Game Off 2021 - YourWaifuIsALie

Blog and documentation for Game Off 2021 attempt.

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Game Off 2021 - Day 3

November 04, 2021

Plot

Not necessarily implementing anything written, but it’s good to have the idea ready just in case.

Opening scene has the Programmer (main antagonist) walking through the near-finished game with checklist in hand, followed by two buff-looking endgame mobs. The Programmer is muttering to themself, fretting about the timeline and how the game is nowhere near launch ready. They notice a weak trash mob sitting on the ground.

The trash mob is our intrepid player character and was actually intended to be one of the first tutorial monsters the player encounters. However, a change in genre/direction of the game means Bug doesn’t have a place in the game anymore. Programmer tells the boss most to delete Bug.

Post-cutscene, this represents the quick gameplay slice. The monster will chase the player character around in the closed room until they’re caught, engaging a battle. The battle is traditionally unwinnable. Given that Bug will have a constrained set of abilities (likely just “Attack” and “Heal”) trial-and-error “should” get the player to “heal” the boss monster and cause an integer-overflow death.

• Need to consider how this is presented because I easily imagine a player not understanding the intent and never winning

Battle mechanics

The most generic of JRPG elements you can think of.

Stats:

• Health
• Mana
• Attack Power
  • Base stat + weapon modifier
• Defense Power
  • Base stat + armor modifier
• Speed
  • Bigger number gets first move.
  • If we have time, add in a turn-gauge and if speed = 2x enemy speed (combined) you get two actions in every “block” of player/enemy actions.
• Tags
  • Effects like “Fire Weapon. Attacks deal fire damage & have +10 Attack.” and “Fire Resistance. Halves all fire damage.”
  • Passive characteristics like “Troll” or “Immutable”
    • The anti-bug tags start getting deployed as the bug-level rises
  • Traditional status effects (if we feel like implementing) like “poisoned” or “confused”
• Level
  • But there’s probably no reason to put in an experience gain/level-up system so this is just fluff

Actions:

• Attack
• Defend
  • Take half damage? Increase defense by X?
• Ability
  • Traditional magic spells like “heal”
  • Bug abilities

So data structure wise we’ll have a few things:

• Character
  • Stats + tags
• Character targeted actions
  • List of applied effects
    • Pre-mid-post calculation
  • Don’t know the best way to organize effects, so I’ll go with everything on the action-side
    • Action has “Fire damage” effect, which will check the target for “Fire resistance” tag
    • Could do other things, like a targeted action taking effects from the target where “Fire resistance” then cheks for “Fire damage” tag
    • Composable functions play a role here but I don’t know how, so we’ll go with the first option until I understand why the system is limited
      • Bonus points, unit tests should be easier to write (combination of effects against combinations of tags, done)

Progress

• General idea for generic battle mechanics. Bugs tbd
• Started collecting a summary in the design doc. I don’t know how to format those/how much detail goes in them, but I can always come back to these blog posts if I don’t remember

TODO

• Figure out how to make Unity play nice with Git
• Keep playing with Jekyll, fixing things like links
• Continue nailing down specific battle mechanics and overworld power-ups
  • Bug-themed things
• Main character designs and 2d “sprite” (probably cutout animation) for both overworld and battle
  • Can visualize the rest of the world around the main character for consistency

Time Spent

6 + 1hr