Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Ditch Z-Order
The Z-order idea almost certainly needs to be ditched. It simply doesn't
make any sense. Why can I move up and down, but not attack up or
down? And it will never be visually clear, because we're talking about
continuous space on a band of pixels with no depth perception. One pos-
sible solution is to do something like what
Mega Man Battle Network
did
and create a discrete grid of squares, rather than continuous space, that
you move around on.
Instead, ask yourself if that 3D movement is really necessary. Many
of these games would be much better of with a purely top-down scheme,
but perhaps making it totally 2D (side-scrolling) would also work. May-
be your game is all about players jumping of of each other's heads. Think
of
Super Smash Brothers
and how rich that is purely on a 2D plane: that's
what can happen when you start a design from the ground up.
Consider Semi-Cooperative and Score-Based
Consider developing a semi-cooperative
brawler. Maybe all the players
can lose, but only one player can win. Maybe each player has his or her
own way of winning that is unique. Look to board games like
Chaos in
the Old World
or
Battlestar Galactica
's
Pegasus
expansion for great ex-
amples of how this can be done.
Also, consider taking a more roguelike approach in which the goal
is to beat a previous high score (it won't work unless you randomize the
game, but as I've made clear, you must do this anyway). Score-based
games are great because the challenges are always renewable.
Think Nonlinear
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a very cool company called Technos
Japan (made famous for their
Double Dragon
games) was experimenting
with some very interesting new breeds of brawlers. In the United States,
we got its
River City Ransom
,
which combines elements of the RPG genre
with the brawler genre and allows players to explore a map freely and
somewhat out of order. Lucky Famicom console owners got to play
Down-
town Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki dayo Zen'in ShÅ«gÅ?
,
an extremely in-
novative, nonlinear brawler with an overmap and enemy lords to chase
down. The point is, making these games nonlinear can really work, and
Technos gives us numerous examples of how it can be done.
Punish Button Mashing
If players are doing alright while button mashing, you've failed. Button
mashing involves, by definition,
players not making decisions. It's not
