12 levels of quality in-depth, what to look for in the future.
Published February 21, 2013
Alright, I've had to re-write this 3 times, thanks to my computer. First off, thanks Milcho for requesting this! If you have any questions about our game, feel free to ask, we'll write something up. Anyway, we'll be discussing our 12 levels of quality in Not Dead Enough. So each item has 12 levels of quality- 12 is best, 1 is worst- including guns and food. We decided to do this when we were on Skype one night. We knew we would need some kind of System for things to deteriorate, because in real life, all things do that! We couldn't think of anything, but then we decided on levels of quality. Once again, in real life, An item deteriorates by time, not just instantly, so that's why we decide on the 12 levels of quality. We went for 12, because that seems like a reasonable amount of steps. 1st step is normal, second is a little bit stale, 3rd is more, and so on until 12. Now we'll go more in-depth about the system!
First is guns. Guns can take a total of 100 shots before being destroyed. You'll never get off 1000 shots most likely, because you'll probably never find that much ammo- melee is the way to go. But with several shots, your gun goes down a level or two, and with each level it goes down, there is more of a chance of it jamming and\or breaking unexpectedly.
Lastly we have food. It deteriorates and gets moldy over time, just like guns. But with food, I think that your health and food bar goes DOWN if you eat something too nasty.
Hope this helped Milcho!
In our final game, you can look forward to:
- animals
- melee
- weather system
- nicer maps
- AI (Joining groups with AI, bad AI, good AI).
- [size=1]And maybe, possibly, co-op.
[size=1]
Thanks Milcho for the request, and if you have questions, please ask! Also, pics of our map are here:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/not-dead-enough-nde/images/new-environment-assets-and-aim-down-sights#imagebox
Well, first, I had a chance to try out your alpha (from your last post). Some feedback:
- The camera seems to shake a lot. I've never gotten motion sickness from games, but that's probably the closest I've ever been to it. Can you stabilize it a bit? Maybe just have it shake when your health is low (if even then, since a lot of people have motion sickness issues)
- I couldn't figure out what happened when i clicked an inventory item (i.e. the gun). It didn't seem to equip at first, but then after some random clicking i did equip it.
- This is probably something you're aware of - but the mouse isn't locked in the window, so if you move the mouse around it may exit the window and clicking will then cause your game to lose focus. And since I have dual monitors so fullscreen didn't help (mouse still moved to other monitor)
Now for this post:
It's interesting that you've sort of combined what I'd normally think of as item endurance and item quality (I'm coming from a rpg point of view). It may work well, depending on what properties of the items you change (like a gun's accuracy and stopping power doesn't really degrade with usage - it may jam more often though, as you said, due to metallic buildup on the inside of the barrel.) Anyway, as a pure game mechanic it's interesting.
I was wondering more in terms of why 12 exactly? Why not, say 10 or 15? I'm not saying 12 is wrong, just that I'd pick some reason for it i suppose. A lot of RPGs that have item durability chose to give it as out of 100 - since durability out of 100 is easy to express in terms of percentage. Now I understand that 100 may be just way too much, but I was wondering if you've considered other item quality levels and what effects they would have on gameplay.
Again, nothing wrong with 12 - in fact I was half expecting you to say that you went with 12 because it's one of those things that's easy to sub-divide. 12 is clearly divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6 - which for example is one reason people cite that the feet/inches system is so useful (1 foot = 12 inches) - because it provides a clear understanding of things like one half, one third, one quarter (and one sixth, though not as commonly used)
Anyway, that's my two cents. Thanks for taking the time to write the post.