Happiness Is a Warm Crowbar (or Baseball Bat, or Axe, or…)

First, the bad news: I know I got you all excited for a riveting discussion of tiles this week, but as it turns out, I misled you. We will actually not be talking about tiles this week. For that, I’m sorry. My dissertation on tiles will have to wait. (Tiles.)

But, the good news is: This week we will be talking about the potential for wailing on monster dudes with crowbars. And that’s a neat concept!

The combat angle of Terror High has, quite frankly, had me stumped for a while. I had a feeling for what I wanted it to be, but couldn’t quite translate that feeling into actual mechanics. My guidelines for combat were:

• The player shouldn’t feel too powerful. Good horror tends to hinge on the power imbalance between the protagonists and the unknown dangers they face. Players shouldn’t ever feel too secure.
• Whatever weapons the characters did use had to be somewhat plausible. What would a teenager be most likely to use to protect themselves in such a supernatural setting? Which leads right into…
• No guns. The Goonies didn’t whip out an AR-15 to take care of the Fratellis (outside of my as-yet unproduced fan sequel Goonies II: Goon Harder), and my characters wouldn’t either. Not only do I feel it would be slightly ridiculous for teens to be armed to the teeth with the latest firepower, it feels a little tasteless and morally dubious in a time where school shootings occur with frightening regularity.

With these rules in mind, I initially envisioned that each teen would have their own, unique way of dealing with their supernatural interlopers. Unfortunately, this approach introduced other concerns. For one, I had a couple weapon ideas that felt right and fit with the character, but I was at a loss for others. It was difficult coming up with something different enough for each of the characters. For another, figuring out when and how to get the character their weapon, plot-wise, proved tricky. For another-er, having only one or maybe two weapons per character also risked monotony, and raised other questions as well: Would the weapons need ammo? If so, would there be random, specific ammo drops and hope the player’s suspension of disbelief is strong enough? If not, and scarcity of ammo is not a concern, how to ensure the balance of power remained in favor of the Baddies? And so on.

What finally occurred to me the other day was that I was struggling to cram a square peg into a non-Euclidean hole, remaining beholden to my initial idea when each of those questions that kept popping up again and again was telling me it wasn’t the ideal solution.

One of the guidelines I listed above was “What would a teenager be most likely to use to protect themselves in such a supernatural setting?” The answer wasn’t a special weapon only they had access to. The answer was whatever was around them.

The new plan is for characters to have access to a variety of mundane, every day items – lead pipes, hammers, axes, that sort of thing. (Think Monster Squad, not Suicide Squad.) Each item will vary in terms of usefulness, durability, and so forth. It’ll be scrappy and improvisational. Like jazz! But, like, with blood instead of saxophones.

Now, let me make it clear that I am under no impression that this is by any means an Original Idea. Plenty of games inside and outside of the horror genre have used this method. But plop plop, fuzz fuzz, oh what a relief it was to have this notion crystallize in my brain.

It also means that I have the opportunity to implement my absolute favorite form of inventory in games: The Grid, aka Inventory Tetris!

I still plan on characters eventually working their way up to a more powerful, unique weapon as per my original idea, but the path to that point will feel much more catch-as-catch-can and therefore, fingers crossed, that much more tense.

There obviously still remain many design hurdles to clear for the combat system, but with this major design decision made, I can move forward with a clear goal in mind. I found a new (and surprisingly free) motion capture database called Mixamo from which I’ve gathered some very promising melee motion capture, and I’ve started the process of converting these to sprites as detailed in my previous post about motion capture.

That’s all I’ve got for you this week, Terrorteers. I’ll see you next week when we finally talk about tiles, or possibly any other number of topics, because to be quite honest I’m making this up as I go along.