Saturday, November 26, 2011

When a design doesn't work, what do you do?

So I'm working on the Scrin right now while Doug continues to get his thoughts together for NOD. One of the things I was really looking forward to with my Scrin design was a new type of lance weapon called a Prism Lance. This weapon would work a lot like a normal beam lance however the effect would be that the beam doesn't do any damage while "hitting" a target. Once the beam shut off however there would be a large explosion and the target and anything around the target would take splash damage. This would in effect turn any Lance based unit into an artillery unit becoming very dangerous.

So I got it up and running and it worked. Sort of. The beam hits. Once the beam shuts off I got an explosion to happen and the enemy units took the damage like they were supposed to. That should mean that everything is great right? Nope. In practice it actually made little difference whether the damage was done when the beam hit or a second later when it shut off. Also the "blast" looked crappy at best. Finally it just didn't work well. SO, back the the drawing board.

My new design for this weapon (I'm not letting this go btw) is to use the charge up of the NOD Obelisk of Light and then instead of a beam firing it will fire off an energy "pluse" that will go boom.

Another example is my Carrier ship with the energy orbs that go boom. These work pretty well in use but I think I need to re-evaluate the explosion to try and get a different effect for when they hit/explode. Otherwise they are pretty close to what I want. The problem is that in use the pillar of light that is caused by the explosion for some reason causes the game to crash after use if I have it damage both ground and air targets. Weird, but a stable game is more important to me than a cool effect.

Whats the point of me saying all of this? Well, what it comes down to is quite simple. Just because one design looks good on paper doesn't mean it will work well in game. However you never know until you try. I would never have bothered with the Obelisk Charge and the big explosion afterwords if I hadn't gotten the carrier set up. I'm thinking that the Prism Cannon will fire the same weapon as the Carriers use but these are just "used" in a different way. It should be interesting to say the least.

2 comments:

UltraKiroXei said...

There are many ways to design If you want to help them: contributing, making models for design, ripping audio, texture with weapons, and stuffs, and etc. I'm still doing the models right now, and start working on textures.

Anonymous said...

Well Ultra, most people were trying to practice mod stuffs and others have to deal with their own reasons. I guess that all things doesn't have to be with one unit with one simple weapon. It can be anything like units are equipping with any weapons. Some unit weapons needs certain upgrade requirements for this. It just like every game modders doesn't have plans for this!