Illusion of Destiny – First Approach The Game: Illusion of Destiny is a team based multiplayer RPG. It plays in the medieval time and represents the fight between Knights and Barbarians. Game Goals: At least there will be two different modes. One offensive mode for every team. The knights have to free the princess which was kidnapped by the barbarians. And the barbarians must break into the castle of the knights and open the main gate. Characters: Every side has three classes (Warrior, Sorcerer and Supporter). I’m currently thinking about the character skill trees and items. If anyone has a good idea for the character design, feel free to post it :) Game Start: Every team starts at their starting points. There will merchants where you can buy items (weapons, armour, healing potion). When you’re team is ready, its goal is to achieve their game goal. Game Play: If you haven’t noticed yet, the game play should be similar to Counter-Strike. That means you play round for round. When you die in a round, you must wait for the next round. Whenever you kill an enemy, he will lose a certain amount of his gold which you can collect. The killed enemy will even lose a little bit of his gained experience. Weapons and armours will have repair points which will decrease when you die. But these items can be repaired by the merchants. I currently think about random items that can’t be repaired, which will be dropped by killed enemies Persistent Game world: All the player stats/items/money and skills will be saved in an online profile, that means your character isn’t lost after the game has finished and you can use it in the next game (I’m currently not sure about this point). I want a game time of about 100 hours before a character is maxed out. That’s all for the beginning :) This design isn't final nor complete, but these are the most important facts I wanted to write down before I forget them :) What do you think? [Edited by - Ludi83 on May 30, 2006 7:20:11 AM]

You might want to think really hard about that bit about 'persistant game world' in a game that is round based, and devoted almost completely to vs' play, specifically with respect to experience carrying over. Many rpg's [not necessarily yours included] have a sort of exponential curve to the level gain, where a lvl 20 character can effortlessly kill 20 [or even 200, or 20,000 with a few huge area effect spells or something] level 1 characters, possibly even without taking damage at all. Your game will be VERY hard to start in if this is the case, and the lvl 1 people will find it nearly impossible to even make it to lvl 2 if everyone else in the room they are playing in has lvl 5 - 10, or worse yet, 55 - 60 [or even 3-5].

Since counterstrike was brought up, it has a mod called WC3, which gives players stats of various characters from warcraft three [like a night elf race, and various others], and it suffered from this effect where high level characters just whupped on low level characters [and it was an fps, the problem will be magified many times over in an rpg where twitch-reactions aren't going to get you some easy kills]. There were times when a single high level player [with many many MANY hundreds of hitpoints] could run int a room with a bunch oof low level characters [not that they'd know it, since the high lvl likely also had invisibility, which was another skill], and kill them with a single shot each [after the hundreds of added bonus damage], get shot dozens of times, and shrug it all off.

You're going to have a tough time balancing your game if it is persistant. You don't have to take my advice of course, but might i recommend a sort of double level system, where you have a this-map-only level, which increases quickly and each level makes a huge difference, and a global level, which increases slooooowly, and makes very little difference. Global level being something where the long time players have an advantage, but it's not just a straight out +(a whole lot) to every stat thing like most rpg levels equate to, but instead something where the character is more indirectly effected by the progress, and have the this-map-only level be more aimed at beefing the character up into super-duper man.

Global levels could give you the opportunity to buy perks like 'can carry XXX gold with you from map to map'[like a little bank] or 'start with level 2 instead of level 1 at map start' or 'start each round with 1 small health potion free, unless you already have health potions'. Little things that make a difference, but don't break the game like how a lvl 90 character entering a room with all the other players being lvl 3 would break it.

Also i'd advise a weighted exp gain, such that if a high lvl character kills a low lvl character, he doesn't gain as much as would have been gained if the player who did the killing was of the same level as the dead player. In-the-vincinity-of-the-action exp gain might also benefit the 'support' characters, and also help the low levels, and give players a reason to not just split up and all rush from a different direction on their own.

@dogcity
Yes, the gameplay will be slower, there will be no or should not be "Headhshot-and-wait-5-minutes-for-next-round" situations, that's not what I want.

You will be able to create your own game like in D2 and can add restrictions to character classes and character levels (and perhaps other things). But this is really far future. In the beginning I only want to add normal servers with levels restrictions.

Actually, I don't know on my own if there will be more tactics or more combats because I haven't tought of the character classes and skills yet. But I'm always open for suggestions :)

The bad players get really punished in the current approach. But the problem is, that it's a persisent world, so you must punish players, I'll look how to make this more human.

@peachy keen
As I said before, there will be some restrictions when you join a level, so there won't be a lvl60 be able to kill you if you don't want. But what I want to achive is a complete different game when you reach a certain level. That means lower level more action and higher levels more tactics.

Yes, the balancing will be a hard part. That's the reason I want to create lots of alpha and beta versions :)

Sorry, but I didn't understand your double level system :(

A team bonus is a good idea, I'll add this on my list.


Some more technical informations: It will be completly 3D with a third person camera, I'm using the C4 engine for this: http://www.terathon.com/c4engine/ I'm now working for about two month with it and I'm making good progress. I'm currently waiting for the next big release which will fix some current multiplayer issues. But currently I'm focusing on 24 players per game.


I'll modify the first post when I have the time.

[Edited by - Ludi83 on May 30, 2006 7:11:24 AM]

Instead of having players get more powerful the more levels they go up, why not have them gain more flexability. This could be achieved through options like spells, manouvers, etc.

By having skills as a binary selection (either you have the skill or don't) and having losts of different skills, a character can increase in laeve and be able to do more than a new player would. This also helps in learning the game as the better players will be able to utilise the more complex manouvers where as a new player might be struggeling to master even the basics.

You might even have nested skills that requier other skills as a prerequsite, for example:
The skills "Wall Jump" which lets a player jump off a wall (like wall dodgeing in UT2004) might need the skills "Double Jump" (like in UT2004) and "Climb" (which lets you climb objects).

Also you might have several levels in a non combat skill, like "Run" each level increses the ability by a small amount. These would work just like the nested skills above, but each nested level gives a set bonus. eg:
If you Had "Run Level 1" and it allowed a movement of 2 metres per second, "Run Level 2" which allowed 2.5 metres per second, "Run Level 3" which allowed a movment of 3 metres a second, and so on.

Yes, I like your idea Edtharan. Sounds a little bit like the D2 skill trees, but it's really cool. As I said before, I currently have no clue how the characters will increase their skills and such things (I only wanted to descripe the game world) but your idea is currently Nr. 1 :)

Make them faster/have better reflexes, but the same power and energie would be great. So, basically a skilled player with a lvl1 character could kill a noobish player with a lvl20 character.

The more I think about it, the more I love the idea :)