challenge, at the cost of never allowing the characters to get stronger over time.  One way to avoid this pitfall is to allow the unlocking of certain customizable features, allowing players more choices over time that don’t necessarily give them an edge over other players, simply more options to choose from.

Now that you have an idea what these two approaches entail, which would you prefer.  Submit your vote using the poll on the right to let the rest of us know your opinion.  Feel free to share your thoughts via comments here too.