Tag: Development

Corrosion: New Mission

We’ve just released a new mission for Corrosion. Anyone with a reputation of 50 or over now will get a msg in their inbox asking for a meet. A rich man wants you to retrieve a reminder of something that was taken from him by a gang. You have to find that item in the gang’s hide out. (Not without them putting up a fight.)

With the introduction of this new mission there will the introduction of three new enemies. Previously, there were just the ghouls to fight — mindlessly running at you hoping to claw their way through your stomach. Now there are dogs, gangers and ganger lieutenants to deal with. Some of them carry weapons and shoot at you from a distance while they sick their dogs on you.

Also, while ghouls were mindless, gangers are social creatures. If one of them spots you, he’ll warn the others. If you attack one that hasn’t spotted you yet and don’t immediately kill him, he’ll warn the others. Yeah, it’s not so simple anymore. :)

Also, there’s the option of searching mission premises after you’ve cleared them. You might be able to find something worth using or selling…

Shadowrun: Corrosion Lifestyles

Trying to stay true to Shadowrun Third Edition as much as possible, one of the things we’d like to implement in Shadowrun: Corrosion are lifestyles, allowing you to purchase  and maintaining a lifestyle that benefits your character in different ways. There’s a wide spectrum of lifestyles, much like in Shadowrun and they offer an escalating amount of benefits.

Below is a small write up of each lifestyle and the basic setup of what benefits they bring.

Cost: this is the initial purchasing cost of the lifestyle.

Upkeep: this is the daily upkeep cost of the lifestyle.

Social: it’s the penalty or benefits you get to social skill checks (Etiquette, Negotiations, Intimidation, etc.)

Ambush: when attacked in PvP it offers a penalty or bonus in avoiding the first, surprise/ambush round of the fight.

DocWagon: when you fall unconscious due to physical damage you are returned to Dixie’s who patches you up. She takes 10% of your money and your reputation goes down and you’re at 9 boxes of physical. This bonus changes things slightly.

Regeneration: regenerating lost physical health is dependent on your body rating, and can take a long, long time to heal. Regenerating lost stun health is usually quite a bit faster, but is dependent on your body or willpower, whichever is higher. This is a bonus that increases your body/willpower in terms of healing by a particular percentage.

Assets: these are money and influence generating things that a crew can purchase/conquer. Each asset has a legal owner, who gets extra benefits on top of the crew benefits. Because a character needs a solid identity to withstand government scrutiny, the higher the level of the asset, the higher the required lifestyle of the owner.

Street Lifestyle
You will live on the streets — or in the sewers, steam tunnels, condemned buildings, or whatever temporary flop you can get. Food is whatever you are able to find, bathing will be a thing of the past, and your only security is what you create for yourself. This lifestyle is the bottom of the ladder, inhabited by down-and-outers of all stripes. But life won’t be all bad; it will be free!
Cost: 0
Upkeep: 0
Social: +3 (penalty)
Ambush: +3 (penalty)
DocWagon: -10% nuyen,  -1 reputation
Regeneration: +0% body/willpower
Assets: character can’t own assets.

Squatter Lifestyle
Life stinks for the squatter, and most of the time so will you. You will eat low-grade nutrisoy and yeast, perhaps adding some flavors with an eyedropper. Your home will be a squatted building, perhaps fixed up a bit, possibly even converted into barracks or divided into closet-sized rooms and you’ll probably share that with other squatters. Or maybe you can just rent a coffin-sized sleep tank by the night. You’ll have the use of a public dataterm, when you can find one that actually works, to call or e-mail anyone, and you might be able to pick up a pirate trid station on the trid unit you found in a dumpster. The only thing worse than the squatter lifestyle is living on the streets.
Cost: 5,000
Upkeep: 500
Social: +2 (penalty)
Ambush: +2 (penalty)
DocWagon: -8% nuyen, -1 reputation
Regeneration: +2% body/willpower
Assets: character can’t own assets.

Low Lifestyle
With this lifestyle, you’ll have an apartment and nobody is likely to bother you much as long as you keep the door locked and bolted. You can count on regular meals; the nutrisoy may not taste great, but at least it’s hot. Power and water will be available during assigned rationing periods. Security depends on how regular your payments to the local street gangs are. When you travel, you’ll ride the tube. You’ll be one among the factory workers, petty crooks and other people stuck in a rut, just starting out or down on their luck.
Cost: 20,000
Upkeep: 2,000
Social: +1 (penalty)
Ambush: +1 (penalty)
DocWagon: -6% nuyen, -1 reputation
Regeneration: +4% body/willpower
Assets: character can own a level one asset.

Middle Lifestyle
The Middle lifestyle offers a nice house or condo with lots of comforts. If you choose this lifestyle you’ll sometimes eat nutrisoy as well as higher-priced natural food, but at least the autocook has a full suite of flavour faucets. You will also have a commuter car or first-class tube pass. You will have a basic vidphone, and subscribe to a few cable channels and a local news screamsheet. This is the lifestyle of ordinary successful wage-earners or criminals.
Cost: 50,000
Upkeep: 5,000
Social: 0
Ambush: 0
DocWagon: -4% nuyen, 0 reputation
Regeneration: +6% body/willpower
Assets: character can own up to a level two asset.

High Lifestyle
A High lifestyle offers a roomy house or condo, good food and the technology that makes life easy. You may not have the same perks as the really big boys, but neither do you have as many people gunning for you. Your home is in a secure zone or protected by good, solid bribes to the local police contractor and gang boss. You will have a housekeeping service or enough tech to take care of most chores, and a luxury commuter car is at your beck and call. This is the life for the well-to-do on either side of the law: mid-level managers, senior Yakuza and the like.
Cost: 100,000
Upkeep: 10,000
Social: +1 (bonus)
Ambush:  +2 (bonus)
DocWagon:  -2% nuyen, 0 reputation
Regeneration: +8% body/willpower
Assets: character can own up to a level three asset.

Luxury Lifestyle
This lifestyle offers the best of everything: ritzy digs, lots of high-tech toys, the best food and drink, you name it. You will have a household staff, maid service or gadgets to do the chores. You will be likely (and expected) to have a powerful car and a big house, a snazzy condo or the penthouse suite in a top hotel. Home security is top-of-the-line, with well-trained guards, astral security and instant response times. Your holophone is SOTA with all the features, multistation trideo, all satellite and cable channels, and subscriptions to several major newspapers and journals. You’ll be on the VIP list at several exclusive restaurants and clubs, both real and virtual. This is the life for the high-stakes winners in the world of Shadowrun: high-level executives, government big shots, Yakuza bigwigs and the few shadowrunners who pull off the big scores (and live to spend their pay).
Cost: 1,000,000
Upkeep: 100,000
Social: +3 (bonus)
Ambush: no ambush possible.
DocWagon:  0% nuyen, 0 reputation
Regeneration: +10% body/willpower
Assets: character can own up to a level four asset.

 

Any other bonuses we can tie to lifestyles?

Monetisation

Recently, I found a great website at bbgamezone.net, a community of amateur and semi-professional social/browser game developers. It’s cool to finally get to talk with some people who sometimes have up to five all ready running and successful games published. Their ideas on best practices are invaluable and the advice on monetisation of games like this are raw, uncut and realistic.

One of the things that surprised me is just how many games are out there, how many people are trying to make an enjoyable game, what a wide scala of genres are covered and how utterly simplistic some of these games are. Also, a suspicion of mine was confirmed; it’s very, very hard to actually finish a game. There are tons of great ideas that are posted on the community board that will never see the light of day. I guess not many people can sink their teeth into a project and see it through to the end. I hope I’ll be able to have the tenacity.

Possibilities, Ignition

Michael Komarck's "Combat Mage"One of the nicest things about having a project of the magnitude that Shadowrun: Corrosion has is that, if done right, ideas spawn and ignite new ideas. We always held the idea that Player vs Player (PvP) combat should be a large part of the game, not only in order to keep the game competitive, but also because we needed a reason to play Corrosion in a browser and being exposed to other players. If there was no PvP element, the game would be a single-player game with chat options, and that wasn’t good enough. The idea of PvP spawned the idea of organised PvP, which is what our end-game is going to be about. (That and resource management.) So we started on PvP, single combat first in order to set the stage for the multi-player combat and in order to give players something more to do to make money, to earn karma and to tweak their character.

We’ve got a rough outline for ranged PvP combat finished and it’s looking good and fast, which is good since the path-finding algorithms we’re using in missions leave a lot to be desired, unfortunately. Having use for pathfinding, it’s fast. Immediately, we came up with another idea; ambushing. Ambushing (or surprise) is already a part of the SR3 game system, where, before the combat starts, the ambusher and ambushee both roll a reaction roll, ambusher against target number (TN) 2 and the ambushee against TN 4, to determine if the ambushee could respond. If not, then the ambusher got a free combat pass to do his worst, which, when you’ve got enhanced reflexes, can be lethal.

Of course, this lethality of ambushing lead us to another idea; how about we drop the TN for the surprise rolls by one for a middle lifestyle, and two for a high lifestyles, and drop the ambush all together for a luxury lifestyle? That way, there are more reasons to aim for a higher lifestyle, which in turn demands a higher daily upkeep price, which in turn keeps the economy stable and flowing.

Right now, if you’re victorious, you get 1 karma if your opponent had a higher reputation than you, another karma if your opponent had a higher rank than you, your rank increases, and you get between 5-10% of the opponent’s nuyen. If you weren’t victorious, you get one karma if either the opponent’s reputation or rank was higher, but you lose 5-10% of your nuyen to your opponent. Also, your rank will most likely go down. This concept of earning karma and making nuyen through PvP introduces some new ideas; you could self sustain on PvP, never having to do one mission if you don’t want to. This means mission rewards need to be competitive in order to keep a steady influx of nuyen into the economy, otherwise players would constantly fight each other and the same nuyen would exchange hands over and over. Nuyen still needs to be spent on increasing skills, attributes and gear, so the need for missions will remain, but to keep the economy healthy we’ll need to keep an eye on things.

What if you want to safeguard your money? Couldn’t you put it in an offshore bank account instead of walking around with it in certified credsticks waiting for some other player to come along and rob you? Wouldn’t that be a great addition to customisable lifestyles? You start out with a small bank account where you can keep money stored for a lower level lifestyle and increase the size as the quality of your lifestyle increases? Perhaps you can buy expansions to a lifestyle, increasing your bank account, increasing your security or something to that effect.

Ideas aplenty, and more and more popping up as we go along. It’s a great feeling, creating something and being infused with ideas. It sure beats sitting around being lead along by someone else’s idea and never having any of your own. I like it!