Oni2:Slaves of War/Design: Difference between revisions

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'''Possible value-adding features''' (in addition to the "bare minimum" list in [[../Overview#Gameplay|the Overview]]):

*<u>Realistic AI</u>. Enemies are unpredictable and inventive, understand your intentions, and react to your situation in battle.

*<u>Levels change with time of day</u>. Security in level differs, use of cover is altered; requires truly dynamic lighting.

If we’re going to emphasize the importance of trust or cooperation in the story, and even if we’re not, we should probably open the game with Mai in ruins or wilderness. The levels are empty at first and '''gradually she encounters people'''. We can use bad weather to make things feel lonely and oppressive at the beginning.<br />

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Can we use '''infrasound''' to affect the player’s mood?<br />

Design levels with the current amount of '''tension''' in the story and mission in mind. Tension can alter the openness of a space, the music and sounds, the number of civilians present, and even enemy types. Which is not to say that open spaces are automatically less tense; a clearing in the forest is pleasant in the daytime, but a campfire in a clearing at night is tense because you can’t see what’s in the darkness around you.<br />

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'''AIs are people''' too. Let them be distracted by things near them while walking casually (Oni already has AIs look in random directions when not alert). Make them react to sounds after a short delay while they think, “Did I just hear something?” and slowly stop walking, then turning to look thoughtfully at the source of the sound, or around in general. Make sure to restore the idle-to-alert loading-weapon animations.<br />

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There should be times when the player is '''impressed by scale'''. What emotions can we evoke with scale? Awe, at the size of a level. Loneliness, at the emptiness of a space. Fear, at the number of enemies. Imagine a line of enemies, giving off a light of some kind, winding their way down a hill towards the player. Imagine hordes of enemies rushing over a hilltop at you (we don’t have to be able to draw hundreds of enemies; we can use simple box models as stand-ins for distant ones).<br />

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Create a feeling of '''anticipation''' in players to get to the next level. This can be done through making a plot that they want to advance, as well as by providing thumbnails for future levels.  These thumbnails would be large, vivid and carefully composed. They could be a fading slideshow of different parts of the level, or even a short, seamlessly looping movie with ambient sounds from the level.<br />

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The '''training level''' can start with the ABCs from Oni, perhaps even the same level, and if the player plays it, she hears Mai reminiscing about Shinatama. But she can also skip straight to later “lessons”; these lessons can be taken in-between any mission. If there is a voice guiding Mai and instructing the player how to throw, it would be a great moment if they tell the player that you cannot throw someone who is facing you unless you knock them off-balance first, and then the player is instructed to try it, just to see that it’s not possible. Mai then successfully throws the person, surprising the voice in your ear. She’s strong enough to do this, but the average character class used in MP cannot (see “throw spamming” notes below). Shapeshifter should be allowed in VR training. The premise can be that Mai can see through the eyes of her opponents to better understand how they fight. A message can be displayed at the bottom of the screen saying “Shapeshifter enabled. Press F6 to cycle back, F8 to cycle forward, and F7 to return to Mai.” Later on, we only have to say “Shapeshifter enabled" to remind the player that they can do this.<br />

'''Variety in combat''' is essential, both within fights and also throughout the game. Unlocking new moves over the course of the game doesn’t always make sense when your character is experienced from the start. We could introduce new Daodan abilities over the game, but that makes game replays annoying for the player who was used to having all the end-of-game abilities. We can either take the simple approach and offer a New Game Plus, or else we can give the player most of their abilities up front and try to create changing environments or sets of enemies over time that require different kinds of skills to be put into play. All this being said, new content over time is probably less important than just making sure that the basic mechanics are fun enough that the player still enjoys them after dozens of hours.<br />

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'''Special attacks''' can end with a cool flourish, unlike regular animations. But if the character misses with such an attack, or there are other enemies around, they shouldn’t do the flourish.<br />

Some music is much more powerful when listened to in the right season/weather, so perhaps the same is true for visuals. Can environments and weather in-game be '''designed for the season''' in which that level is supposed to be? If we are implementing the feature where levels change by time of day, we can take advantage of this too with track variants (different instruments, tempo, etc.).<br />

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If we have the resources to spare, it would be fun to add something really exciting to a level but direct little attention to it, and wait for players to find it. Say they exit a base, and notice a stadium nearby with sounds of distant cheering, and upon entering it they find out they can participate in a fighting tournament.  (Imagine that music like “Yo Pumpkin Head” from Cowboy Bebop is playing, to set the tone.) This kind of surprise will create a '''joy of discovery''' and lead to the sharing of these discoveries with the community.<br />

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This also leads to a natural question about '''hypos'''. They were never realistic in the first place, or they wouldn't heal people anywhere near that quickly. Presumably they would not be needed in Oni 2 if Mai can auto-heal, but we might want to be able to use them on AI allies, which poses the dilemma of having two competing methods to heal Mai, with hypos being far more convenient. A nice solution to this is found in an old suggestion by a forum member, which is that hypos only have that healing effect on Mai because their sedatives suppress her consciousness, which in turn normally suppresses her Chrysalis. This would also explain why Mai heals under the surgeon’s knife but not when she’s injured in-game: because she was obviously sedated while they operated on her! And as far as the subject of hypos restoring the same amount of health for NPCs, nothing in Oni explicitly says that hypos dramatically heal regular people like they do with Mai, and AIs cannot use hypos, so we never see this happen in-game unless we force it with BSL. So if we ever remade Oni, we would only have to slightly rewrite some text to make it clear that normal people use hypos to recover from injuries over a much longer period of time, and that symbiotes react much differently to them. Then, in Oni 2, Mai can be more in touch with her Daodan, or learn to be at a certain point in the game, after which she can auto-heal. At the same time, hypos may become too dangerous to use by that stage in her progression if she is trying to avoid Imago.<br />

==Free agency==

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Relevant links:

:Provocative interview with Chris Crawford on interactive storytelling.

:On what made Deus Ex almost unique in the world of games.

:On the subject of the player’s actions allowing the story to play out differently each time, the Blade Runner video game is famous for this, even swapping roles for NPCs based on the player’s choices.

:Emily talks about exactly the kind of challenges I have been contemplating for the Totally Interactive concept. I think that Oni 2 would naturally avoid some of the challenges that she faces with a text-based interface.

[[Category:Oni 2]]