Bounty hunter

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silvan
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Bounty hunter

Post by silvan » Thu Nov 16, 2006 7:34 am

Waiting to fall asleep again after having a bad dream last night I came up with the following idea :
In the spacestation where you start there could be pictures of wanted pirates. Maybe they are well hidden and you have to look for them very carefully. In the following vertical scroller level the wanted pirates appear with a certain probability. Maybe they appear later in the game so you have to keep track of all the wanted pirates.
But you have to be careful because if you just shoot down every pirate you see you might hit one that isn't wanted and therefore have to pay a huge fine. The explanation for this could be that you shot down a "civilian" ship or you hit a pirate that works for your government at the time.
If you shoot down a wanted one you get a reward (maybe a lot of money or a very rare weapon).
This would encourage the player to explorer the spacestation more intensively plus it would motivate the player to replay a level.

What do you think about this idea ?
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nicolasc
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Wanted Alive - not Dead

Post by nicolasc » Thu Nov 16, 2006 9:14 am

Hi,

Being part of the weapons team, I was thinking of developing an EMP-weapon, which can be used to disable certain ships, which will be salvaged after the mission.

To your idea: Shooting them down, will get you a reward; (re-)capturing an even better one...

To keep the balance, I would suggest to keep the EMP ammo very limited, i.e a few missiles.

The idea itself is ingenious!

cheers
nico

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beni
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Post by beni » Thu Nov 16, 2006 3:13 pm

I also like the idea. The point of making a level more interesting because of the possibility of an encouter with a pirate and thus raise the replayability of the game is cool. I think it is also easy to implement and goes well with the story.

EMP is actually a important part of the story as well. Since Noxon Spaceships have a shield (at least in earlier versions of the story) EMP weapons were the only weapons to actually make the enemy vulnerable.

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patrick
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Post by patrick » Thu Nov 16, 2006 5:28 pm

Since I like all sort of pirate stories, I would of course also like to play one on my own or hunt them, if I could.

Perhaps pirates can be announced (radio or something) or appear with a different color on the radar, so the player is prepared and knows what to do.

About rewards: what about military titles in addition to a money/weapon reward. I like the idea of capturing pirates with EMP. The player should definitely be given some extra credits for that :D

Perhaps we should monitor the mission goals somewhere and add pirates to them as bonus goals. Something like a very simple quest book 8)

silvan
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Post by silvan » Thu Nov 16, 2006 6:15 pm

patrick wrote: Perhaps pirates can be announced (radio or something) or appear with a different color on the radar, so the player is prepared and knows what to do.
...
Perhaps we should somewhere monitor the mission goals and add pirates to them as bonus goals. Something like a very simple quest book 8)
I wouldn't make it that obvious. It should be a challenge for the player to find out more about the pirates (Where they might emerge, how many of them etc.). I mean nobody knows exactly where the pirates are and the governments don't officially fight them, but they don't like the pirates either, therefore they fight the pirates in a more "unofficial" way: They encourage bounty hunters by hanging out wanted posters in the spacestations.
So only the more experienced player knows where to get some extra money or rewards.
Maybe we could introduce the "pirates for money quest" early in the game so that players know about it, but later on it should be less obvious as I described above.
The light on the end of the tunnel is a train.

Marc
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Post by Marc » Thu Nov 16, 2006 6:53 pm

Another thing which could theoretically be added to make the bounty hunter idea more interesting: Famous bounty hunters get their pro and cons.
For example, shops could for example sell them things a little cheaper. Or there are special missions you only get with a given "fame" level.

On the other side, it can happen that the pirates try to get rid of you, so instead being able to hunt a single pirate in a level for a reward, he would actually wait for you with a squad or the like.

This way you get harder enemies as "famous bounty hunter" but if you get rid of all of them you get a higher reward etc.

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beni
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Post by beni » Fri Nov 17, 2006 8:48 am

Marc wrote:Another thing which could theoretically be added to make the bounty hunter idea more interesting: Famous bounty hunters get their pro and cons.
For example, shops could for example sell them things a little cheaper. Or there are special missions you only get with a given "fame" level.

On the other side, it can happen that the pirates try to get rid of you, so instead beeing able to hunt a single pirat in a level for a reward, he would actually wait for you with a squad or the like.

This way you get harder enemies as "famous bounty hunter" but if you get rid of all of them you get a higher reward etc.
Very good idea. With that we would have another attribute in the character system: the bounty hunter fame. It should be easy to implement and it would make the game harder (at least when it comes to pirates).

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hofzge
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Post by hofzge » Fri Nov 17, 2006 10:16 am

I like the idea of pirates, but I think to let them appear at random would overcomplicate matters. We should keep things simple and as it has to be the goal for this semester "to get the game running with at least one level".

Don't get me wrong: I like the idea of pirates as they also lessen the burden on the modelling community and bring a little reusibility into the models. We've had so many good ideas until now, but I feel that if we have ideas in the phase in which Orxonox is now, we must also think from the game side:
  • How can this change be implemented (programming/modelling) ?
  • How long will such an implementation take? Is this change realistic in one semester?
  • Will the game benefit enough to make this change worth the while?
  • Does this change bring new things, which must be implemented in other parts of the game (as for example pirate ship models) ?
  • Does this change ultimately make the game more fun to play?
It is a wish from my side to always keep these points in mind. In the case of the pirates, my view is that they greatly increase fun and that they can be easily implemented and that fame is a rather easy to implement attribute, but that random pirates might somehow be detrimental to the gameplay as sometimes a given level would be difficult and sometimes easy, which is not a good idea in my view.

So I think that pirates are great, if they don't come into the game too much at random.

Last but not least: I think that we must not lose sight of the goal "one playable level", as it has to be the thing to work towards. I only say that because having something playable is so much more fun than having ten techdemos.

Sorry if this post sounds negativistic. That was really not the idea and I also like space pirates and Boba Fett very much. Sorry as well that I got a bit off the topic.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
-- William Gibson, Neuromancer

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