Yesterday I went to see Johnny English Reborn at the movie theater. While the movie itself was pretty fun (giggling all the way through), it was one of the movie trailers at the beginning that caught my eye. The one titled In Time. The premise is a world where people buy time to live instead of paying with money. Meaning the poor die and the rich live forever.
It’s not really the movie itself that caught my interest, but the premise and ideas. It makes a pretty neat game mechanic! A game in which the player is rewarded with more time to live. The ticking timer would be an instant motivator for the player to progress.
There are tons of different ways this concept can be interpreted though. Usually a timer in games is something a player dislikes. I think it happens quite often that a player almost completes the current objective, but falls just a few seconds short. And that’s just frustrating.
Another way to interpret this concept would be a global timer. One that carries on between levels and starts out with several hours. The player would be rewarded with extra time on set points along the way. At the start of a level, the player is given an estimate of how long he’ll probably take to complete it. At the end of the level, he’s given a performance overview which shows how long he took, and if he has to pick up the pace in the next level (or do a more laid back approach). To expand on this idea, how about optional side-quests. Each side-quest would take extra time, meaning the player has to perform better throughout his entire game session to be able to afford taking on a side-quest.
It’s an interesting game mechanic. Hope I’ll be able to do something with it in the future, but don’t feel bad about using it yourself (in case you’re a game dev too). Somebody else probably thought of this long before I did. :P
What’s an action-oriented game without weapons? Very boring! Luckily my upcoming gamemode, Ragnarok Conflict, has plenty of weapons already. The problem is: how are players going to get them?
This is the point in a game’s development you can come up with some really creative stuff. But you’re restricted by many variables, even ones you’re not immediately aware of.
The ‘currency’ used in my gamemode is War Experience, which can be gained by completing objectives during matches. War Experience can be spend in a ingame item shop. There are a few features and problems I hope to tackle when structuring that shop:
In order to get the players to progress fast at start, I could have a few easy achievements that reward bounties of War Experience for players to spend. At some points the easy achievements will have been obtained and players will have to work harder and longer to gain the harder achievements.
The shop system I’m thinking about now is having every purchasable item (weapons, upgrades, abilities and suits) represented as a node in a tree, much like a tech tree inside most common RTS games.
In order to buy the item you’d need to satisfy both its requirements (War Exprience cost, kills with a specific weapon, etc) and you need to have bought all nodes prior to it. This way players can work their way up different paths, but still gain everything in the long run.
The only problem with this system is that it takes some time to implement, requires a lot of balancing, and needs a lot of content at start. Still, I think it’s a good solution. Now hope the execution is at least as good as the idea.
