Character Switching
One of the major changes I made was the character switching mechanic. As always, when you switch characters, you gave up your chance to attack that turn. But Kongregate's game needed more ways for you to maneuver around attacks. Without the vast design space of the 17 x 17 chart, you needed some extra ways to avoid stuff when you know it's coming.
This is why in Kongregate's game, switching characters lets you completely avoid all damage from your enemy's attack. If you know they will attack, you can make them waste the energy they paid to attack, and make them deal zero damage. Of course, they'll need a counter to this if they know you will switch, which is why I added the new mechanic called intercept.
Intercept does nothing at all if the enemy attacks--you just get hit. But if the enemy switches characters, your intercept will prevent the switch and deal 35 damage, a huge amount. That means your opponent skipped his attack (because he chose to switch characters instead), he doesn't get to switch, and he takes a huge amount of damage.
This intentionally creates a game of paper, rock, scissors with highly weighted outcomes. If you have an opponent down to very little life, everyone knows he wants to switch out (he'll heal one hit point per turn while switched out, by the way). Or, if your opponent's character has little or no energy left to pay for moves, everyone knows he wants to switch out. So the "textbook" thing to do is to intercept him in this case.
This creates a good mind game where you have to read how crazy your opponent is. Is he crazy enough to actually attack when his character has two hit points left? Is he crazy enough to attack two turns in a row? Three turns in a row?!
So far, we have energy meter management, we have paper/rock/scissors system of attack/intercept/switch, and we have single/multi-hit attacks and three types of resistances. This almost gives the players enough wiggle room to use good strategy, but I wanted players to have one more tricky way to influence the fight: attack ranges.
Each turn, the fight will take place at either close range or far range. Each attack in the game is designated as either a close range attack, a far range attack, or both (can be done at either range). Some characters must be far to be most effective, others must be close to be most effective, and others are able to fight at both ranges.
This mechanic lets you try to change the range in order to get an advantage, but it's intentionally expensive to change ranges: it costs 50 energy points (half your energy meter) to attempt to change it.
This brings the total number of decisions per turn from 1 to 2. Now, you must first decide whether you want to try to get close (50 energy), try to get far (50 energy) or just go with the flow (0 energy). If you decide to go with the flow (which you usually will because spending 50 energy is a lot), then you're allowing the enemy to pick the range for the turn. If one player chooses close and the other chooses far, then the choices cancel each other and the range is set to whatever it was last turn.
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Since every action's outcome is dependent on the action of your opponent, it really widens the disparity between a good player and a poor player. Just like chess, or Go, players will lose because they are completely and utterly outmatched and don't understand why they've lost. Additionally, while I agree that the mechanics are elegantly simple, it's the kind of system that requires a holistic awareness of the game and doesn't function very well for new players who are only familiar with a subset of the rules (any kind of double-blind system is going to tend towards effect).
RTS games tend to soften the blow a little bit with base building. In this way, the player is given a challenge that is purely internal - their ability to build and manage their own base/resources. The WC3 map, Defence of the Ancients is another example of this factor since players are challenged to fight the AI creeps on one level and the other players on another level.
I'm not saying that this is a flawed design, I'm just wondering what your thoughts on these points might be. Personally I love these kinda mechanics, but as a meta-game for a casual-friendly site like kongregate, I have my reservations.
Sean Chan: Your Carpe Universum game has some great style, but you have things completely backwards on this point. The ability of a bad player to beat a good player in Chess is extremely low. The same is true in Starcraft and in Street Fighter. Clearly, the same is *not* true in rock, paper, scissors.
Most people would expect RPS to be about 50/50 and what I'm showing with this game is that it's not--that good players can use yomi (mindreading) skills combined with valuation (understanding the payoffs involved) to win more than their share. And of course the game has two varieties of secret sauce to make that more possible, as explained in the article. But anyway, you seem to assume a 100/0 split in an RPS game, and I cannot even fathom why you think this.
A simultaneous-move game with RPS choices is far more friendly to beginners than Chess or Starcraft vs experts. In all my years of explaining that expert players have an uncanny ability to guess right far more often than chance, no one has ever countered with "no, they guess right basically every time, so much so that their guessing win ratio would be close to that of a master Chess player's win ratio versus a beginner." So I kind of don't know what to say here.
At this point, the game is no longer theoretical. After playing it for months now, it is indeed true that good players can mysteriously guess right far more than their 50/50 share and it is indeed true that even they cannot win 100% versus weaker players (or even as much as Chess/SF/SC players would win) due to bad guesses and some randomness. Pretty much anyone can get in there and attack/switch/intercept and have a shot.
While a poor player has the same potential to win as a veteran, after a certain point, he's just randomly picking actions (he doesn't know any better). Which is fun, as much as snakes and ladders is fun.
There are two elements that we're working with here, alea and agon (I have no clue who came up with these terms, can't remember where I read them either). Alea is chance/randomness, agon is competition.
A game like Starcraft has a diminished element of alea (in the sense that if you haven't scouted them, you won't know what strategy they're going for and if they're random, what race they are), how much of it is dependent on how much scouting you do.
I would say that what you call yomi would come under agon, I consider it a competitive element because it's directly concerned with dealing with your opponent. The main difference is that Starcraft has additional layers of appeal (ontop of alea/agon) to a player in the form of an internal challenge of base building. Developing self over competing with opponent. I messed up by using Chess and Go as examples because they don't really have that (in Go, all of your moves only have meaning in relation to your opponents pieces), sorry.
What I'm trying to get at is that some games have an element of challenge that is completely independent of the actions of your opponent. This is building a bigass base in Supreme Commander and churning out experimentals to step on units. It is using Zangief's pile driver because it's the most difficult move to do, as opposed to performing it because it's the right way to defeat your opponent. In Magic: The Gathering design jargon, it's the Timmy pyschograph. It's about appealing to a sense of fantasy instead of just focussing on the winning.
A player like that can lose the game and still walk away happy, because he's achieved his goal. A goal that has nothing to do with winning, but rather about pushing his limits and doing something he's never managed to do before. In such a case it's the self-improvement and personal challenge that is the reward rather than winning. If the appeal of a game is solely winning, you'll only end up pleasing half of the players (less in multiplayer FFA structures). By extending the appeal to smaller, personal challenges within the context of a competitive game, I think it's possible to stretch that margin further.
I'll bring it back to Raph Koster's theory of fun. If fun is about learning in a safe environment I say that we can take that a step further by allowing the player to experience that fun without having to win. It serves to keep competition positive and friendly rather than confrontational (which can get ugly, especially with children). I'm not saying that this Kongai game format is difficult for players to get into (on the contrary, it's very easy to pick up and play) I'm just saying that it might not have that much retention with a casual audience as it could be if it were broadened a little bit, maybe you have some mechanics for that that we haven't seen yet.
As for Carpe Universum, that's still kinda missing the mark for me, it's not achieving what it was meant to do in it's current state (it's currently tempo driven instead of beat
driven). I didn't really set out to build a game with no deaths, it just kinda came up because I didn't code in the bits for handling player death. But as a music driven game my intention for it is to allow anyone to play through much the same way you would listen to an album or medley of songs, but if you want to be competitive on the high scores then you define goals for yourself and you get to be as competitive as you want to be.
Possibly yes. There's something to be said for simplicity though, and removing everything other than what is the point. That's what I tried to do with Kongai. For my other card game, Yomi: Fighing Card Game, there is some hand-management and hand-manipulation you can do, so it does have more of the 1p aspect you're talking about. Is it better to include this 1p aspect or cut it out to make the game simpler? I think the answer is not so clear. Even if I had an opinion on that, I would not be able to say it here. ;) Perhaps you will eventually try both Kongai and Yomi: FCG and give you opinion then.