Arcanaville

We're all going to jail, aren't we.

The game: The Muppets Online

• The concept: players try to keep old vaudeville theater operational by completing missions or "acts" assigned by frog, pig, bear.
• What we keep: color palette, furries, giant monsters
• What we lose: dual wielding, the ability to look below the waist
• What we add: boomerang fish, chicken control, pig melee
• Why it would be like City of Heroes: devs hire Venture to play both Statler and Waldorf in-game.
• The Downside: Troy Hickman's guest act would cost us T for Teen rating one week after launch
• Why I would play this: Character creator would suck up most of my day, looking for exploit that would allow me to kill Elmo would suck up the rest.

I should also mention that how we conceptualize what powers do as players and what they actually do mechanically are often very different. So if you decide to make a game based on the conceptual nature of the powers you may find yourself recreating the powers from scratch, because the data we have doesn't do what you think it does.

For example, CoH has no "chaining" mechanic. None. Chaining powers grant powers to targets which create an aura around the target which forces the target to grant additional powers to a limited number of the targets around them which themselves damage the target and grant the same aura to those targets and set a flag which prevents the same target from being hit again by the target it hit with its own aura.

All the data says is "give that guy a new power." It takes human comprehension to look at the sum total of what's going on and say "that's a chaining attack." But if you make a game engine with a chaining mechanic, what's going to use it? None of the powers in City of Heroes, until you make them do so by hand. Unless you're smart enough to create an expert system that can deduce developer intent from the data.

A lot of powers work like this. Tanker single target attacks aren't: they are AoEs, all of them. That's so that taunt can hit multiple targets. But the damage in them is restricted to only the targets exactly zero feet from the center of the AoE. Which, in the modern game, is at most one thing. Do you implement that behavior directly, or do you again, by hand, change the definition of all those tanker attacks to be single target and implement a new mechanic for AoE taunt effects as a special case?

Do you directly implement exactly how our game engine deals with buffs that buff themselves? Or do you fudge, again by hand, Combat Training: Offense?

There's actually a set of flags that tell the game engine to treat things like enhancements differently than powers - enhancements actually *are* powers, just powers that work differently. Do you hard code implement that distinction directly, and then have to deal with things like Luck of the Gambler: Def/+GlobalRech as yet another hand-edited special case? This is another case where we think of something as one thing, but the game thinks of it as something completely different, and there are cases where the difference is important. In the above enhancement, the +Def Strength should only affect the power its slotted into. The +Rech Strength should affect the entire player.

There's no "rule of five" except in the devs' head. That's not something the game engine is directly aware of. Its actually just another Requires clause on the passive powers that are granted by the inventions as the set bonuses. Do you implement that in a hard coded fashion or do you implement that specific field in a general purpose manner? Because if you don't, you'll then have to make a special case rule for the "rule of one" used by Bruising, and the "rule of three" for the Might of the Tanker proc.

If you don't implement all of the complexity of the game engine, you'll be left with the actual data being a cloud of special cases, which would probably take more time to implement in the long run. What we see and what the game engine does are often radically different in the details, and the game obscures a lot of funky activity the data contains to make interesting things happen. Skip that complexity in the engine, eat it in the data. There's no way around that.

What's a single target attack, what's a pet, what's a buff, what's an enhancement - these all sound like easy questions to answer. But they aren't, at least not by just looking at the data.