I'm trying to come up with ways to further increase the players interests in the game-characters and I figure that one way to immense the player into the plot/game/characters was to have mission debriefings. The old game "Wing Commander" comes to mind. Right after you return to your homebase/carrier, the TigersClaw, you get a brief animation on how your fighter land and docks in the hangar and a grafical presentation of your ship hovers into view. If you did get shot a lot, a picture of a ship pepped with holes and scorches was shown. If you did ok, a better ship came into view ect. I think that was a great way of showing you how your last mission progressed. Instead of throwing up a bunch of numbers with hit-ratios and number of missiles fired or dodged, you get this mangled or blown apart ship. (I can even imagine the cries of utter desperation from the chief-engineer when he sees his "babies" limping in half shot up.) Next after that you could talk to your wingman about the mission (Or at least I think you could, not sure here) and lastly you get called into the skippers office. This was another type of debriefing, here the míssion-type was evaluated, like; Did you do the right thing under the right circumstances? If it was a escort-mission, did you stick to the vessel you where supposed to be protecting or did you leave it right out in the open to hunt bogies, and so forth. Sometimes you could get a warning, sometimes a valuable lesson was to be learned, a pat on the back or get completly chewed out by the skipper. Sometimes there was pieces you get promotions or decorations and there where small celebrations for you to mark the occations and so on. Sometimes there was just dialouge to bring the story forward. I think this way is better portraying a ongoing campaign where you are trying to get down on the base level where everything is happening. If you are telling a story, everytime you show something that breaks away from the story (could be simple score-table or even a save-window) you sorta bring the player out of the story. Wing Commandes had this neat thing for saving games; it basically showed the bunkbeds for the flight-crews and everytime you saved a game with a new character, a person showed up in that bed sleeping. If you returned to the game, it would for example say: "Wake IceMan up" and the game would load. Neat! Does the approach sound like a good idea for immensing the player into the game? If so, what other ways can you think of that can act as a way to show progress (or failures) thoughout the game, without breaking the storytelling? Any ideas are welcome! =) Ps. The game "Cannonfodder" had a funny way of showing statistics; then you began the mission you drafted people from a long queue outside your drafting-place. The queue was only filled with a number of new people between missions with a certain number. And if your soldiers where killed little white crosses appeared on the hills above the drafting-place. Quite funny and exellent in that game. Ds. [edited by - Bangladesh on January 30, 2003 8:05:06 AM]

I think it's a great idea, probably because I loved Wing Commander and was immersed in it by exactly the techniques you're talking about

I just had an interesting idea: if you show scorch marks on your fighter after returning from a really nasty dogfight, why not similarly show damage to the inside of your carrier if you do a poor job of defending it? You could show burn marks on walls, or even affect the interface by making the player's computer terminal damaged (and therefore unavailable) until the next mission.

Edit: a couple more ideas (oh and keep in mind that while I'm using fairly Wing Commander specific topics I'm sure these ideas could be adapted to other games)

Again on the subject of your carrier taking damage, perhaps characters could even be killed or injured while on board, munitions and docked ships could be destroyed and unavailable until new supplies arrive, etc.

[edited by - Dobbs on January 31, 2003 4:51:31 PM]