Combat System

Thanks to my teammate AJ (http://foodiegamer.blogspot.com/) I recently read an article on Gamasutra about the process of creating and iterating a combat system.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/175950/the_fundamental_pillars_of_a_.php

I enjoyed how the article put the process of building a combat system into a simple and easy to understand module, but what really caught my eye was a comment by user Bart Stewart that described the external factors that can make conflict interesting:

"One thing I notice, though, is something that seems pretty common to combat AI in most games. Namely, that "tactics" is being defined here as really applying only to personal combat with internal resources. But tactics also refers to the smart use of external environmental elements to obtain and exploit a force advantage over an adversary.

This is mentioned indirectly by describing a "tendency" (presumably of novice combat AI designers) to want to allow multiple mobs to function as a squad, apparently just to make a game feel more "immersive" or to make enemies "feel human." It's a fair point that a small set of interesting choices is better than a big vocabulary of indistinguishable actions. But I think dismissing environmental tactical choices as mere "immersion" would miss some opportunities for offering more enjoyable combat play.

In addition to tactics enabled by internal resources -- e.g., HP/mana, cooldown timers, recovery delays, shields, movement speed -- environmental features can be resources as well. Line of sight may be the most common environmental phenomenon that characters can be programmed to respect, creating opportunities for movement and stealth tactics. But there are plenty of other phenomena that also allow tactically interesting character actions and choices: day/night cycles, rain/snow/fog, smoke, entrenchment (digging into the terrain), smell (what if you want to sneak past guard animals?), sound (the Muffle spell in Skyrim), camouflage, heat, pressure, radiation, mass, and so on.

Think about the Thief games. Both light and sound were functional environmental elements of combat AI design. By allowing characters (player and NPCs) to be aware of and make choices about these environmental phenomena, the range of interesting player choices possible -- and the coolness of what NPCs might do because they could detect those phenomena and make decisions regarding them -- allowed a truly satisfying game to emerge. Tactics weren't just about my internals versus your internals; the world itself mattered.

Not every game needs exactly those features. The point is that external environmental resources can also be valuable in tactical combat AI design because they enable more interesting choices. They're not just for immersion."
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Environmental elements could be a really interesting component of our game. It's the Raymond Legends aspect of our design that makes our game unique compared to the other pitches as well as an indie title. How we could incorporate musical cues or objects in the foreground or background to change up the combat experience is something I want to do more research on and absolutely incorporate in our game.