I've been away from Sever for some time. I've been thinking about it, and I want to come back to it. I've been pretty swamped for the past while, and I was a little discouraged with the development. I knew I had to work on AI and scripting, both difficult areas for me. I feel like I made some really good progress on the AI at the beginning, but it still had a ways to go, and it was a bit daunting. The scripting scared me as well because I wanted it to be the best that it could be, and I didn't know where to start.
However, I would like to eventually continue its development, but I'd have to simplify my plans for scripting. There's a simpler way to do it, but it's apparently much less flexible and not always the best way to go. However, Sever's scripting likely won't be extremely complex. Plus, I can refactor it later if I really want to. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm going to go the easy route with scripting.
My plans for the AI, however, probably won't change. They weren't extremely ambitious in the first place. The most complex thing I want it to do is to navigate the map intelligently, and I have some ideas for how to do that, as explained in my last post. Everything else the AI does will probably be easier than that.
After the AI is improved and basic scripting is in place, I'll probably tweak and add to both as I start creating levels. I'm hoping that there won't be any other huge systems that I'll have to create once those are done. I'm hoping that the rest will just be minor additions as the game evolves.
Those are my thoughts about Sever. As I've been away from it, my mind has wandered a bit with other game ideas that would be fun to try out one day. The one that stands out the most is a detective puzzle game. Most Sherlock Holmes-type detective games are just hidden object games, sometimes with general mind-bender puzzles thrown in for a challenge. However, none of them really make you feel like Sherlock Holmes.
For example, Sherlock Holmes sees some white dust on someone's shoe, figures by its off-white color that it is limestone, knows that there is only one limestone quarry in the vicinity, knows that limestone falls off after a few hours, and deduces that the man was at the limestone quarry today.
No game can get the player to do anything that complex, but it could be simulated in a more simple way. Compare it to the Arkham games. Whereas the older Batman games had separate buttons for jump, punch, and kick, the Arkham games removed those in favor of a single attack button so that the player could focus more on strategy rather than on the actual attack itself. If they hadn't, it would be too much for the player to strategize "and" make his attacks land just right. They simplified one system so that the player could focus on the other.
Similarly, a Sherlock Holmes game could simplify the meaning of clues so that a player could look at them and instantly know what they are. For example, rather than allowing white powder to be anything from flour to limestone to chalk, it would just be white powder. There's only one kind of white powder, just like there's only one kind of red or blue powder, and each comes from one place. Therefore, if you see red powder on someone's shoe, you know where it came from. I don't know that we'll have powders of every color, but you see where I'm going with this. The world is simplified so that clues are easy to follow.
This way, rather than the player just clicking on a highlighted clue to hear Sherlock explain what it means, they would decipher it themselves, just like Sherlock Holmes would.
I haven't thought through all the different elements of the gameplay, like dialogue or anything else that you'd expect in a detective game, but I'd have to keep that simple as well. I considered making the game procedural somehow, but I decided that that would be beyond me, and even if I succeeded, it would probably be much more limited than if I crafted the levels myself.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. Thanks for reading!
clevceo
