complex mechanics?

I see in the rating system at the end of a mission that one of the options is "complex mechanic" or something like that. is that just a perception thing on the part of the player, because without scripting, I cant see how any of the MA stuff can be considered "complex".

on a related note, is there an option to "find a key" in the MA?

Well, it's hard to understand if you have not spent a lot of time in the MA editor.

My arc "A Hero in Need...is a Friend Indeed" is a five mission arc that I spent about 50 hours making initially (up around 80 hours of work now with updates and fixes). Of the 50 hours at least 20 of it was spent on the final mission. Playing the mission, it's very hard to see that, but when you realize that you can't exactly place spawns and how important it is for the story for things to happen in the correct order, you can get a small glimpse of what it took.

A simpler example from that arc is that in mission two while you are fighting the boss a an ambush is spawned. The patrol says something like "Captain Zamuel they've taken the box!' and he then says to you "You fiend! Put that back!" as if he is responding to the information. Each of these sorts of things take time to plan out and make sure they work properly.

Hope that helps explain it a little.

WN

I dunno if they ever really spelled out what "complex mechanics" means, so applying it might be a bit subjective. Something like WN's mission mentioned above, I set my arc, A Wake Foe Dead 6 for "complex mechanics", because I was using a cute trick I picked up here on the boards to get some extra dialogue lines spoken.

In one of the missions, I have two bosses spawn when a glowie gets clicked. Both are set to "optional" so the player won't fail the mission for not taking them down, and "flee at full health". I placed them as close to the mission door as possible. The net effect here is they spawn at the glowie click, speak a couple of lines the player will see, a couple of words appear in the Nav text area, and then they break for the door, having played their part of delivering lines and leaving quietly without clogging up the rest of the mission.

The meaning of the "Complex Mechanics" keyword is a little arbitrary. Personally, I tend to use Complex Mechanics to refer to cascading triggered objectives in a mission, or more generally, any combination of Mission Architect elements that, when fitted together, have the end result of making the mission's gameplay seem especially unusual compared to typical content.

It should be noted that it is quite tricky to do something like this, and especially using lengthy sequences of required triggered objectives risks making the mission aggravating to play through. For example, having 10 or more objectives daisy-chained together, forcing the player to backtrack over the mission map repeatedly, often seems cool to an author but is very annoying to a player.

All that said, I find "Complex Mechanics" to be one of the less helpful keywords. While some small number of people may explicitly search for arcs with "Complex Mechanics", I'd wager that a lot more players are searching for "Solo Friendly", "Comedy", "Drama" and similar keywords.

Hope that helps!

Yeah, pretty much what PW said. I try to avoid chained objectives in the first place; a good rule of thumb IMO is to never make the player backtrack unless it's either a small map or it REALLY needs to be done for the story to make sense.

IMO the flag refers to unconventional use of common AE mechanics; you are right in that AE mechanics are rather simplistic themselves. Such unconventional use / tricks can be
- having objectives that the player can choose to fail and thus get the 'failed mission briefing', simulating a branching mission. However, the arc will still go on as normal, so this is typically used for the last mission only.
- using invisible mobs/patrols or despawning bosses to provide "voices in your head" style speech mid-mission; I do this in my "Tales from a Scorched Earth - To Reign in Hell" arc, though the apparitions are still visible some of the time (haunted house and all that).
- having 'traps' in the mission: optional collection objectives that spawn optional bosses/patrols/ambushes that the player has to fight. The LOLBAT arc makes good use of these.
- many other things. For example, I'd say "Signal:Noise" by Cheshire Cat (one of my favorite arcs) uses the AE tools creatively to set up a pretty creepy atmosphere.

That said, I personally act as if the flag didn't exist, mainly because everyone thinks it means something else. The in-game description doesn't help things, either.


-- Z.

Basically "Complex Mechanics" means that the mission is more complicated than your average pre-Going Rogue mission. If you missions consist of single objectives like "Get the glowie" or "Defeat McBossName" like a paper mission would then you don't have complex mechanics.

If you have objectives that change midway through the mission then you probably qualify for Complex Mechanics. An example of this would be your typical "trap" mission, where you get to the objective in an empty map only to have to trigger a bunch of enemies between you and the door or another objective further inside the map (and a bunch of enemies between you and it).

Chained glowies would also be another example. Something like "Get Spellbook" leads to "3 Spell Components to Collect" which then leads to "Place Items in Cauldron" and then finally "Speak the Incantation at the Altar" would very much so count. However these sort of things can get annoying if they go on for too long, so using it more than once in a single arc can be tiring.

Another example is a mission in my "For All the Wrong Reasons" arc - on a VERY small Abandoned Tech lab map, you have to:

1) set up 4 Teleportation Dampening Fields
2) then trigger an emergency signal, which leads to
3) the boss and his ambush materializing in a previously empty lab

Since the map is really really small (like about a single room), you can see where everything needs to go, and it really does simulate the effect quite nicely that you've summoned the boss in almost on top of you so you can stomp him into the floor.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite