[airstrike] Airstrike levels and goal oriented game-play

[Erik Auerswald]

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 07:54:54PM +0300, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> On Wednesday 02 August 2006 11:52, Erik Auerswald wrote:
> > > > Every biplane could have it's own set of bombs, fuel and damage
> > > > displays (the same way a missile has a target lock indicator).
> > > > Depending on the AI (player 1 or 2) the displays could be on the
> > > > left or right of the screen. Additional displays (from cloned
> > > > biplanes) could be stacked on top and fall down whenever a biplane
> > > > with gauges below dies.
> > >
> > > Airstrike supports upto 4 players, so maybe the displays need to be
> > > in each corner of the screen, but otherwise sounds good.
> >
> > Is airstrike supposed to support 4 human players?
> 
> Well, at least player object and main() do that.  However, currently
> there seem to be only "player 1" and "player 2" AIs (sets of keys),
> so the support is not complete.  Adding "player 3" and "player 4"
> AIs would be trivial though.

There are practical issues with the number of keys simultaneously
pressed. The size of levels and planes might make it very crowded with
more than 2 players. But in principle I would like 4 player support (or
even more ;).

> > > Doing lives is easy.  Just change player_generator_message() to call
> > > something updating the lives count on screen whenever the count
> > > changes. I'm not sure whether lives should be shown as a number or just
> > > suitable number of co. sprites.  How do you show infinite number of
> > > lives for levels where lives are irrelevant to the level goals?
> >
> > I'd say use small plane sprites to show the number of lives. The current
> > live should be represented by a sprite as well, infinite lives could be
> > represented by displaying no plane-lives sprite.
> 
> Sounds good to me.  I think for practical purposes >5 lives could be shown
> as many/infinite lives.  (if the number of lives gets down to 5, then they
> can be shown with separate sprites again)

Infinite lives could be shown by just one sprite with an inifinity sign
overlayed. Or without any images as initially proposed by me.

Especially for deathmatch style gameplay I want to see exactly how many
lives are left, even if the fraglimit (and therefore number of lives)
is 30.

> > > 2. Hostile competition: the goal is not related to the other player(s),
> > > but the main challenge comes from them, they shoot and obstruct you
> >
> > Every player has a different goal to complete the level? After
> > completing his goal by one player what happens? I don't quite understand
> > the gameplay of this.
> 
> I meant that althought the challenge in the level (is supposed to) come from 
> the other players (shooting / crashing into you), the goal is designed so
> that neither killing the other player(s) nor co-operation between them is
> needed to achieve the goal.
> 
> The goal is the same for each players (e.g. do N laps around the level).

OK, just the way the third level is at the moment.

> > > 3. Friendly competition: Both the goal and main challenge are not
> > >    related to other players.  These levels work also as single player
> > >    levels
> 
> Btw. E.g. collecting or shooting items from the screen would fall to
> co-operation gameplay type as triggers can notice only that something
> disappeared, not who was responsible.

As with the first two airstrike levels at the moment.

> > > Btw. At the level start, the level goal should be also displayed
> > > even if it's just "find how to end the level".
> >
> > Yes, this needs to be done. Maybe the next thing to implement are
> > multiline messages?
> 
> The goal should be shown at the same time as level name, maybe in
> smaller font.  Level "description" keyword would suit for this best I
> think.  This description could be shown in level selector also if we
> get something like that later on.

I've just commited something like that to svn. :-)

> > > Note that it was though that later on the sprites player controls could
> > > also pick up stuff and drop it somewhere (think of "spacetaxi" or
> > > "paperboy"), so this would need at some point be able to show arbitrary
> > > objects the sprite "has".
> >
> > I'd say for any arbitrary object in the game there should be a small
> > sprite to represent the object in the HUD. A plane carrying an object
> > would display the small image next to it's stats.
> 
> This can be added later (v1.1?) when planes can carry something.

Definitively.

> (unfortunately I don't have yet time for coding on Airstrike, but discussion
> doesn't take much time...)

I can't say how much time I can devote to airstrike at the moment, but
I'll try to do some coding.

Erik