General Gameplay

Confidence meter

Tommy begins the game a reluctant here-unsure as to his own abilities. It’s our job to bring character growth to the player, the sense that Tommy is "growing into" his role as a hero.

Obviously, one way to show growth to the player is as Tommy learns his mystical power and grows their abilities.

Behind the scenes of the single player game, there will be an invisible "confidence rating" that will increase during (and decrease?) the play of the game. Events like killing foes, finding secrets, passing through dream quests will all add to the player’s confidence rating.

At certain thresholds, the confidence meter will trigger a different set of "Tommy Banter" to be used, so that the player can hear Tommy's growing confidence through his own voice, comments and observations.  NOTE: (George)  Imagine is Gordan Freeman had started off sound meek and timid and afraid and by the end of the game he sounded strong and confident.  Hard to pull off, but if you do it, the character is 3-dimensional and more than a stereotype.)

Question: as Tommy’s confidence raises, should some of his other abilities increase as well?  Maybe Tommy's confidence meter should act kind of like experience in RPG's and dictate certain things?

Player controls

Standard FPS controls.  But Tommy should be able to do 2-3 more interesting things (Climb/swing on ropes, Grab/Throw items etc).

Health / food sources

Health will come to the player in 2 forms in Dark Harvest—organic "food" and health stations.

"Food" is a term loosely applied to organic items that the player may pick up or catch and eat for nourishment in the game. Food comes in 2 forms—sedentary and motile.

Sedentary food is like a can of beans or a piece of meat. Motile food is an animal to hunt and kill—it then becomes sedentary food.  (NOTE:  I LOVE the idea of Tommy killing small ambient creatures for food on the alien world - this WOULD ROCK!  Like the lizards in Rune.).

To activate sedentary food, the player must simply move over it—an aural cue will indicate that he had picked up and eaten the food.  Motile food must first be killed - or maybe just hit the USE key with it targeted and Tommy will grab and eat it.

Some of the alien food may actually poison the player while other food may increase health but offer other side effects as well (some desirable, others not).  Below are some possible food powerups:

Sedentary:

Motile:

Damage system

Each entity will have a flag to tell whether it is invulnerable, basically destroyable or dynamically destroyable. Objects like a crate, cash register or gas pump are basically destroyable—they simply blow up. Enemies and other player characters are dynamically destroyable—the damage system is more refined and the results of damage taken will be more dynamic.

All destroyable entities will have a health value—once this value dips to zero or below, the entity is considered killed.

Entities take damage from collision with other objects in the world. These objects can be environmental, such as a wall, a floor (from a fall), another entity, etc. In this case, there is no target check, but damage is applied generally, based upon force. If a dynamic entity (like Tommy in Multiplayer) is hit with weapon damage (a projectile, a shock wave, a bomb explosion, etc.), then the receiving entity will check the hit location.

A dynamic entity is broken up into various hit location areas (heard, torso, arm, etc.). Each hit location has a "damage threshold" value as well as a damage modifier value.

First, the damage modifier is applied to the weapon damage to determine to total damage received from the hit (as an example, an arm hit will lessen the total damage, while a head hit will amplify the damage).

After the damage has been modified, the entity is checked to see if there is any relevant armor at the current hit location—if there is, then it will absorb damage (and lose effectiveness, of course) first, before the entity does.

If the damage done by the weapon (after modification) at a certain area exceeds the threshold value, then a test (random, percentage based) is done to see if a critical hit has been achieved. If a critical hit is determined, then a critical hit is processed (if there is more than one critical hit possible for an area, then a critical hit is chosen randomly).

Note: damage is not applied to individual areas of an entity—individual areas are only used to determine a damage modifier, possible armor and possible critical hits.

If a critical hit is registered, then one of the possibilities is that an appendage may be severed.

Player characters, all we have is head, arms and legs to be severed.

When a limb is blown off, that appendage is "shrunk" and its polys are no longer rendered—a pre-modeled arm, leg or head gib is spawned, plus a gore gib is attached to the stump

Blow off head—dead, but maintain control for 5 seconds—head fall and camera looks at headless player

Blow off arm and weapon is also destroyed (perhaps he can still hold it?), health "bleeds" down to 5%

Blow off leg and animation switches to a death animation and player dies

Driving a vehicle

When the player moves towards the control area of a vehicle (like near the steering when and driver’s seat of the school bus) and invokes the use command, he will then take control of the vehicle (this is an example if the "use collision" type of trigger).

For example: the player steps near the seat of the school bus and taps use—an animation is triggered for the player sitting down in the seat and grasping the steering wheel (his hands will snap to bones in the wheel). To stop using the bus, he simply invokes the use action again to get back up to standing position.

When a player is in vehicle control mode, most of his control input will be directed to the vehicle’s control (like turn the mouse left/right to steer the bus, move forward to put your foot on the gas, etc.). If a vehicle has weapons, then the player uses his own weapons control to access and use the vehicle’s weapons.  We will decide on the proper control interface on a per-vehicle basis.

Hearing a translation

During Tommy’s vivisection episode, part of the rear lobe of his brain was augmented with the addition of a semi-reliable language translation implant. During chapters 1-2, all alien-speak is just that, alien and unintelligible.

After Tommy wakes up in the prison, his translator is working—since it was a modification of the rear lobe of the brain (where coordination, language and optical info is processed), the translator, when working, works for both spoken words and visual text.

When Tommy listens to an alien speaking, it almost always starts off as alien (his translator must recognize the speech before it kicks in), but then the translation begins (sometimes—it isn’t always reliable) and Tommy will hear the translation, slightly garbled and modified, layered on top of the alien speak.

When Tommy looks at something visual, the image will fluctuate from alien language into readable English (with "noise" and inaccuracies added).

Option: since motor coordination is also effected in that area of the brain, should we have Tommy’s controls get sluggish or strange when his translator is working properly? Just a thought.

Interacting with a kiosk

At many times during the game, Tommy will interact with Trocaran kiosks—from here he can access a myriad of data about the ship, his location, his situation, the game story, etc.

For "single burst" kiosks (one that only spout out one bit of information), Tommy simply approaches and invokes the use command.

For more complex, interactive kiosks, Tommy starts the session up with the use command, but then his movement controls will control the kiosk (and his animation will move him so that he is looking at the information and interface area of the kiosk more closely). To end the session, he invokes the use command again.

Note: we will need to come up with some fairly standardized physical, artistic and interface design motifs for these more involved kiosks, since they will involve the player to a greater degree—it really doesn’t matter for "one shot" kiosks.

General AI behavior overview

Last revised: 07/01/98 - PCS

One possible approach to AI is to break it into two different classes: style and plan. The style is basically an AI entity’s personality—how it attacks, etc. The "plan" is independent of the entity—it is essentially a behavior script that can be assigned by the mapper. One entity might have a plan to get behind the player, or run away, or run and tell other where the player is, etc.

Beasties can be seen "doing things" rather the just standing around

Some beasties can use multiple weapons

Each specific instance of a beastie can posses unique traits (such as aggressiveness, speed, skill, randomness, etc.)

Beasties are somewhat unpredictable

Beasties can group up into temporary "packs"

Beasties can hunt the player

Beasties can sneak up on the player

Beasties can run from the player

Beasties can evade the player’s attacks

Some beasties can use the environment to their tactical advantage

Beasties can hide

Beasties can ambush the player

Beasties can aid the player (not attack the player, but attack some things that the player attacks)

Beasties can navigate intelligently through a level (up stairs, jump across gaps, etc.)

Some beasties can use switches, etc.

Some beasties can have arms, legs or head blown off

AI States (overview)

Note: these are only possible states, not nailed down as of yet