Monday Musings #7: Metroid Game Jam
The Metroid Game Jam started on Sunday. As it begins, I want to examine a mechanic that I want to use for my project. For some time now, I have toyed with the idea of a connected pool of Health and Attacking Resources. Attacking Resources here refer to concepts such as Ammo, Mana, or weapon damage. I like the idea of the player having to balance their aggression so that they do not lower their health too much. This idea of having Attacking Resources affect Health also presents some interesting balance options, as more powerful attacks will drain more health. This could unbalance a game pretty easily as well. Before I get into the mechanic that I want to use for my game jam game, I want to go over a couple of related ideas.
Unified HP and MP
I designed this mechanic for a turn-based RPG that I am writing the design document for. I am calling the unified HP and MP stat SP. For this game, I want the player characters to have access to a few powerful and situational spells. These spells will be potent enough to shift the tide of battles, and they will not be direct-damage attacks. Instead, the player will deal almost all of their damage with standard attacks, while the spells provide opportunities for greater damage, healing, buffs, debuffs, and more.
A basic mock-up of that game’s battle UI
I find this mechanic exciting because it will put a premium on spells. The game’s strategy will focus entirely around using spells at the right time to set up the enemy for big damage, while not endangering your characters. I also find MP to be a largely uninteresting mechanic. MP makes sense in games where the characters do not return to full health after each battle. These games require resource management on the part of the player between battles, but I generally prefer games that allow every fight to challenge the player to their fullest. By restoring SP at the end of each battle, individual fights will put the player’s resource management to the test.
Enemies will also have SP, casting spells and taking damage in the same manner as the player characters. This will mean that the player might want to bait out certain enemy spells in order to weaken them, or time attacks to hit right after a big spell. This will also require programming the enemy AI so that they cast spells intelligently. If enemies spam spells until they are super weak, or never casts them for fear of lowering their own SP, the combat will not make the most use of the SP mechanic. That said, some enemies will need to spam magic, or to not cast at all for the enemy types to remain interesting.
The combat, while turn-based, incorporates action elements to allow skilled players to avoid damage, score critical hits, and recover SP. When attacking, the player will hold down the attack button to Charge up their attack. This Charging mechanic provides the player the opportunity to do big damage, and to time when their attack will hit to avoid enemy blocks. Players can also block attacks to reduce damage, and if they time the block well enough, it will restore some of the player’s SP. These action elements will help to balance the game by allowing players to lower their characters’ SP with spells while still warding off damage based on their own skills.
Mixing HP and SP in a traditional turn-based game would require a very large pool of SP. Action elements balance out that requirement by allowing players to prevent damage entirely. Enemies operating on the same mechanic means that the strategy of spell timing carries over to the AI as well. If the spells in the game did a lot of damage or were needed in too many scenarios, the player would have a lot of trouble managing their SP.
Equipped Weapons Adjusting HP
I originally came up with this mechanic for use in an action-RPG in the style of Monster Hunter. Players would be able to customize their own suits of armor, and equip various weapons to take down big enemies. Nothing too out of the ordinary.
The mechanic works by having the different weapons reduce the player’s health by a different amount. This health bar would represent Suit Power, so using different weapons and powers would drain more of the player’s maximum power. A pistol would only reduce the player’s maximum Suit Power by a small amount, while a powerful sniper rifle would reduce Suit Power by a lot.
In shooter-RPGs like Destiny, the optimal strategy often involves hiding behind far off cover and taking potshots at enemies. These games tend not to give players enough health or defensive maneuvers to fight enemies up close. Giving players enough health to effectively fight at close range would mean that players would be too tough to kill at range. A character with a shotgun might be able to fight their way through most encounters, but they could do just as well if not better with a sniper rifle because enemies would not be able to deal enough damage to take the player down.
Weapons that adjust Suit Power would allow a character with a shotgun that did not drain Suit Power to fight up close, while a character with a heavy drain sniper rifle would be better suited to stealthy ranged combat. Some weapons could even provide bonuses to Suit Power, making characters more tanky. Suit Power provides another statistic that I could use to balance the various weapons in the game, as I could adjust the level of Power Drain for more powerful weapons.
Unified HP and Ammo
When thinking about how to implement the Suit Power mechanic into a Metroid-style game, I realized that it would not work well. Weapons adjusting Suit Power would work well in a shooter-RPG because it would allow different weapon classes to play different styles against the same enemies. In a Metroid-like game, puzzles require specific weapons, and some enemies can only be killed using certain weapons. In that case, weapon selection does not present the player with a meaningful choice. The player must use the weapon that they need to advance through the puzzle, or to beat the boss. That means, as a I designer, I could adjust enemy damage instead of player health in order to balance those encounters and it would have the same result.
So, I thought about how I could alter the mechanic to better fit the formula. I thought about having the weapons drain Suit Power every time they fired, but that seemed like it would be really hard for the player to manage. Then, I thought about draining Suit Power every time the player had to reload, but then I thought about one of my favorite games, and how it deal with reloading: Mass Effect.
In Mass Effect weapons do not use ammo. Instead, each weapon has a heat sink. When the player fires the weapon, heat builds up. If the player fires for too long, the weapon overheats and needs to cool down. So, what if each of the weapons in my Metroid game had a power meter that ticked down as the player fires, and when the weapon runs empty, a clip of power is drained from the suit. If the player stops firing, the weapon recharges on its own.
This mechanic brings some skill and meaningful decisions back into the equation. While before the player would simply be restricted to certain levels of health during certain segments, the player will need to manage the power levels of all these weapons so that they do not lose health during key moments. Alternately, players will be able to intentionally drain their health to keep firing.
The Jam
The Metroid Game Jam runs for the next three months, so I will be posting more updates about my work on that game in the future.
