Target priority settings?

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Quizer
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Joined: Mon Feb 08, 2016 5:22 pm

Target priority settings?

Postby Quizer » Wed Feb 10, 2016 6:58 pm

Have you thought about the idea of target priority settings? Some tower defense games have them, allowing the player to decide what enemy gets attacked when. It's useful for making sure that the heroes / towers get the most value out of their theoretical DPS and don't ineffectually waste their attacks. I feel that for the most part, the attack priorities hardcoded into the heroes are pretty good - Jack shoots the enemy closest to the goal, since he just hits a single one anyway, Barrows tries to spread his slow effect to as many enemies as possible, Sam tries to target clumps, and Wylde (who was called Wesley in his unlock panel for some strange reason I don't understand) seems to actually try to line up his piercing shots to hit multiple enemies. Not sure what Jane does, but her targeting must make some kind of sense, too.

Still, there are some situations where you might want to alter this behavior. Like, if there's a huge wave of regenerating zombies bearing down on you, and you don't really have the firepower to break through their healing if the heroes just spread their shots around like they do. Or maybe you'd want Barrows to only slow the front ranks, because this would actually make enemies clump up more for Sam's pumpkins. Yeah, you can click specific enemies to target them, but then the front guy will be out of range or dead a half-second later and you have to click another one, and while you are doing this you have no time to worry about things like upgrading heroes or looking for better spots to reposition them, and the game doesn't pause for you.

This is another case where being able to halt the game while you give orders would be handy. If in a crunch you could go as slow as you need and take the game a few split seconds at a time, that would be enough to make the simple single monster targeting option the game gives you work. Surely you must have considered and already rejected the idea of adding the ability to pause time to the game. What were your reasons?

Anyway, targeting priorities. Ideally, you should be able to set behavior for each character separately. Target first, target last, target low HP monsters, target high HP monsters. From there you could branch out to more esoteric edge cases or priorities that override other priorities. For a game that does this really well, check out Defenders Quest by Level Up Labs, another tower defense game that uses heroes as towers (though they can't actually move).

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[HT]Kevin
Game Designer
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Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2015 4:59 pm

Re: Target priority settings?

Postby [HT]Kevin » Thu Feb 11, 2016 10:51 am

Thanks for the suggestion -- we've alredy looked into target priority options, but for the moment it's too much work to implement and we have other areas we are focussing on (like Multiplayer).

Regarding the Game Pause -- we are still a bit torn about it - on the one hand it makes sense, cause as you say, it takes a lot of the stress out of some situations. On the other hand it can very much change the game, from a very action based to an almost turn-based game (if that is better or worse is hard to say).
We are looking into options to make a game pause feature interesting - for example there could be a limited amount of Pauses you could use per match or each pause aufter the first 3 pauses deducts some XP (which would incentive using it sparingly and picking up the challenge of not using the pause) - What would you think of that ?

Quizer
Posts: 33
Joined: Mon Feb 08, 2016 5:22 pm

Re: Target priority settings?

Postby Quizer » Thu Feb 11, 2016 7:57 pm

Generally I feel that tower defense games as a category benefit more than they suffer from being able to pause the game and take things at the pace the player wants, but I can also understand the desire to preserve the action-oriented nature of the game. Being penalized for using pause too much sounds like an acceptable compromise, I think. It would let you salvage a mission if it is teetering on the edge, which would still be better than failure, even if you get less XP for part of it, but as you say, it would otherwise encourage the player to use pause as little as needed.

The XP penalty would have to be properly calibrated to be fair. Maybe only the wave that pause is used on should be penalized, so that for as long as you avoid using it, you earn the full amount of XP, and if you do use pause, that already earned part is safe. Once you use pause on a wave, you would be free to continue to use it as much as you want without further penalty on that wave, but you should still try to go back to not using it once the immediate emergency is salvaged. You could dial down the base XP reward, then give a bonus at the end of mission summary for "unpaused waves", or something like that, so that it ends up coming roughly to the same amount. Does that make sense?

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[HT]Kevin
Game Designer
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Re: Target priority settings?

Postby [HT]Kevin » Fri Feb 12, 2016 11:32 am

It makes sense, yes!
I do like the idea of just penalizing the Wave where it was used - as you say, it could then be used multiple times and does not feel frustrating.

Quizer
Posts: 33
Joined: Mon Feb 08, 2016 5:22 pm

Re: Target priority settings?

Postby Quizer » Fri Feb 12, 2016 2:44 pm

If you go this route, you should have a visual indicator on the pause button and/or the wave bar whether using it at this moment will penalize you or not. Luckily, the nature of pause should make it pretty hard to miss the wave ending if you pay a modicum of attention, so with that reminder it will hopefully prevent too many cases of "Ah crap, I missed the wave ending, now the next one is penalized, too!"


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