Category: game design

I’ve been having a few days of angst (ok a few weeks) regarding game design and ‘fun’ in Gratuitous Tank Battles. I guess I was panicking at the intangibility of ‘fun’ and thinking I might be constructing a huge and very elaborate ‘system’ and ‘simulation’ rather than a game. Essentially, it became clear to me that the game was a bit too much like company of heroes and not enough like chess.

Now COH is a great game, but I think it suffers a bit from unit-balance hell. This is something GSB really struggles with, especially for new players. Chess, on the other hand, is awesome in this regard.

Chess only has a handful of unit types, and their capabilities are simply explained. Chess is all about the complex interactions between simple units. This is a good game. COH and GSB are about the super-complex interactions between complex units, and a huge number of them. This is a deep, but also hard to learn, and possibly frustrating game.

I’m pretty sure I’ve sorted it all now :D. Essentially, GTB needed the starting game stripping back to very few unit types. Maybe 9 units to attack with, 9 to defend. That already makes it a fairly complex tower-defense style game. The joy of GTB is that there are so many more layers for the player to explore beyond that basic game. For example:

1. After the player has got the hang of the basic UI and mechanics, we can flip things and make them the attacker instead of the defender. yay!
2. After that, the player can unlock extra units on top of the starting nine. Yay!
3. After that, the player can start to customise his units, choose different modules for them, and also edit their colors to look distinctive. Mega yay!
4. After that, the player can try different game modes (Rush, or possibly waves rather than continous attack). And also try online challenges (eventually).
5. After that, the player can fiddle with the built-in level editor and design their own maps either to upload and share, or to play against the AI. Woohoo!

So, if I can get that basic 9 types vs 9 types defence game working just great, then I am pretty convinced everything else will fall into place quite nicely. It just needs a ton of work, but that doesnt bother me at all. I’m just keen to get the initial mechanics of the early game to be perfect, and I made decent progress on that today :D.

Soo… one of the things about doing a reverse tower-defence mode in my game, is that suddenly you care more about the route your troops take. In tower defence, the fact that enemies may seem to mindlessly go off on a tangent doesn’t matter. If they act dumb then yay! if they act clever then yikes! but it’s never frustrating.

As attacker, things change. if a left turn goes to certain death, you expect your units to take the right turn. But is it that simple? Maybe left is lethal to infantry, but right lethal to tanks. Maybe you want to send the infantry to their deaths as a decoy etc. Consider the following map:

In terms of general design and gameplay, I love this. it makes for huge flexibility, unpredictability, and variety. As a player, I can find it frustrating when attacking because the troops may take a route I don’t want them to take. I’ve been mulling over various GUI ideas for issuing orders. None are perfect, and in any case, I’m keen to have GSB-style hands-off play for challenges, which means too many mid-battle controls are going to be a pain.

I can’t yet decide whether it really is frustrating as a player if the routes are chosen by each unit, or if that’s just me as designer panicking. The instinct is to add all sorts of options or UI controls, but I don’t want this game to be complex to play. Hmmmm…..

On a lighter note.

The last few days have seen nothing but multiple xperiments with reconfiguring the gameplay for Gratuitous Tank Battles until I hit the magic balance of excitement, fun and spectacle. This game design business is tricky stuff!

Tower defense is an accepted, well-known formula, but tower ‘attack’ is not, and at the very least, I want to ship a game that is fun to play as both attacker and defender in tower-defense style. So with that in mind, I played the game a lot and concluded that it had lots of design issues. The main one was traffic jams. I was trying to design a simple ‘starter’ map that had a single weaving path between towers, and you would place your units and away they would march. The problem was, that when you spot a certain difficult tower ahead, it’s all very well placing a unit that you think counters it, but that unit is then stuck behind 15 other units before it gets there.

Initially I’d been scared of multiple paths for all maps, because of the complexity for the player, frantically scrolling around. Then I realised that if the paths were vaguely parallel, this problem went away. if I shrunk down the map a bit, I could fit the whole screen in with one look (when zoomed out), and could get more of a grip on it, even with multiple paths.

There have been a whole host of other changes as a result. Lots of balance changes, plus the introduction of ‘supply drops’ which automatically drop on the path in the quietest areas of the map, thus encouraging the attacker to spread his attack over multiple routes. That seems to work, as it’s a nice trade-off between ‘those supplies look tempting’ and ‘I ‘m kinda fully committed to attacking this route instead’. Parallel groups of paths also encourage complementary units, so repair wagons can trundle along beside assault mechs, etc, and a sluggish or damaged tank doesn’t bring the whole army to a halt (just half of it :D) I have full support for units stepping sideways around such blockages, I just need to try it and see how it goes.

I have some crappy placeholder art still in the game, and tons to do, but the last few days, where I’ve totally ignored graphics and only fiddled with mechanics and balance, seems to be paying off nicely. It feels more like a game now, and less like a tech demo. I also ditched fog of war, although it may well return in certain modes.

Everyone agrees that when it comes to gameplay the best approach is to try tons of stuff and see what turns up right?
Anyway, it’s an approach I am becoming keen on. Things often sound like the greatest game idea in the world until you try them. And things that sound lame and boring often turn out to be hilarious and fun. The ski-jumping game in wii-sports probably sounds crap in the design document…

Anyway, with that in mind, after playing through a few GTB battles in ‘classic’ mode (tower defense) as the defender, it became clear to me that ‘towers that do different damage to different units’ isn’t enough, in terms of interesting decision and gameplay, so I started thinking about special units.

As of today, there are 3 new magic modules, and associated units in the game. They are hospital modules/ambulances repairyards/trucks and supply trucks. The hospital and repair facilities regularly pulse out waves in a set radius that heal/repair your troops/tanks/turrets as appropriate. There is no overlap, so ambulances only work on infantry, whereas repair yards and trucks do everything else.

This is my first new mechanic, in that we now have units that act as support units, rather than directly contributing to victory. This brings up all kinds of decisions regarding whether to deliberately target the support units, whether you have lots of support units to keep a few big ‘tank’ units alive, or go for a mad rush with no support etc…

The second new mechanic comes from supply trucks. Supply trucks have no weapons, and no abilities, but they score disproportionately when determining victory for the attacker. Basically, getting a single infantryman off the map alive earns (for example) 1 point. get a tank away and you earn 50 points, but get a supply truck away and you earn 500 points :D

This introduces some new things to strategize over. supply trucks are literally harmless when they enter the map, and only pose a real threat as they close in on the exits. Unlike normal units, which can serve some purpose in shooting turrets etc, the supply truck is a binary decision. In other words, you should only deploy one if you are SURE its going to make it to that exit.

Obviously there are tons more potential ideas, and nothing here is revolutionary, but I hope to eventually ship a game that gives the player a ton of variety. Small tower defense battles, as attacker or defender, big battles, rush battles, wave-battles, 2-sided pitched battles, custom edited maps…. If I don’t die from stress or old age before I finish all this :D