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IDProjectCategoryLast Update
0019403AI War 2Gameplay IdeaOct 4, 2019 5:31 pm
ReporterChris_McElligottPark Assigned ToChris_McElligottPark  
Severityminor 
Status resolvedResolutionfixed 
Summary0019403: End of game winning screen of some sort.
DescriptionBadger notes:

This started as a reminder Bug report for the "You Won" screen and then turned into a brainstorming session about Lore and Campaigns. I would love to figure out how to get the notion of a multi-game Campaign with built in Lore into AIW2. I think there should be a "Play one-off map" like AIWC, but we can do better now I think.

First, brainstorming about the "You Won" screen.
There's a nice "Letters of Fire" screen for when you lost, but we also need something for "You Won." Can we do something better than just "You Won!" though? That was always quite anticlimactic.

Here's my ideal, not sure how plasubile it is. Figure out some cool way to blow up the Master Controller (maybe when the Sim detects that it's shooting the Master Controller and dealing fatal damage it sends a message to the Vis code to take control of the player's camera and sweep in majestically toward the spectacularly exploding Master Controller). Then do a "You Win! followed by scrolling text with the "Lore" post-game information (ideally we'll also finagle some actual Lore/story into the game), followed by allowing the player to play and destroy the remaining AI forces or just quit to the Main screen.

It occurs to me that you could have a Canonical playthrough of the game which is a campaign of multiple maps, with increasing difficulty and with different options enabled. And make a story about how you are reconquring different areas of the Galaxy.

So lets say you start with a difficulty 2, 40 planet map. Then if you won you'd get Some Lore Progress ("Okay, you've recaptured an outlying sector of the Galaxy"). Then you'd get a difficulty 4, 60 planet map that would give you additional Lore Progress when you won. You could tell a story about how you start in a small part of the galaxy, then slowly conquer your way back to Earth where the real Master Controller is.

You can also do things like "Okay, after winning mission 3 you can take one of two paths back toward earth: a High AI Difficulty Campaign, or a weaker-AI game where you will face the Devourer Golem", and justify the choices via Lore. And the "next campaign" could be pretty randomized too. Or once the "Choose your next ship" code is in, we could allow players to tackle a Hard mission with some bonus (You can either start with 2 extra ship type unlocked at the beginning, an extra 4K science or having your Ark be just a bit stronger).

You could also try things differently, Lore-wise. You could have a bit of Lore for each different player-designed Ark. You would do one mission with each Ark (you could have them aware of eachother, or maybe each Ark thinks they are the only survivor), in whichever order you please, followed by a Finale where you could choose your Ark and get a conclusion to the Lore
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Chris_McElligottPark

Feb 6, 2018 11:21 am

administrator   ~0046888

My followup:

Camera movements along spline paths or whatever else are really straightforward, and we can even define this sort of thing in xml if we want to. There are plenty of bezier curve options for the sort of thing you have in mind.

The ability to do things like animate text upwards in a crawl (credits style or Star Wars style) is also something that can be coded up pretty easily. After that, it's a matter of having a framework for timing that stuff out, and then actually plugging in the content.

Same goes for any other sort of special effects like explosions or whatever. We basically just have something that runs over time and does the updates. This would probably be better as C# rather than xml, come to think of it. But still in the extensions category, and we could just use coroutines to keep the code really easy to read and update.

I'm not personally going to have time to implement that sort of thing in terms of the content, but I'd be happy to set up the framework for that sort of thing. I've done all of the above before, and the main thing that's time consuming from my end is now the content creation, not the framework bits. Keith, this wouldn't be anywhere nearly so complex as the Tidalis stuff, because it's all controlled by simple C# this time. And you don't have to get involved at all, actually, unless you want to write the ending crawl.

My own wishlist item would be post-game graphs, but that's just me. That's a lot more work, though, and again out of scope for me.

Chris_McElligottPark

Oct 4, 2019 5:31 pm

administrator   ~0053464

Did this a while ago, thanks!

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
Feb 6, 2018 11:20 am Chris_McElligottPark New Issue
Feb 6, 2018 11:21 am Chris_McElligottPark Assigned To => Chris_McElligottPark
Feb 6, 2018 11:21 am Chris_McElligottPark Status new => assigned
Feb 6, 2018 11:21 am Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0046888
Oct 4, 2019 5:31 pm Chris_McElligottPark Status assigned => resolved
Oct 4, 2019 5:31 pm Chris_McElligottPark Resolution open => fixed
Oct 4, 2019 5:31 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0053464