In the last post we added in a vertical traversal mechanic. Although I actually did have a mana meter in Cloak I didn’t figure out a way to refuel the mana, partially because I was initially thinking of using mana potions and making them very scarce so a player would have to use their powers very sparingly. This is at odds with the improvisational design philosophy I wanted to adopt. One flaw that I felt Dishonored had (and to some extent Dishonored 2) was that powers were the core driver of the emergent gameplay but those powers were inherently finite because of the mana bar. And using the single most useful skill (which is blink) could eventually lead to cutting yourselves from entire sections of a level if you did not use it sparingly. Then I thought, what if the main character has something inherent in the level design that fuels their powers? I asked my partner, and we brainstormed some ideas. My partner suggested that the player be able to suck the life force from the enemies in the level and use that to refuel the mana bar. I liked the idea but I eventually came to reject it because it was very similar to the high chaos/low chaos dichotomy of Dishonored. But not in a beneficial way. One of the criticisms of Dishonored 1 is the high chaos swashbuckling playthrough is more fun for most people than a low chaos playthrough because it makes more use of the robust combat mechanics and emergent systems. In addition for the theme of my game, which is more about a heist than an assassination, a mechanic that encourages killing would be detrimental to the roguish aesthetic. I wanted a game with a dichotomy of sneaking and fleeing instead of sneaking and killing. This led to me thinking about a round table discussion with Warren Spector and Doug Church where they were describing their philosophies regarding immersive sims.
In it, Doug Church said something that surprised me at the time. He described a game of Thief as a game of stealing and losing territory. That the player is navigating territory that belongs to the individual AIs patrolling it both claiming it and surrendering it as they move through it. I didn’t understand it at the time because I was retroactively viewing Thief through late-period immersive sims which tend to feature far less dynamic lighting. A lighting system that I brought into Cloak. And then it hit me. Doug Church was describing not only the line of sight or knocking out enemies, but rather was primarily talking about the dynamic lighting, with the player’s territory mostly being the shadows and the NPCs territory being the light. And this prompted the creation of a system that directly incentivizes interacting with this territory game. And the fastest way to do this is to create a resource incentive. Essentially the player has a power that they can use to dim the lights in a room, siphoning the energy to fill their mana bar. This temporarily gives the player control over the “territory” while giving them more options to use their powers, encouraging both the core game mechanics of sneaking AND enabling improvisation. It also creates an interesting choice involving the complete extinguishment of light sources as they are all tied to power sources. If you cut that power source, you are taking the associated territory permanently but losing access to restoring your resource pool. Moreover, the player will almost always be able to find a light source to dim, meaning that their improvisational abilities are almost never too far from a fuel source as long as the player is strategic and isn’t overly greedy with light extinguishing. The player thus is making a choice between enabling easier sneaking or leaving means of improvisational escape. I implemented the changes to the lighting system and the power resource management system and I’m very satisfied with the results.
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Jed MyersDeveloper Archives
February 2021
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