Sunday, July 29, 2012

Making changes while adding vs getting it all in there and then working on it

There are two general ways of dealing with a project like ours.  The first is to try and keep everything balanced and working properly as we move on in the design, constantly changing small things to try and make the overall experience feel good while continuing to show improvement.  The second is to get as much work done as possible and then go back once everything is done and tweak then.

Each method has it's advantage and disadvantage.  When we originally started working on the mod we followed the latter design focus, we were just trying to get it all in.  This led to the Xenoforce 9C mod, a version that while popular was not very well done.  It did have SEED and AW and UC in the game, but the game was fundamentally missing some important parts.  Upon inspection it was determined that we simply could not go back and tweak the choices we had made, that the problems were too severe.

Hench why we have gone to the former way of doing things, trying to tweak the game as we go.  The upside to this is every release should be balanced out.  The downside is that every release takes longer as each one needs to be balanced.  In the end what we're looking at doing now is a complete rebalancing where we take all things into consideration.  This is important due to some of the new ideas that Doug has come up with, most importantly being the "armor resistance" design.  This change is very very cool and will help give the units that have it just the edge they need.  Basically what it comes down to is the armor will degrade as used and once fully degraded the unit takes extra damage.  This degrading can not be repaired or fixed, but over time the armor will come back to normal.  The idea is that a unit in battle once pulled out will get field repairs or maybe the pilot will become re-energized and will once again be able to act quicker making their units more protected in the field.

While I know everyone wants the next version to come out yesterday and they want their seed and robotech too all I can say is that this change, along with all the other modifications should lead to a much more interesting game.  Faster battles, important units actually having a greater roll in the field, rolls being more transparent, and each faction having it's own special way to either help offset the cost of their units or having their own way of making additional funds in the field.   It will be worth the wait, and it will be quite cool to see happen.

2 comments:

Alan said...

One: Yay a post
Two: Didnt you make a post like this a while back?
Three: Im glad you are doing it this way because i went back to 9c cause i wanted to play Seed and the entire game seemed to easy so thanks

azuza001 said...

Sort of. I commented on someone elses comment about this, I was trying to go into better detail here.

The basic rundown is that we want our games to run quicker, faster, and for units to have more value.