Brainstorming

BioWare has posted a video about the combat mechanics in Dragon Age 2:

Dragon Age 2 Combat

It got me to thinking about some things I'd personally like to see in a tactical RPG combat system. In particular, when Mike Laidlaw, the lead designer, started mentioning terms like "tank" it really left me thinking about where the genre can go from here.

I've enjoyed several MMOs over the years, but for me, the now-stereotypical roles of tank, healer, DPS, etc have grown stale. They always felt a little contrived and never made much sense.

In "real life" and other RPGs, you always take out the biggest threat first. The idea that a Tank could say something SO offensive that I would attack them rather than the more deadly magic user in the back row never jived with me. It was a transparent mechanic that was a little too obvious and broke suspension of disbelief for me.

Anyway, some ideas that I think would make for an interesting gaming experience:

Terrain and Environment being much more of a factor. Positioning yourself in different ways relative to certain terrain features should provide different bonuses. If you stand behind a short wall or a barrel, ranged attacks should have a lower change to hit or do less damage. Likewise, if you're on top of a hill, that terrain feature should have a radius associated with it indicating that ranged attacks should have a greater range and be more accurate.

Positional Importance should play a more integral role. In almost all martial arts, being aware of (and controlling) range is vital. Different restrictions and bonuses should apply based on distance from your opponent and position relative to them.

Some real life combat range examples for armed and unarmed combat according to Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do and the Filipino martial arts of Eskrima are described in the following links:

Jeet Kune Do Ranges

Eskrima Ranges

I'd love to see a combat system with different 'scales' available for a character to 'zoom' between by using combat maneuvers, akin to 4x strategy game such as Sins Of A Solar Empire

Auto-attack would go away entirely. Even mundane moves like a 'slice' would have to be used with care and at the right time and from the correct distance.

A battle between a character who prefers to grapple vs a sword-wielding opponent might then revolve around the grappler attempting different maneuvers to execute a takedown or to otherwise close the distance. If successful, the weapon-user would be forced to drop his sword and either grapple, attempt to unclinch/disengage, or pull a side-arm such as a dagger. From the sword-user's perspective, he would enjoy a huge advantage as long as he could keep the grappler at a distance and avoid being backed into corners or herded into obstructions.

Just some random ideas that popped into my head. I hope someday I have more time to prototype them out.

Alpha Incoming!

Things have been going quite smoothly with development! We're planning to be ready for an Alpha release by the New Year.

Content
Once again conceptart.org came through. Our post for a background artist received THIRTY responses over the course of a couple weeks, with 25 coming in only two days.

I felt bad having to turn away so many talented artists, but we only had a single opening!

To narrow the field, we asked for a sample of work. It was a very efficient method, but in retrospect I now see that it also comes off as a bit sketchy. As was pointed out to us, some less scrupulous studios use this tactic to get free concept art and ideas...in the future we'll have to come up with a better way to sort through applicants.

In either case, we're now two Mikes strong! I'd like to welcome Mike Phillips (http://www.mikephillips.ca)to the team. As you can see from his portfolio, he's extremely talented and we're eager to see what he comes up with for the first battleground.

Work on the "knight" unit type (the last of the three units planned for Alpha), should be completed shortly. He's been the most difficult of the three so far, but we're almost there! A few more refinements and Mike V. (http://sites.google.com/site/michaelvportfolio) will be able to get started on the animations. Mike has done a simply FANTASTIC job with bringing the mage and dragon units to life.



Server

• Timed Mod Events - Synergies can now add Mods to units that will trigger effects at intervals. This will allow for some very interesting gameplay dynamics. Currently we're planning for the knight to have a Synergy called Lifefont, which periodically heals allies of a small amount of damage. Since mods can stack, a trio of these guys will be very hard to take down!
• Smart Unit Updates - Only the state changes since the last update are sent to the players now. This should cut down dramatically on the bandwidth used to keep the players up to date. Right now we're seeing updates consume ~40-60kB per game, which isn't too bad at all.

Client

• Added audio support to the Resource Manager - HTML5 has a weird quirk where HTMLAudioElements cannot be played multiple times simultaneously. My solution was to maintain a list of them instead, dynamically allocating new ones for each sound effect if all existing instances of a sound are already playing. This was especially necessary for the mage character since at high levels his Fireflail ability can generate quite a few fireballs
• Implemented a flexible particle system and integrated it as a new SceneNode type. It has support for arbitrary Particle class implementations as well as Effectors. Currently I've implemented Wind, Gravity, and Gravity Wells. Chrome is so ridiculously fast that my meager dual-core rig can handle ~500 particles at once in addition to all the other graphics. Not bad for not having a GPU at your disposal!