Quote:
Original post by twood
Originally I had been thinking more of a sandbox style game, but I'm worried it will be difficult to keep the game both interesting and balanced. Going story based provides an easier way to teach the player what is going on and how the game works. Plus I think it might be easier for development...
Any thoughts on this?
Ultimately I think the difficulty of keeping balance and maintaining interest will depend on the ways in which levels (story based or procedurally generated) vary. I picture it working in a similar way to the "Theme"/"Tycoon" (theme hospital, roller coaster tycoon etc.) games - a level is defined by a location, a set of goals and possibly some restrictions:
Locations:
Locations might affect which equipment and spell types are the most effective or perhaps the availability of short/low reward quests vs long/high reward quests.
Goals:
Restrictions/Modifiers:
When you think about it in terms of variables like this, it should be quite possible to define some metric of level "difficulty" and generate a sequence of levels with increasing difficulty. There might however be some situations where an impossible level is generated if all of the permutations aren't considered.
In the end, if you decide to design your own levels manually you'll still be using a similar set of conditions to define them and they need to be fun in and of themselves - adding a bit of story text to each level will only go so far towards maintaining player interest.
Personally I like the idea of a story mode with a few pre-set levels and (skippable) tutorial included and a "quick play" mode or something similar where randomly generated levels can be played indefinitely.
