Rock Game progress report
Ok, so what's been going on?
Firstly, I moved my site to www.rocklegendgame.com, which will be the new name. Secondly, the game will come under the 'Kudos' brand now, so it's officially Kudos : Rock-Legend, or 'KRL', which sounds kinda cool. The game *does* play in a similar way to Kudos from a basic concept POV, but it's way more different to Kudos than a traditional sequel or expansion pack. It's a major variation on the turn based life sim strategy thing.
I'm currently at the 'check the long term playability and balance' stage, which is proving tricky, and rewarding at the same time. Many big changes and tweaks have happened 'under the hood' that you can't easily point at.
I changed the way that the success of gigs is determined in quite a big way, to enable me to scale the game properly from small pubs to big venues (18,000 capacity is the biggest right now).
I also had to revamp the publicity stuff to reflect this properly. There needs to be a point (stardom wise) where handing out leaflets to passers by just won't have the same effect on your popularity (in percentage terms) as it did when you were a little pub band, and the old system didn't allow for that.
I also decided to 'scale' the rates at which stage show expectations, and performance expectations improve with bigger venues. Eddie Van Halen may be twice as good, or maybe 4 times as good as a local pub guitarist, but you expect him to have 100 times more lights, lasers and visual effects on stage, and I needed to allow for that too.
My current task is to balance a new thing I put in which monitors all the different 'inputs' to a gigs success, and causes disproportionate problems if any of them is tragically low. For example, we probably reckon that the light show accounts for maybe just 20-30% of the impact of a gig, but if that light show is totally awful (1 30w bulb at madison square gardens) then it needs to have a seriously bad effect on the overal gig. This way, you need to keep an eye on everything that goes in to a good gig in order for it to go well.
Firstly, I moved my site to www.rocklegendgame.com, which will be the new name. Secondly, the game will come under the 'Kudos' brand now, so it's officially Kudos : Rock-Legend, or 'KRL', which sounds kinda cool. The game *does* play in a similar way to Kudos from a basic concept POV, but it's way more different to Kudos than a traditional sequel or expansion pack. It's a major variation on the turn based life sim strategy thing.
I'm currently at the 'check the long term playability and balance' stage, which is proving tricky, and rewarding at the same time. Many big changes and tweaks have happened 'under the hood' that you can't easily point at.
I changed the way that the success of gigs is determined in quite a big way, to enable me to scale the game properly from small pubs to big venues (18,000 capacity is the biggest right now).
I also had to revamp the publicity stuff to reflect this properly. There needs to be a point (stardom wise) where handing out leaflets to passers by just won't have the same effect on your popularity (in percentage terms) as it did when you were a little pub band, and the old system didn't allow for that.
I also decided to 'scale' the rates at which stage show expectations, and performance expectations improve with bigger venues. Eddie Van Halen may be twice as good, or maybe 4 times as good as a local pub guitarist, but you expect him to have 100 times more lights, lasers and visual effects on stage, and I needed to allow for that too.
My current task is to balance a new thing I put in which monitors all the different 'inputs' to a gigs success, and causes disproportionate problems if any of them is tragically low. For example, we probably reckon that the light show accounts for maybe just 20-30% of the impact of a gig, but if that light show is totally awful (1 30w bulb at madison square gardens) then it needs to have a seriously bad effect on the overal gig. This way, you need to keep an eye on everything that goes in to a good gig in order for it to go well.
posted by cliff at
12:17 PM
