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Original post by TechnoGoth
Its an idea but your missing a key point. How would you make possible for they player to complete as many as 5 and as few as 0 of the events. With a time system, thats easy to do by simply have a date at which the five of events come to an end. However under an event system I have to decided for the player what the possible series for those 5 events are. Do you see my point?

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Simple--have a trigger which disables the five events, as I suggested. Thus, if the player is in a hurry, he may hit this trigger without having seen any of the events; if he''s careful, he can see all five before hitting the trigger (an example is a town which has many possible things to do and see, but which gets destroyed at a certain point--once it''s gone, so are the events). And you can even set up an arbitrarily complex branching tree of events, enabling triggers, and disabling triggers. It''s all up to your design.

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Original post by TechnoGoth
Then there are things like seasons, feastivles and other things that happen on certain dates. Such as a 3 hour chemisty lecture ever wednesday.

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Again, you can set up triggers for events that range from the very simple (player goes to sleep in an inn; when he wakes up, a festival has begun) to the maddeningly complex (player sells a wooden sword to a one-eyed woman whose cottage he found by walking five steps north, and three steps west from the old, rotten stump and jumping while carrying two healing potions and wearing the amulet of Yendor; this sale enables the player to buy a sword of massive slaughter+10 from a one-armed blacksmith fifteen miles away, who happens to be the old woman''s long lost lover...) And these triggers can be parts of quests, hidden, you name it.

-Odd the Hermit

I don''t think it would make sense to the player or from a design point of view to have a common tigger disable 5 diffrent events.

Such as:
event 1: Save the mayor of Glen''s daughter.
event 2: Arrival of a circus in Fan.
event 3: Chance to herd Pocket Pippo from Balla to Icari
event 4: Flood in Icari.
event 5: Thieves planning on stealing a relic from the Museum of the Word.

It would not make sense for the all these events to end when the player buys take out from a local fish''n shop some other such trigger.





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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

I have an idea!

We could keep on discussing this theoretically and not get to a place where both sides understand completely what the other means. I think we need concrete examples.

So I suggest that you, TechnoGoth, design a *very small* part of your game with your time-based system, with as much detail as you can do -- the story for that part, the events, the triggers etc. and other stuff the player can do at the same time / between events. But it should also be *large enough* so that there are times when events overlap and also long pauses between events. And then you put this online somewhere so we can read it, analyze and critisise it.

Or you could try designing the same parts of the game both with a time-based and an event-based system and see which works best.

What do you think? Is it too much work? You''d need to do it anyway at some point, but this could change your workflow in a way you don''t like?

I''m currently working, so I don''t have alot of free time. But I am making a simple and fun little sample game, mainly to test and debug my game engine at the momment. I''ll use the time based system in that game, so that people can get an idea of what it will be like. Altough my sample game, is completely diffrent then my final game. IT basicaly an humerous anime style game. It takes place at a school, with your character being a choice from a verity of diffrent anime style character. Magic Girl, Alien, Ninja, Angel, Normal Guy. The game consists of basically playing through your first semester at Boarding school.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

That sounds very fun. I don''t like the idea of having some arbitrary trigger that cancels the 5 events. I really don''t like the idea of arbitrary anything. I suppose you could set it up that if you go to the next town, the other town with the 5 events burns down, but what if the player was just scouting ahead? They scout ahead then come back and they find out they didn''t get a chance to explore that area?

This happens all the time to me in maze like areas. I scout ahead, then I get to the boss and I don''t get a chance to go back and see what I missed. Of course solutions for this could probably be found too. It''s all a matter of what style your going for I think.

I think it could work, it''s just a lot harder to deal with than event-based. But event-based is somewhat arbitrary, which really annoys me. Deus Ex, while one of my favorite games ever, has some sections where the event based triggers really annoy me. There is a section where if you go one way, your brother dies, and if you go the other way, he lives. It is really stupid, because if you stay and help him fight off ALL of his attackers, then exit the way that triggers his death, he dies. And the player really doesnt see why he''s dead since he thinks he saved his life.

These problems could be solved with smart triggers, but as the event tree gets more complicated, there will be more flaws in the system, and it will be harder and harder to balance and playtest.

I suppose whether it''s time based or event based, with a complex chain of events it will be hard to balance either way