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Old 10-21-2010, 10:03 AM   #15
dayrinni
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Join Date: Apr 2002
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Re: MUD Development Journal

Well, balance is a tough one. Like you said, even with each class having 18 abilities, I could (by mistake) make 18 rogue abilities under powered and 18 mage abilities over powered. Then again, I could have a completely different system where a player could learn a skill at any point by starting to use it (Dragon Realms). Again, there could be differences between the balance of the skills.

So we have to be careful on how we approach these abilities (and anything else). There will always be issues with balance. It will be a challenge to make sure all 18 abilities are useful and balanced. I surely won't get it the first time! However, that is why I went with a lower amount of abilities. Lately, I usually give classes 1 ability per level. So from my perspective, I am cutting down the amount of abilities and hopefully because of that, I can do a better job balancing them.

To talk a little bit more about your example above with giving 2 more rogue skills. It seems like they just did it for the sake of having 4 skills? This usually won't achieve anything, unless the designers get lucky . There needs to be a purpose for these abilities and this purpose comes from the Class Vision. You know - the typical What role does this class perform or fill? Looking here can give the area of expertise and can help in giving better abilities.

Really, there are a few parts to making abilities for me:
1. What realm is it from? As in, is it magic, melee, holy or rogue?
2. What does the class need now to fill their role? For example, I have just started making the Mage abilities. What do they need right away to be a good Mage? Let's say I am on the 15th ability. What have I already made and what do I need to give the Mage's at this level?
3. Come up with an initial attempt at a balanced version of the ability. At this point, I keep it in mind that we are still in testing phases and the players will know things will change.

I feel this gives me a good way to approach creating reasonable abilities for classes. You can kind of see how I leave the exact numbers and balance issues to the very end. They can always be adjustable.

I have never used EB, but it sounds fairly interesting. Maybe I will do some investigation on this. Sounds like you had a similar experience to me. As you know, I started with C and then went to Java for MUD programming. I used putty and pico for my editing. Good times! But it was a pain in the butt. Now I use Eclipse (I also use it at work), and it is a different realm of reality. Eclipse is extremely powerful and can make programming much easier and streamlined. When I first switched to Java and Eclipse from C, I was much more productive even though my Java skills were lower than my C skills.

Where you the person who sent me an email about the world generation using a PNG file?

I like your approach of replacing characters based on skill. That is a good one actually. Very cool.

I haven't done any planning for a language system yet for Ascension (haven't decided on the races yet...I think I want a reptile race that can claw and bite though)...but I can tell you about the system I implemented in ATS, my previous MUD. At first I went with a random character screen but players complained it made the screen look bad and took away from RP. So I went back and I replaced the say text with a generic flavor message. For example, if the player was a Dwarf, then it would look something like this:

Dayrinni says something in a deep tone, from the earth.

It was more flavorful than that but you get the idea, I hope.

I pretty much agree with what Milawe replied with about this. It does present its challenges because many MUDs use forms of OOC communication. This could turn people off.

From ATS, we only had a tell system where players could send messages to staff members. This worked OK. But over time, players wanted to talk to other ones somehow. So I put in global CHAT and NEWBIE channels. At first I was against this but as more players joined, I saw that they couldn't build a solid community (which as you know is very important) within the game (not everyone uses forums). This was important so I put in the channels right away. The game really did benefit from it.

Hopefully you can use this experience in determining your decision on what to do.


PS: I have not had all of my morning coffee yet so I do apologize for any errors!
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