My ultimate goal as of now is to create a Third Person Shooter M.U.D. I don't know where to start describing the game and there's no way to give a clear description of how this game will play without making a movie, so I'll just start describing sequentially. This is mainly a Team PvP game, no free for all games. It basically combines the game play of Guild Wars with Gunz: The Duel. This is a fast Third Person Shooter that combines the 7 skills bar that typical RPGs use, like in Guild Wars and LotR: Online. You make the keystroke assignments for the skills yourself, you cannot click on the menu to activate your skills since you need your mouse for aiming. You can have any key or mouse button activate a skill, or use your weapon along with customizing your movement buttons. This game is fast paced with large indoor environments, and includes games like Deathmatch, CTF, King of the Hill, and others that I haven't thought of yet. There is no storyline, just a jump in and start playing game. As you start up this game, you can create and do the usual customization of your character. The typical stuff. Once you're done customizing your character, you will be prompted with a menu to increase four different stats with some starting points. There are four stats: Strength, Speed, Intelligence, and Mind. Strength gives your character access to more guns and items, increases your melee damage, decreases fatigue when you get tired from running, and increases your inventory size. Speed increases your running speed, enhances your jumps and dodges, and gives access to melee and other acrobatic skills. Intelligence increases the potency of any skill (magical or melee), increases your mana regeneration rate, and gives access to offensive damaging and enfeebling spells. Mind increases your defense against non-magical damage and gives you access to all kinds of healing and warding spells. Your starting equipment can be some different types of guns, swords, and staves. The starting guns are just the typical hand gun, rifle, rocket launcher, the usual. Mid to high level guns will be unusual. One can needle your opponent into place, one will fire a mechanical bug that drains your opponent's life over time, and others. The melee weapons consist mainly of swords and halberds. You can wield two single handed weapons (including guns), but halberds are two handed. Their main source of damage comes from either using skills unlocked from your speed stat and/or increasing your strength stat. Staves are for magical users. They increase the range of your distance spells and gives you latent abilities, like decreased mana usage when using a spell, increase your mana pool, and other latent abilities. They're two handed, so you can't have other weapons out at the same time. Stats are very dependent on each other when you are deciding what kind of player you wish to be. If you want access to all sorts of guns and items, Strength will be your choice stat. If you want access to a variety of guns but want to have some healing power to increase your survivability, Strength and Mind will be your choice stats. Intelligence by itself will make you deadly, but you have absolutely no defense. Your enfeebling spells will help you (like slowing down your enemy's movement or paralysis) but will only ensure your survivability for a very short time, so you need to kill your enemy before they kill you. If you're not willing to take that risk, some points in Speed or Mind will help. You could also be a pure healer with your Mind stat, but will have no offense or acrobatic defense. The latent defense against damage from your Mind stat will definitely help, but you can only survive for a short time. Some points in Speed will help, or Intelligence to increase the potency of your warding spells. Speed by itself will make you an acrobatic assassin. You can outrun your opponents and can dish out extreme damage and hinder your opponents with your skills. The catch is you have to be really close to your opponent to dish out some real damage. You'll have to be really sneaky in order to get close to your opponent without getting hurt or hindered. I think I've written enough for now. What do you think? Good? Bad? I'd like to know what everyone thinks. I want this to be a new kind of play style that combines fast TPS action with RPG teamwork. Thanks for any input. [Edited by - Drunken_Monkey on April 18, 2008 1:34:22 AM]

Sounds very interesting, I like the idea of the skills leaning on each other. I am not entirely sure about the 4 skills though, I think 3 may be better, just have one general magic one. You should, at character creation, choose one skill skill for a, say, 3 point bonus and one for a 1 point bonus. Then, as you play you level up in all skills. If you spend a lot of time running, your speed would go up, carrying as many weapons as you can and punching would boost your strength and so on. This way you can make an all round character or a specialised character.

As for magic, the player could at character creation, choose spells to start with. If magic was he 3+, he could choose 3, if it was his 1+ he could choose 2, else one. Then, when the player killed someone, they might leave a "scroll" behind with that spell on it. That could then be added to their list of available spells. At the start of each game, depending on their total magic skill, they could choose which spells they brought in to the battle. The limit of spells that can be taken would vary depending on their skill. These are the only spells that could be dropped for other players.

I am not sure if the player should loose the spell when they drop it. If they did, some spells would have to be very common. The side effect of this is, there could be very rare spells that if you got, you might not want to use for fear of loosing it. Obviously, these spells could not be chosen at the start, but spells can be bought when a certain magic level is reached. Or, at character creation, at random one set of spells would be available, but there are many different sets and to get spells from other sets you have to find them.

This could also be applied to weapons, if you choose strength as 3+, you could start with 3 weapons. There would be your standard rifle, but there would be rare weapons like a rocket launcher (say). This would function in the same way as the magic.

Not sure how this would apply to speed, maybe shoes?

Sounds fun. How are you working the inventory? Will it be a "drop current, grab new" system like in many curent FPS games (Halo, for instance) or will you have to collect gear, then sort through it in a window, like Diablo? Little interface hiccoughs like that would lead to some embarrassing deaths, and some swearing.

Reminds me a bit of Savage, actually, where you're levelling up, earning money, and picking new gear to fight with. In Savage, your team is working up a tech tree, and you just buy the better stuff with gold, but the idea is there.

I'd be worried about the "found" items being too uber. If they're not worthwhile, then nobody will bother with them, but if they're unbeatable, they'll turn the game into a race to see who can get the BFG first. Giving them limited use, like the Redeemer in UT, could help mitigate that.

I assume you are talking to me as I can find no reference to "finding" stuff in the original post, my apologies if you are not!

I think I may envisage a slightly different game to you (probably because I am not entirely sure what an MUD is, think it is a multi-user dungeon, but I don't know what that means) I was picturing more of a square arena, maybe with some boxes in it or whatever. Each game would be limited to say, 5v5. The finding aspect wouldn't be finding at all. You would just stumble upon the during the game by chance. Players wouldn't be able to go find them. Furthermore, I am picturing quite frantic combat more akin to Halo than anything else. This means, that the spell/gun could be dropped upon death and then passed on to someone else before even being used. The really uber spells could maybe only work in close range so that players would have to put themselves in risk to use them. However, maybe a limited use for certain spells would be a good idea.

As for the swapping weapons, I am not quite sure. I think the Halo-esque system would be best, however, with some characters being able to carry more than 2 weapons, cycling through them to get the right one to drop could be annoying. Maybe a mix of the two?

I was responding to this:

Quote:

Original post by Drunken_Monkey The starting guns are just the typical hand gun, rifle, rocket launcher, the usual. Mid to high level guns will be unusual. One can needle your opponent into place, one will fire a mechanical bug that drains your opponent's life over time, and others.

But your reply was pretty much just what I was looking for.

What I'm not getting from the OP is a real idea of what the gameplay feels like. Frenetic, Halo-esque fragfest seems appropriate, but having to reroll stats every time you die would really suck. Do you roll up once and consistently respawn as that dude until you manually change your config, like in the MP mode of Deus Ex? Are you removed from the game for a round when you die, like in Rainbow 6?

The more serious RP gaming is usually slow, even turn-based, allowing you to take advantage of all your stat and skill advantages, and to bring a diverse array of gear and moves to bear. If it's a twitch game, you'll need to keep the controls simple so the player can keep focused. The conflict there is obvious, and difficult to surmount. How does this idea surmount it?

Ok, sorry, at least I answered your question!

As for your latest question, I thought the player would level up at the end of each game, depending on how well they did in the various areas. However, I guess this is more of a Persistent Shooter than a M.U.D. (looked it up)

MUD doesn't really imply any specific game-play elements.It is a rather antiquated term though.

There's a mod for UT out there, where you level up your character, and your weapons, as you play. A kill earns XP, and each hit with a weapon earns weapon skill, so if you use the Shock Rifle all the time, you can get it levelled up to do more damage, fire faster, etc. They also had crazy stuff, like magic spells for invisibility, speed, summoned monstered, invulnerability, etc. that you could point "skill points" into when you leveled up.

It was poorly balanced, and if you joined an active server there were always three or four demigods out there with flak cannons that blot out the sun and 54837 HP and "feedback" skills that hurt you when you shoot them. Don't let that happen to you.

Sorry for the late reply. College is being an ass to me right now :(

The reason for the second magical stat (Intelligence) is to keep players from having deadly magical spells and extremely potent healing spells at the same time. That would make the system hard to balance. If you want your character to have offensive and defensive magic, you'd make a great support character for both attacking and supporting, but you won't be able to be the main nuker or healer.

Also it's to increase the diversity of the gameplay. Remember, that characters with high Speed can make great use of Intelligence to increase the deadliness of their skills and have access to spells to enfeeble the enemy to make them easier to kill.

Players with high Strength can make great use of Intelligence to give themselves more ways to hurt and enfeeble the enemy. Speed, Intelligence, and Mind are the only pools that gives you access to more skills.

Skills, items, and weapons are all bought and require a minimal amount of one or more stats. You'll be given a starting amount of money when you create your character so you can buy your stuff.

All items will consist of mechanical devices to add more diversity to the way you play.

One of the items will be a grappling hook that stays on your left or right arm. The grappling hook can make great surprise attacks and could be very useful for CTF. If you're holding two single-handed weapons, you won't be able to use one of them while the grappling hook is fired depending on which arm it's on. If you take enough damage while swinging, you fall. I don't want to do what UT3 did and make you fall when you take 1 point of damage, that was NOT FUN AT ALL. However, it will make the game very unbalanced if you don't fall at all, so I gotta find the sweet spot.

I haven't thought of any other devices yet, but I can say that I do not want to add things like potions or traps that will directly affect yours or others health or mana.

Items will be in a weight system. Increasing your Strength increases your weight capacity.

You do not drop your items, weapons, or spells when you die. If you want an item, you need to buy it.

You gain a base amount of experience and money at the end of each game and more experience and money depending on how many rounds or points your team won.

Quote:

Original post by Iron Chef Carnage There's a mod for UT out there, where you level up your character, and your weapons, as you play. A kill earns XP, and each hit with a weapon earns weapon skill, so if you use the Shock Rifle all the time, you can get it levelled up to do more damage, fire faster, etc. They also had crazy stuff, like magic spells for invisibility, speed, summoned monstered, invulnerability, etc. that you could point "skill points" into when you leveled up. It was poorly balanced, and if you joined an active server there were always three or four demigods out there with flak cannons that blot out the sun and 54837 HP and "feedback" skills that hurt you when you shoot them. Don't let that happen to you.

I LOVE RPG Invasion. I still play it :D