there is a lot of features I''d like to see in a game like Hand of Odd. Lorne Lanning onces said, refering to HOO concept: think of Age of Empires, but instead of your mouse, you have GAMESPEAK to control the game. so, I try to imagine several scenarios involving GAMESPEAK interaction.
First of all, it seems to be impossible to control simultaneous and instantly a huge mass of diferent characters (or units). In Age of Empires games, the player can be viewed as a kind of GOD, controling all the moves of his civilization in a real time way. In a game like Myth: The Fallen Lords, the player is more like a general, playing in the battle field, directly giving orders to change formations, movements, attack and defense tactics, but every unit is still simultaneous and instantly controled, via the mouse.
In an Oddworld game like the HOO idea, I believe that the player should feel just like a single person, hovering around the battle fields and villagess, giving direct orders to builders, militias, shamans, or small groups of units. THe AI of the game would have to be extremely powerfull, so that things could happen naturally if we choose to take a rest for a while, or just watch the unfolding happenings by their own.
Basic concepts:
1. As the player, you should be able to create several playable characters, the "leaders" of your community. These playable units could have unique status and species features. the player could then use them, one at a time (like we do switching from Abe to Munch) to accomplish several tasks to achieve our goals (deploy an environment, restablish the balance of a particular area, fight an enemy community, develop some sceintifical research, the list goes on).
2. The playable characters should interact to diferent NPCs, to give them specific orders. so a general could say to a militar unit: "Patrol this area!", and the NPC would make his job by his own (with a complex AI system). If the unit sights an enemy, he could run to the leader and tell something like: "Sir, I saw something...", depending of his personality, or he could choose to fight the enemy, or call for help, or stand stiil, all would depend on the AI system.
3. THe playable characters, while not at the player control, should have an active behavior, based on the AI system, and not just stand still until we return to them. For instance, A general who was training soldiers in a barracks should keep doing that even if the player stops to order that, and doesn't give an specific order to stop that.
4. The characters and the environment should have a very well stablished life cycle and defined behavior, complex enough to keep developing by their own if we choose not to interact with them.
5. The GAMESPEAK set of sentences should be expanded to dozens of diferents sentences, and a dynamic sentence creator should be sorted out, so that the actual set of sentences could be stretched up to thousands of diferent combinations.
6... I can't think of anything else... Maybe later...
Any coments? Any idea you want me to elaborate in depth?
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