Wednesday 17 October 2007

Battlefields

I want to make battle field locations a lot more interesting than they currently are. At the moment, a battlefield consists of a big open area which is filled with a little bit of water and a mountain, with monsters scattered around it. You have to find the enemy unique leader and kill them to complete the battle.

I've just added allies based on your race, so you arrive in the battle with friends on your side.

However, I want the battlefield to consist of hundreds, if not thousands of monsters, and to be interesting to navigate, which is not the case currently.

So I suspect I'm going to do the following and create a 'battlefield' terrain, which consists of three states: a picture of an allied monster, a picture of an enemy monster, and a 'stack of bodies' picture. The battlefield terrain will be impassable and be laid out on the map as walls in a maze that spans the whole map.

Its such a big hack, I'm cringing internally as I write this. However, it seems to be the only way of conveying a huge battle scene without it slowly emptying out, or grinding the CPU to a halt emulating thousands of monsters.

Any other suggestions?

4 comments:

Andrew Doull said...

Of course, the way to do this is to create a map with capture points, then base the player or enemy leader reinforcements based on the capture points taken, and have monsters moving between capture points when not near enough to the player... but that's more like an RTS. Which is always do-able.

Mikolaj said...

Sounds interesting. But how replayable will it be? If not much, I'd keep it rare, small, difficult and easy to predict by common sense without spoilers. If it will be very replayable --- random maze and enemies, random location and number of trigger locations/boss monsters, etc. --- I'd make it big, common and not worry too much about the need for spoilers/experience (you learn it once and use a lot).

Unknown said...

If you want lots of monsters but you don't think computers could handle as much as you want, you could add "waves" of monsters.

Andrew Doull said...

Waves of monsters is a great idea. I'd already thought of it, but... ;)

Its actually a really good indicator of who the ultimate enemy you're fighting on the battle field e.g.

'Bolg, son of Azog reinforces the pallisades with orcish warg riders.'