In my previous post, I proposed the idea of a game that helped the player when he seemed like he needed it, by decreasing the difficulty or increasing the bonuses. Now I have implemented such a system (I''ll detail it below) in my current project, and the tests so far have proven out quite interesting : when they found out about the "cheating game", a lot of players were actually thankful it happened. The game is a classic vertical shoot''em up. The player''s ship has three (weapon, defense, offente) slots he can put abilities in. Those abilities are dropped by enemies at random, and can be picked up by the player. Each slot can hold at most one ability, and it starts empty. Also, for each slot, there is an "upgrader" that an enemy can drop instead of an ability, which when picked up makes the ability of that slot more efficient. It has no effect on an empty slot. What I found out was that when the player needed an ability, it would be rather upsetting for him to only find upgraders five times in a row. Hence the "cheat" : when the game detects the player needs an ability for a slot (that is, when the slot is empty), it prevents enemies from dropping upgraders for that slot (they drop abilities instead). What do you guys think about this?

Victor Nicollet, INT13 game programmer

It sounds like a good refinement. I even think you might want to expand it. If there is a maximum degree to which an ability can be upgraded, then have the enemies stop dropping those upgrades when it''s maxed out. In Super Metroid, enemies would never drop an item you didn''t need. So if you had full missilies and bombs, and all you needed was health, all the items the enemies left would be health items. That''s a good system.

Yes, this would have been a good idea... However in my game you can only have maximum upgrades for 15 seconds - and picking up more upgraders increases this delay, so I can still keep on dropping them.

Victor Nicollet, INT13 game programmer

I like your idea to help the player this way. There were times I too was frustrated by enemies dropping junk I didn''t need. I was praying they drop the thing I needed like extra lives In my vertical shooter game which I haven''t started and probably not going to, was to have jail cells that you can knock out and rescue scientist in them. They would work on improving your weapons, etc. Just a bit of an idea rather than enemies dropping stuff all around.