Other Gameplay Elements

[Domarius]

Yes, the AI will never calm down for the rest of the mission once you've done something that atrocious.

[DopeFishhh]

what about a karma factor (listen before you laugh)

 

the way things tend to go in games is once you've got the technique or map down you can run through it without much challenge. if you throw something new at the player it only lasts as long as it takes for them to figure it out (if they are good then probably not long at all)

 

what the karma system does (doesn't have to be offical or displayed on screen) is assess how the player has gone thus far, if they've done well then their score is a high positive number, if they've been scraping through by the skin of their teeth it would be a negative number (range +100 to -100). medium difficulty tries to keep the score at 0, difficult tries to keep it at -30, and easy at 30.

 

how does it effect game play? the engine goes by the karma to nudge things infavor of or against the player. say the player is sneaking past a guard, if he's been doing well (positive number) the engine will slightly increase the guards senses to make it harder to sneak past and more likely that the thief is spotted. negative the guards senses will be dulled.

 

if the thief is spotted thats bad, and thus his karma is lowered, if the thief gets into combat thats bad too so his karma is lowered. if he does well and say pick pockets someone without getting caught his karma is increased, if he snipes a guard or steals a nice piece of loot the same happens.

 

the net effect is that through multiple plays of the same mission it may be near impossible to get through it the same way and without some sort of challenge.

 

the mission maker can adjust the score and check the score, using them to do a more mission specific adjustment of the difficulty. the creativity of which is upto the mission maker, they can also adjust the difficulty settings so the engine based karma kicks in earlier or later.

 

when the karma is high the mission maker could do things like:

- send the guards on a surprise patrol

- add an extra guard to a key spot

- lock a door or increase it's lock difficulty (happens when the player gets to it)

 

when the karma is low the mission maker could do things like:

- make a guard fall asleep

- send a guard to the kitchen to get something to eat

- add extra random loot (when the player would find it)

- unlock a door or decrease it's lock difficulty (happens when the player gets to it)

 

this isn't aiming to make things any more difficult for a player or easier, just make it fair. play testing can determine if it needs to be harder or easier.

[Ishtvan]

I would call that "dynamic difficulty level" instead of "karma" (usually you don't get good karma for killing people )

 

It's an interesting idea, but personally I would rather just set the difficulty settings to one value at the beginning of the mission and then run with it. If I want to play on expert, I want the guards to be extremely hard from start to finish, not easy at the beginning and then only harder near the end when I'm doing well.

 

Also, I don't really like games with dynamic difficulty, because it always leaves me wondering: Did I get thru that difficult situation due to my own skill, or did the game just dumb it down for me because I screwed up something earlier?

 

FM's are reasonably short; it's not like you have to stay at the same difficulty for a whole game. If a player is having too much trouble, they can always restart the mission with easier difficulty settings.

[Dram]

It's a tad bit RPG-ish, but if it was limited to certain aspects of the game, it would work really well

[sparhawk]

You are free to implement whatever extension you want, once the source code is released.