04-04-2013, 12:19 PM
... or, how my game's bosses can't be assumed to be encountered at certain points.
Alright. So some back story. My project doesn't follow a single linear story that I can predict the player to follow. Rather, you are given 31 days to work out how to save the world(s) from an ensuing disaster, and whatever you do until Day 31 is pretty much up to you. Freedom to explore and freedom to pursue quests, the enemies will grow in power after particular days in particular areas.
In what is probably pretty much the social links of Persona 3 and 4, this project has character quests to follow, one for each of the party members. You build your relationships with the characters, sort out their character arcs, and whoever you're the most friendly with will influence the final showdown. There isn't exactly a main quest to speak of, so the bosses are part of these nine threads you may chose to follow.
How? I can't predict that. Pretty much right from the beginning the player is free to go wherever and recruit any of the characters. This leads to for example, a player being up to the middle of the game but only now working on the quest of a character that was introduced in the beginning. Any boss fights in these quests are in limbo, separate to the current day that defines the assumed party level average and enemy encounter strength.
The point to this topic, is that I am asking for help to work out a way around this. I have a few ideas about how to solve this, but are not sure about how well they would work:
Alright. So some back story. My project doesn't follow a single linear story that I can predict the player to follow. Rather, you are given 31 days to work out how to save the world(s) from an ensuing disaster, and whatever you do until Day 31 is pretty much up to you. Freedom to explore and freedom to pursue quests, the enemies will grow in power after particular days in particular areas.
In what is probably pretty much the social links of Persona 3 and 4, this project has character quests to follow, one for each of the party members. You build your relationships with the characters, sort out their character arcs, and whoever you're the most friendly with will influence the final showdown. There isn't exactly a main quest to speak of, so the bosses are part of these nine threads you may chose to follow.
How? I can't predict that. Pretty much right from the beginning the player is free to go wherever and recruit any of the characters. This leads to for example, a player being up to the middle of the game but only now working on the quest of a character that was introduced in the beginning. Any boss fights in these quests are in limbo, separate to the current day that defines the assumed party level average and enemy encounter strength.
The point to this topic, is that I am asking for help to work out a way around this. I have a few ideas about how to solve this, but are not sure about how well they would work:
- Bosses grow in strength according to the day value: I don't trust scripts that increase enemy stats to be particularly smooth. This would be the most simple way around the issue though, if the stats can be increased at a natural/non-broken rate and I can include skills or behaviours in latter-day conditions.
- All story-bosses are puzzle-based: Instead of straight-up using strategy or power to take down the enemy, you simply have to survive (which having more HP or DEF could help with) while you work out the required string of actions to take down the boss. This lends itself to issues of bizarre adventure game logic situations, issues of making varied puzzles, what happens on failure, or when narrative-wise it wouldn't make sense. Some guys just want to shoot you.
- Character quests are slightly bound to the day value: This would mean you wouldn't be able to progress with a certain quest until a certain day, thus allowing me to know that a boss has a certain amount of strength. Persona's social links had a schedule to follow, however P3 and P4 take place over more than a month, and their social links don't have bosses. (Though sometimes you were required to have a certain level of X statistic, there was padding to increase the relationship a few decimals if you didn't do something well enough.) I am not too fond of this though as I don't want to force the player to have to not do certain things on certain days, or wait on stages, or what have you.
