Re: keep moving forward

Jeff Lait <torespondisfutile@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in news:9969f58d-a17b-
49f0-a4d4-958ff52c0ac2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
On Feb 17, 1:03 pm, Mario Lassnig <ma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

why not make mana a property of the "land"? once you have depleted
all mana from a given area you basically have to move on to
replenish.

I have considered this for POWDER, but rather than Mana only, I'd tie
both health and mana regeneration to "land". And, by land, I mean
"explored area". The idea is that every explored square grants you a
regen point. If you stay in one spot too long recovering, you will
use up all your regen points and have to go deeper in the dungeon to
exploremore squres.

I had some issues of implementation that have stopped me. Not only is
there the obvious difficulty of balancing this so it only shows up in
more abusive gameplay, but there is also the whole magic mapping
scrolls - they "explore" a lot more squares than you can reach
normally, but it would be sad to penalize the player for using them by
not giving them the regen points. Making the character step on every
square to "explore" it is equally inducive of grindy gameplay.

Magic mapping could give fractional points for any previously
unmapped/unvisited squares. Normal exploration gives the full value,
or whatever remains to be awarded if said squares were already
magically mapped.

You can perhaps reduce the grindy feel if you award points based
on sight rather than stepping into the space. Then the player at
least doesn't feel the need to step on every individual square.

Such a system may or may not encourage players to explore every
part of your level, depending on how fast they gain pool points
versus how fast they deplete them against enemies. One possible
problem is that if the player for whatever reason has little to
fear from a level's monsters, then they have more reason to stay
and explore the whole level (to get the extra points.) On the other
hand, the player who is outmatched by monsters is in a bad bind as
he may find himself losing points faster than he can gain them.

Another alternative is to drop the whole exploration aspect and
simply award fixed point amounts to pools when the player exits or
enters a level. No worrying about magic mapping versus physical
exploring. No worrying about players trying to maximize squares
visited. No punishing players who exit a level early. (Actually,
it could even encourage some players to advance to the next level
faster.)
.

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