TurnShip DevBlog #1
Hello again! It's been a while, hasn't it.
I feel awkward writing posts like this, but I hope posting about problems and solutions, both designwise and brainwise, might help other people make their own games or projects. So here we go.
I had a break from TurnShip to work on some other projects, because I wasn't finding it fun to develop or think about. But, I never stopped to examine why I was feeling that way about it.
Despite people saying the pandemic is a good time to get creative, I think a lot of creative people are finding it much harder to work - I know I am. So I think that tied into it.
But also, I'd just been working on the most basic ship types, Pawns, to get the combat basics down. Trying to make a vertical slice for testing multiplayer. But it was boring! Also, narrow - because of this, I was missing some glaring design flaws in combat!
(All of these ships are just stretched out Pawns. My favourite is Rotund King, which is also how I wish to be referred to after eating too much.)
In TurnShip, ships have a steam reservoir, which is topped up by a small amount each turn. You use steam to move and fire. Basic resources, right? And Pawn class ships only have short range guns.
Unfortunately, this meant that the best strategy was always: 1) Do nothing 2) Let the enemy spend all their steam moving to you 3) Blast them to smithereens. They can't run or fight back without steam!
I was hoping for ebb and flow to the battles, not just ebb. Design problem 1: How to make players move?
Solution: Lob explosives at them from half a mile away.
Widening my focus from basic ships let me get more creative about weapon types and abilities. Also, I'd never really pinned down what Bishop ships were for.
Rooks as castles were clearly going to be defensive; Knights slow and offensive; Queens fast and offensive; the King, as your command centre, is your highest risk ship and tries to stay out of combat.
For Bishops, I'd been toying with a few ideas about them acting as comms relays, or maybe healers. But those ideas weren't ideal, adding more complexity - comms relays means coding a comms system (difficult), and healers just mean prolonging battles (boring). So snipers it is. Or mortarers, anyway.
And playing against them, it should feel very satisfying when you chase them down. Bishops are weak defensively. (What are you going to do, run half a mile away and shoot me? Ye- no!)
But this isn't the end of this problem. We're trying to encourage a mix of close and long range combat. Now players won't just wait for each other to approach, but the best strategy is for them *both* to sit at long range from each other, taking potshots. Whoever closes first still has less steam, so we need to encourage them to come together. Problem 2: How do we encourage closer range combat for both players?
Solution: Armour.
Armour causes long range shots to glance off, doing less damage.
There's a min and max range for effectiveness, and a falloff in between that I can tune through testing. This should encourage ranged weapons to stay away, but not too far. And if they're not too far away, then other ships can close the distance in a turn or two and attack the snipers.
So the players are encouraged to move their Bishops into optimal range, along with some guards to protect them. The range system can can be expanded later when I add map obstacles to block shots, or block the view of enemy ships.
Armour has also given me a reason to tweak another feature/problem, components and debuffs - more on that in another post.
Good luck with whatever you're working on, and see you soon :)
