Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
the drop on the queen—sneak up on her without getting zapped by the bondage laser—the
slaves can turn the tables.
The most basic kind of runaway slave simply picks a new direction at random every time she
approaches an intersection (without doubling back—see Figure
). This slave makes up the
bulk of the queen's opposition in the game—since she chooses at random, she doesn't always
move toward the queen, giving her opportunities to sneak up from behind, and she may avoid
opportunities to really corner the queen. She's more difficult in greater numbers—they fill
more space, all picking different paths—but she's easily manageable in small numbers.
3.20
Figure 3.20
Simple slaves pick random directions in
Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars
.
Midway through the game I wanted to introduce a smarter opponent. This one is called a
gladiator. Whenever a gladiator reaches an intersection, she looks at the queen's position in the
maze relative to hers and picks the direction that will lead her closer to the queen the
quickest (see Figure 3.21).
Figure 3.21
The gladiator picks a direction that leads her to the queen.
Originally, I had imagined gladiators becoming the replacement for the original slaves in the
later scenes of the game—a harder-to-deal-with version of the same behavior. That's what I
thought. In practice, though, it became apparent that they weren't as overwhelming in large
numbers, that they didn't gain as much from numbers as the original slaves. You see, they
