Hail Wanderers!
A new year, a new semester, and in my case at least, a new team! I'm very grateful to the wonderful people at Neveryear Games and look forward to working with them on We Love Nuclear Armageddon. I will be taking the role of the main systems designer, working alongside the narrative designer and reporting to our lead designer and producer throughout the semester. Primarily I'll be working on adding faction specific upgrades for all of the buildings currently in the game, but I'll also be doing some work on the narrative and, at least for the short term, working on a re-balance for the economy in the game.
Right now, the game's economy is balanced. It works well, and all the various costs of creating buildings, nukes, and activating shields, along with overcharging towers, all work very well. The economy runs off an interesting system were it is impossible to stockpile resources. Instead, the player has a max value for the two resources (uranium and chromium) that they generate each level. Because of this the player is encouraged to use as much resources as possible in their turn, as any left over resources won't carry over to the next turn. The system works very well, and that's not the area that I'm going to be looking at for balance. What I want to do is to try and streamline the economy some. Right now, many of the buildings and the nukes use a combination of the two resources, so it can be hard to figure out how many buildings that produce each resource the player should build. This issue is compounded by the immense importance the game places on the position of buildings on the player's planet (the planets rotate, and both shields and nukes work based on an area of effect, so it is important to keep in mind what is next to what) and the fast pace of gameplay. It would be ideal for the selection process of a building to be as simple as possible so that the player can focus more thought onto the placement of the building or other tactical and strategic decisions. Ideally, I would like to have chromium be a sort of defensive resource (used to build buildings and power shields) and then have uranium be a more offensive resource (used to build nukes and overcharge towers). I'll probably keep it that nukes require both resources to build, but I'll experiment on a few iterations of the offensive/defensive split over the next few days and see where it leads me.
In other news, I'm part of the way done with yet another revision of the lore for the dungeon crawler, and intend to add more to the combat system. I want to add different combat states (grappled, etc) that will present different options to the player, with the intent of both making the skills enemies will use more diverse and also presenting more interesting and unique combat scenarios to the player. I'll have more information about that as I continue to work on it.
Finally, (and quickly), I'm taking a creative writing class this semester, so expect to see some short stories and the like appear on the blog from time to time (I'll spare you all the poetry, don't worry). I'll probably have to do some messing around with how I want to present the stories, as the standard blog posts are pretty terrible for presenting long blocks of text, but we'll see how it goes.
Finally finally, I'm going to be working on a portfolio website over the coming semester as well. No real details as of yet, but I'll still maintain the blog as the main source of updates for the projects I'm working on, etc, and use the portfolio to showcase the work that I've done.
There are lots of exciting things happening in the coming months, and I look forward to sharing them here.
As always, until next time,
Guardian Soul
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