Category: Development

…but I’ve finally starting working a little bit on Corrosion again. I guess I overdid it a bit when I started working on it pretty much non-stop, taking occasional breaks to wash and feed myself and take trips to work in order to get paid. I took a little break over the summer and gave myself some time, waiting for the logos that are being developed. It’s a sub-project that my brother is taking care of, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s been taking as long as it has. ;)

Anyway, I built something that had been necessary for a long while; a daily refresh mechanism. It turned out not to be quite so difficult after all. Now the finished quests get refreshed after a day has gone by since the last daily refresh. I’m not sure whether it’s a smart idea on my part to make the daily refresh character dependent (each character having their own daily refresh time, but whatever, we’ll see where it ends, otherwise I’ll move it to midnight, server time.)

We’ll see how fast development goes from now on. I’m not putting any pressure on myself or my brother. He’s been keen on getting his own development environment set up so that he can start working on designing the next mission; The Arena. :)

I swear, this thing might kill me. I’m still plugging away at Corrosion and the combat mechanisms in particular. The pathfinding is done, it works, but it’s anything but fast. Limiting the searches to about 200 tiles or so seems to help with the speed and makes the game slightly more playable, but it creates strange situations where pursuing enemies break off the pursuit through a corridor when they find their path blocked by their friends. I think I’m going to have to find a reliable way where they ignore their friends in terms of finding a path, but respect them in terms of getting in line. That way they’ll continue pursuit but never overtake their friends until a space in the corridor opens up.

Why is it going to kill me? Well, these musings keep my preoccupied throughout the day. Whenever I have a free moment, there’s only so many topics that my mind wanders towards, and Corrosion is on that list. (Together with finding a possible place for a friend when she arrives back in Amsterdam soon, my soon-to-be-unemployed sister and her financial situation, my work, my Shadowrun game, Jiu Jitsu, etc.) So today, while I was walking to work, I nearly got myself run over by a bus because I had been preoccupied with figuring out this pathfinding problem. The adrenaline dump of a near-death experience quickly brought my mind back to reality, but simultaneously drained me of a lot of my energy. Funny how that happens.

Corrosion has been my baby for the past four months now, starting out as an idea that was born from an evening of hanging out with my brother and mostly due to my brother’s enthusiasm and creativity has turned into a somewhat more complex game than I had initially thought it was going to be. At first I thought it was going to be a simple statistical crunch game, but then we got the idea to make the combat engine a tile-based game, which meant Line of Sight algorithms, path-finding algorithms (A*, breadth-first, etc.) and slowly but surely it’s becoming more and more complex. I’m slowly getting to the point where I start wondering if this is ever going to be finished, but then I look back at what we’ve accomplished already, and I feel better.

Currently, the game is not even close to finished. You can make a character of any race, mundane, a shaman or a mage (no adepts yet) and we have weapons, armor, drugs, spells and cyberware that you can purchase. Important things like rigging, decking and conjuring haven’t been implemented yet, but that’s a matter of time. Drone rigging is going to work similarly as conjuring, where you basically have a companion that fights along side you, or, if that turns out to be too complex, that acts as a buff to your own attacks and capabilities. Of each category (spells, weapons, armor, cyberware, etc.) we’ve only added a few items so that we can teach the overall mechanism that governs them, and we moved on. Weapon accessories are going to be important, as are various electronics that should be able to use during combat.

Just thinking about all the things that still need to happen make me go a little funny in the head, but luckily I’m having a lot of fun and I’ll keep plugging away until it stops being fun. It helps that I’m not the only one working on this, even though I have to do the majority of the work. So yeah, hopefully next week I’ll have some time to introduce path-finding and tweak the stealth/perception mechanism that currently exists (I don’t like it, it’s too crude.)

I guess one of the things that I struggle with is whether or not I’ll just be doing this as a way to keep myself occupied, or if this is actually going to be something that other people will enjoy and play. Also, what would I rather have, really?

We decided to not implement the idea of dice pools into Corrosion for the simple reason that it’s a complex mechanic to maintain. Combat Pool, Magic Pool, Karma Pool, Hacking Pool, Control Pool…I’m not looking forward to implementing that. At first it seemed like that wasn’t much of a problem; the lack of dice pools just means that the progression through the game gets controlled a little bit since it means fewer dice to roll and thus less successes on your test. A case could be made to implement the Spell Pool, as it’s dice that usually get split between the Sorcery test and the Drain Resistance test. You could assign them fifty-fifty, or with whatever division you’d like to apply. Combat Pool becomes harder, since it’s situational. People will generally keep some dice back in order to assist dodge rolls or Damage Resistance tests when needed. Corrosion needs to be quick and you don’t want to have to decide how many dice to assign to one test and to the other between one round and the next.

So we chucked them, thinking that the lack of situational modifiers like visibility, movement and range would balance each other out.