Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Analyzing the mechanics in Figure 6.44 reveals that in the basic FPS game economy
there are two related positive feedback loops. However, the effectiveness of the return
of each feedback loop depends on the skill of the player. A highly skilled player
will waste less ammunition, lose less health, and gain ammunition from engaging
enemies, whereas a poorly skilled player might be better off avoiding enemies. The
amount of ammunition a player needs to kill an enemy and the chance that killed
enemies drop new ammunition or medkits obviously is vital for this balance.
You could add a number of additional feedback loops to make this basic game
economy more complex. For example, the number of enemies might increase the
difficulty of killing enemies or increase the chance players will lose health fighting
them, thus creating positive destructive feedback (a downward spiral). Negative
constructive feedback could be created by having the player's ammunition level
negatively impact the player's chance of killing an enemy. Players with little ammu-
nition would magically fight a bit better, while those with a lot wouldn't fight quite
so well. This would tend to damp down the effect of large fluctuations in ammuni-
tion availability.
RTS Harvesting
In a real-time strategy game, you typically build workers to harvest resources.
Figure 6.45
represents a simple version of this mechanism with only one resource:
gold. In this case, gold is a limited resource. Instead of using a source, the available
gold is represented with a pool named
Mine
that starts with 100 resources. Note that
the pool is made automatic so that it starts pushing gold toward the player's inven-
tory (the pool named
Gold
). The flow rate is determined by the number of workers
the player has. Building workers costs two gold units. Note that the converter to
build workers pulls gold only when there are two gold available: It is in “pull all”
mode as indicated by the & sign.
FIGURe 6.45
mining for gold in
an rTs
