Sprint 5 experiment
I used the final afternoon of Sprint 005 to work on something just for fun :-)
I'm planning to add a Muay Thai Camp to Bangkok. In this location, your agent will be able to learn Thai boxing, spar with other girls, meet NPCs, and get hired as a ring girl for professional Muay Thai fights.
Obviously, we'll need some combat rules to implement this location properly (and for other action scenes), so on Friday afternoon I got brainstorming on some hand-to-hand fighting rules for Female Agent.
Progress
I already had some vague ideas about how to do this using the game's RPG rules, so I made good progress. I'm especially pleased with a few innovations:
No turn order: Fighters attack each other (while defending themselves) simultaneously, instead of attacking and defending in turn like in most RPGs.
No hit points: Damage is handled via Status Effects, instead of by whittling down a health bar. Example: hitting someone hard can cause effects like pain (reduces their next combat roll by a variable amount) or concussed (knocks them down and puts them out of the fight).
Tactical choices: fighters can choose to strike or grapple. Strikes damage an opponent, grapples put them in a worse position.
Special moves: characters with martial arts training can perform special types of strikes and grapples. For example, trained field agents can use the Apply wristlock special move to try and immobilise an opponent in one move.
Size matters: height and strength make a big difference in hand-to-hand combat. Fighters inflict and shrug off damage based on their Build and Strength stats.
So does fitness: anybody who's ever laid into a kick pad for more than a few seconds knows that fighting is exhausting. Fighters lose effectiveness over time based on their Stamina stat.
So does aggression: attacking without warning gives you a big Sucker Punch bonus. When in doubt, hit first.
I want to do some testing, so I started work on a little fight scene set in the Lifepath. I'll publish it when it's ready.
Comments (16)
i would focus more on getting what you have planned done before adding in an entirely new system
Thanks man, appreciate you feeding back on this.
It could be very useful and fun/hot for the scope of the game to have a basic combat system that uses the agent's stats (the "personality" ones too), and then plan different consequences when winning or losing. It shouldn't be anything overly complicated or go outside the "I need to fight" scope though (so no tournaments, etc..), it's not the core of the game.
I'm basically only doing this so we can have a weekly oil wrestling floorshow at the Hard Cock Cafe :-D
I think this is a considerable over stretch for a game that has been going for ?over a year now and barely has any working sex scenes or interactions. Get the actual game working and then consider adding something like this, but dont sacrifice core content time.
Thanks man, see my reply to Spiralnebula above but thanks for reinforcing that feedback. It may be that this has a negative effect.
Maybe I'm the only one who feels this way but if this continues to eat into dev time of the rest of the game I think it's a bad idea regardless of quality, because it's not part of the game's main draw and development has already taken a lot longer than expected.
This is important feedback and it's the main reason that I haven't tackled things like this so far, they're just too far down the priority list to get around to. I've started doing this as an experiment (based on Alex Andrews's Scrum of One technique https://www.raywenderlich.com/585-scrum-of-one-how-to-bring-scrum-into-your-one-person-operation ), so let's see how it goes. I think the idea is that squeezing in a few hours every couple of weeks to work on something fun and low-pressure makes me more productive for the rest of the sprint.)
Unrelated: I'd love to have a game dedicated to a girl trying to become a pro fighter. I'm not sure how much you should focus on a fight system. It depends on how much melee you see us doing. I like the lack of hit points. Status effects/debuffs could be a few seconds to a few months (bad concussions that last and therefore affect your outside work). Your opponent, if they are perceptive, can worsen the status effect, making the effects more onerous and long-lasting. Ie, they do something that debuffs your strength until the debuff is greater than your strength score and you fall down. I suspect that our agent wouldn't engage in matches herself, though, as it seems unprofessional for someone whose job relies on their looks to risks bruises and cuts
You should check out Fight Club Reborn, featuring writing by our very own Dissonant Soundtrack! Fighting in matches will be optional, although cuts and bruises are a good idea – maybe some agents will have to get pretty creative with their makeup if they have a shift at the Hard Cock Cafe the night after a girl/girl cage fight.
I like it a lot but having no hit points would probably overcomplicate things. Everything else is good and you can give bonuses or penalties to hit and damage based on that and even have the conditions that give similar penalties, but for now I think it's best to stick to the tried and true hit point system. Especially with both combatants taking their turn at the same time. Another thing is you may consider making it a straight up MMA thing instead of specifically Muay Thai. I say that because I think it is good to include the grappling, but Muay Thai doesn't actually involve grappling. It's a mainly striking fighting style with fists, feet, elbows, and knees that has a pseudo grappling stage called "the clinch" which is actually just a position you put your opponent in to make it easier to elbow or knee them in the face. As opposed to something like Judo or Jiu Jitsu which brings someone fully to the floor to lock limbs into positions that threaten breaking them and forcing someone to tap out if they can't escape. I like grappling and I definitely think it should be an option, but then you can't call it Muay Thai. That or you're just bringing an unfair advantage to the table :)
If we see hit points as someone's ability to soak up hits without being hurt, I've already got something that does that; a fighter's Strength stat gives them a chance to just shrug off a blow without picking up a status effect. Hopefully it will work out. I should have been clearer – the fight engine isn't just supposed to support Muay Thai. The tutorial/testing scene I'm working on is a schoolyard catfight between the agent and another girl: the available strikes are [[slap her]], [[scratch her]] and [[kick her shins]]; the grapples are [[pull her hair]] and [[grab her shirt]].
Excellent, pleased with the innovations, especially agree with the tactical choice. Good luck
Thanks let's hope it works when we test it :-)
Not sure how to think about this; I love tough girls (that cover image is amazing), but isn't our agent being a fighter supposed to be a secret?
Being known to have picked up some Muay Thai may actually help your agent's cover, should her fighting skills be exposed during the mission. :-)