This is for my theoretical online game design, so it assumes 2+ player-controlled characters. There may be some additonal skill-based factors, but the range should be small, compared to traditional RPGs. You have a "power gauge" that can be charged from empty to full over the course of five seconds. At any point you can choose to attack at your current power level, which resets the gauge. If you're attacked first, you lose hit points (proportionate to the power of the other person's attack, plus a random factor) and your power gauge gets reset. I'm thinking that this would be statistically equivalent to a random outcome -- but it hopefully wouldn't feel random to the players. Victories will still feel meaningful, since they're a direct result of player decisions -- and rather than being aggravated by a "random" loss, a player will think damn, I waited too long. Other factors: Hit points regenerate, slowly. No shortcuts. Death means you can't log on for a set period of time -- three real-world days, say. And escape is always an option. But since I still want combat to be potentially lethal, I'm thinking I should keep hit points low, relative to the sliding base damage and additional random damage of a hit. Between that and the fact that two opponents are likely to take roughly equal amounts of damage, I could see people "sticking to their guns" in hopes of getting their opponent first -- and dying when their opponent happens to max out on their random damage. So, does all this sound plausible? Is there anything I'm overlooking?

Some kind of temporary adaptability shield of sorts would be good for people just mashing the attack button. Meaning if the current attack is within say +/- X amount of the last attack from same player, then its deflected by the other player.

Sorry, forgot to say that I think your idea is simple and neat. I don't have the time to think more into it though, studying for an exam.

Button-mashing is definitely something I'd like to avoid. Of course, rapidfire charging-and-attacking means that you're making all those attacks at very low power -- but it does disrupt your opponents' attempts at charging, and forces them to adopt the same strategy. Hmmm.

In general, I'm concerned that charging times may shorten as the players keep trying to hit sooner than the other player did, last time... the one thing I can think of that might help is to set up an exponential relationship between the gauge and the damage of your attack. So, if you hit at 2 seconds, you do 4 damage, while 5 seconds is 25 damage. That may be enough payoff that players will risk waiting longer. And while it doesn't necessarily eliminate button-mashing, it does make it less effective.

Instead of making the attack FORCE a power reset, perhaps it should only have a chance of doing? That way attacking early has a chance of working well or a chance of not working at all. You could even make some kind of curve for the percent chance so charging long doubly increases your chance of forcing them to reset? And if you just constantly attack at 1% power, your chance of forcing a reset might be 0% so you always want to charge some.

You could have the damage be linked to the bar, and also link the chance of interrupting to the bar. If you mash the button, you'll do little pings of damage over and over, but odds are slim that you'll actually interrupt your opponent's charge. Then he can hit you far harder. It's really just a twist on "Chicken", and is one of the fundamental ways in which people compete.

You know what this makes me think of? In UT2004, when you and an adversary are both in the twin laser turret of a HellBender. The beams, when juiced all the way up, can nearly flip the other vehicle over, and since the turrets don't point below horizontal, that means he can't shoot you for a second. So you try to get as much power as possible into the shot, but you want to be the first to fire, because if he hits you and your vehicle tips, you have to wait until it settles before firing. It's a pretty intense fight.

The major problem i see is that death results in 3 days of the person not playing the game which means they will go play something else. Face of mankind which is currently in beta has a 24hr period of no playing after you run out of clones or clone insurance. you buy clones ahead of time so when you die you spawn in a cloning facility which slowly recharges you to 20% health. You can buy more xepensive clones that give you more health regenrated. It takes about 3minutes or so to get 20% health, more if you buy clones that give you more energy. During this time the player cant move only look around their tube. This makes dieing without any clones the cue to make a new account (since its in beta and there is nothing to stop you from using another email address to create another account). Waiting just 24hrs is very difficult, 3 days will probably mean the death of your game since noone will play it.

Unless you make the battles worth risking the inability to play for 3days, you wont see anything but conservitive players and many people running from battle. The last thing you want is people not being able to play your game, because they will move on to something else that they can play.

Also how will this game be played out? Will it be a realtime game where players can dodge and move? or something where they become in battle mode and cant dodge attacks? Becareful, players may call the game cheap because they cant play for three days because the lag caused them not to attack soon enough.

I like the idea, but I can't see it being very fun in the long run if it's only based around attacking and if getting hit by an attack always resets, just because there isn't enough depth to it to allow the player to try to come up with a strategy. It seems like it would often degrade into lots of button mashing or lots of waiting and then a quick death.

I definitely like the idea of making it so that the more powerful a hit is, the more of a chance it has of interrupting someones charging. If you combined this with the ability to react to an attack, you could have something really, really fun. You could make it so that at the instant a shot is released, the target of the attack has a twitch reaction chance to try to dodge/deflect/absorb the blow, at expense of their charge or part of their energy bar.

I agree that the 3 day inability to play would be a bit much. Actually, I'm not too fond at all of any gameplay element that stops them from playing. The idea is to keep the person playing your game.

I think it's generally a better idea to reward the player for good playing by allowing them to graduate to higher levels of play, and then punish death by taking them down a few levels. For instance, maybe higher levels of play would give them access to better areas to fight in, more ways to attack, etc. Dying would reset them to a lower level and they'd have to fight their way back up the ladder again.

Extrarius & Iron Chef Carnage:

I agree that a chance-of-reset seems like a better idea than a guaranteed reset, but I'm not so sure it should be tied to the player's percentage bar. In that case, a player who's fairly far "ahead" in charging can continue to charge with minimal risk, in order to max out their gauge and their damage. If damage is exponential, which I'm still leaning towards, that just makes it worse. I'm thinking simple chance might actually work better.


qazlop & Santa Claws:

This mechanic isn't the "heart" of the game -- I probably should have mentioned that in the initial post. My goal is to design a online game where combat is possible and meaningful, but running-around-killing-people is not the predominant play-style.

Since it is an online game, I don't think I can use "twitch" -- although I like the idea of being able to dodge based on timing, I think it would make it more fun. But since the game isn't intended to focus on fighting, I'm not all that worried about combat not being fun for its own sake. If anything, I'd be worried about it being too much fun -- which is why there's no significant levelling or equivalent psychological tricks in the design.

I'd like people to be able to do a little "footwork," if they want to, moving in and out of each other's range -- although by the time somebody actually attacks, it's too late to dodge. But if lag turns out to be a serious problem, I'd be willing to "lock down" combat -- so you can hold a weapon or move, but not both. The setting of the game would actually make that fairly plausible.


I have to say, I'm amused that a three-day waiting period before a resurrection is considered to be unreasonably long. I realize that game "death" is expected to be fairly trivial, but I think this does work for what I'm looking to accomplish. I want combat to be taken fairly seriously -- not something that most players will jump into for the hell of it. I want even the combat-prone players to consider retreat to be a viable option -- and this may be equivalent to the low-consequences "defeat" people are expecting, since the safest method of retreat would involve becoming incorporeal, and re-manifesting costs energy.

Actually, "dead" players can probably float around incorporeally, too. Incorporeal characters are little soul-flames, anonymous and incapable of communicating or otherwise interacting with the world... although you could hover over your killer's shoulder in an attempt to unnerve them. Or bobble around a still-living friend in an attempt to get their attention, then lead them to your killer...

But I digress. Thank you all for your input.