Creatures and Combat

A new combat system: 'Come back or I'll bite your legs off!'

It was recently suggested that there should be a new combat system based on anatomy. This means that an attack is localised to an area (such as head, torso, left arm, right arm, left leg and right leg) and that area takes all the damage. I would think it would be interesting for such a system to work (such as that in MechWarrior) in an RPG and I think it could produce some quite interesting results. Basically you could train your character at finding weak spots or in specific forms of battle. Based on the skills that they have (and some small random factor) depends on where they hit. If the player is not trained very well, then they hit all over the place (and therefore make for inefficient battle). If the player is trained very well, they will attack the same area and therefore make more use of their attacks. I can also see that this system would make for some interesting death scenes where the opponent gets their leg lopped off. Another thing that annoyed me about a certain CPG was that when you cut off a zombie's leg, they fell over dead. I would rather see the zombie flailing on the floor in pain before they died of lack of blood. Maybe they could crawl after your character and try to make a last feeble stand against you.

Monster Generator

I have been thinking recently as to how it is possible to increase the size of an army. In some CPGs there seems to be a very limited variety of creatures. What I think could be done is that creature's morph with each other into a new creature of which they can spawn a few more of that race. How do we go about this? Well, going back to genetics, we each inherit traits from each of our parents. We do not inherit all the traits from each parent, but rather, randomly assorted traits from either our mother or our father. To achieve this with monsters, we simply take either one or the others specific statistic and add it to the new creature (making sure to use a custom random function generator so we actually have a spread between the two). The easy part is creating the creature's statistics; the hard part is the image. For a 3D game, it is possible to merge vertices and you could come up with a rather unique creature with this method. Using the same system mentioned above about the anatomy of a player, you could swap anatomy of monsters to come up with a monster that had strange combinations of anatomy and that had different skills on each of these. For example you have a zombie that merged with a sabre-wolf (that had a power attack using claws). The zombie and sabre-wolf then merge into a sabre-zombie (or whatever you would call it) that had mainly the traits of a zombie, but had the arm of the sabre-wolf. This would make a super zombie with sabre-wolfs claw attack. Mixing the images in an isometric implementation of an RPG would be fairly simple, because it just uses transparencies to build up the final image. It would then build a list of all the necessary images for this creature in memory for quick blitting.

Variety is the spice of life, Bio-diversity

Now that I have added my thoughts on the Monster Generator, which would pump out endless minions for every player's slaying frenzy, I must say that it is not a good idea at all. Sure, there are the obvious benefits of having endless masses for you to slaughter, but what would be the point of your game anyway? I think that if you choose to have a story that is deep and does not revolve entirely around killing, you could go with a more rewarding approach. You then populate your world as you would at any other time. I am talking about bio-diversity. It is all well and good to populate your land with all of the old favorites from your legends, but what will make your game stand out against all of the others? You need not fear creating your own races to mingle in your world. Most writers create a new race in their books to fill in the gaps of what they tell the story. It is not so hard to base your new race around certain species of animals. You could have bird, lizard, rhino, frog, etc. as a base for your creatures. Otherwise you could go for a completely new type of being that resembles more of a god. Give your creatures a reason for being where they are, give them a goal that they wish to attain and then you will have a community that will be an asset to your world.

(New) Realistic Sword-fighting – "Aiming for the head"

It was suggested recently by Nazrix that sword fighting should be handled in a more realistic manner. This was originally misconceived to mean "we need to imitate a real sword fight" but what was meant was that damage that was associated with a particular attack should affect the player in different ways for different areas. This doesn't sound all that different from what we were discussing in "A new combat system: 'Come back or I'll bite your legs off!'" but the discussion tended also to how you would handle a localised sword fight. This new system would mean that it was more difficult to kill anything and that a single opponent creature would be of near-equal skill. As an example, you could select different locations on the opponent, and would be able to block by means of clicking on the area to attack with left click to lunge/stab and right click to swing. A double click could block, as the opponent would be seen to ready him or herself for an attack, because this would be visible to the player. Also, an attacking opponent would show 'weaker' spots in their armour or on their body which would give the player a little opportunity to quickly strike them down if they know what they are doing.

(New) Flowing fighting – Bringing in the arcade fights

After going through the realistic sword-fighting debate which eventuated into system that was suggested by MadKeithV (in Sword Fighting - RPG), I decided to think about possible extensions of such a system. The extension would mean that benefits for apt players of the game would be available, without making it so difficult that only a guru could figure out key combinations. Using the simple mouse clicking combinations, aided with possibly one or two modifier keys (shift and ctrl possibly) using the system mentioned in the above article (Realistic Sword-fighting – "Aiming for the head"), I thought of how arcade fighting games could be used to advantage.

In arcade games, you hit a number of keys or buttons to create a single move. By hitting many buttons in sequence, you can create attack combinations. I was thinking about how you could control a flowing attack sequence in a 3rd person Isometric RPG and using the above system I came to this conclusion. There are certain attacks that would be slower for a character to achieve, and there are certain issues that affect speed in attacks.

For some details on how this system works you should read Implementing the Flowing Fighting System.