I've come up with a pretty cool idea, but before I get into it I have to preface it; As a hockey fan one of my favorite games is NHL Eastside Hockey Manager 2007 by SI Games (free trial download is here: http://www.sigames.com/). You get to become the general manager of a hockey team from the NHL to various pro teams around the world. You don't actually play the games as a player (though you can coach) the game concentrates on team building.
Anyway, I was thinking about X-men and how team rosters were chosen and realized that I could make a very cool game similar to EHM but based on superheroes. The game would allow you to recruit heroes to a team. You'd train them, direct them into to battle, but also you'd have to manage morale and make intelligent decisions on how to construct the team's lineup. I've already thought out a ton of necessary attributes that would be needed, and I've put some preliminary ideas into a tactical, training, and recruiting modules. Unfortunately I don't have the programing skills to construct such a game, and I'm not sure how much actual interest there would be in it.
Powers would almost all have to be individually coded and their game value determined. It'd be a different kind of game than Freedom Force though. Freedom Force is mostly designed around physical interaction, so the benefits of stuff like telepathy or leadership are sometimes difficult to simulate. But this game in theory would.
Just a cool idea I came up with and thought I should share. If there's any interest I'll post some more details.
I think it's nifty. Someone make it so.
sounds like a lot of fun, one of my favourite TT games used to be Bloodbowl, and i loved playing a season through, picking players to cover strengths and weaknesses, this sounds quite similar. Even if it can't get off the ground due to programming/lack of resources i'd still like to hear more.
i'm interested but i have no coding skills
Cool, people actually are interested :D
I've got a lot of ideas on how this game would work. I can give give some details on attributes right now. EHM uses a 1-20 attribute scale and I've adopted that in my notes. 1-20 gives alot more range than Freedom Force's 1-10 without getting so large to be unwieldly. However it's possible that such cosmic level characters like Galactus might require a higher scale but I'll deal with that later.
In regards to strength I've mapped out the first 4 levels:
1 weak -> children, unmuscular people
2 normal -> people of common strength
3 strong -> people who work out a lot
4 peak -> the best a person can be. Non-super strength chars are capped to this level regardless of training.
5 -> at this point we move to post-human ability, I'd need to work out exact levels.
Levels for other attributes may or may not have their own mapping.
Anyway along with Strength these are the attributes on the physical end:
*Strength - attacking strength
*Speed - movement speed would likely use a modified strength mapping
*Dodge - my actual plan for dodge is that 1-20 equals the percentage of dodging any attack. Dodging would be based on agility, gymnastic ability, marital arts, possibly speed, those kinds of things.
*Endurance - essentially hit points, would likely be mapped like strength.
*martial arts - a modifier skill that would increase strength and possibly dodge. In comics martial arts masters have consistently been shown to defeat characters much stronger and more powerful then themselves by being able to use their physical abilities to much greater effect.
Then there would metal attributes:
*Intelligence - this affects intelligence, though at this exact moment I'm not sure how it affects the game, but it will. Reed Richards without intelligence is a completely different character.
*Assertive - this would be a scaled attribute used to determine a characters interaction with others. high scores would be very dominant, low scores submissive. Dominant personalities will want to be in charge, having more than one would lead to conflict.
*Rallying - a leadership scale determining a characters ability to inspire those around him.
*Tactical - the characters tactical skills. Obviously an ideal leader would be hight in all of the previous attributes.
*intro-extro scale - this affects characters interaction, low are introverts, loners, high scores are very outgoing.
*discipline - determines if a character is willing to work hard and follow procedure. Important for training.
*stamina - amount of work that can be done before tiring. When tired it negatively affects attributes.
*teach - ability of a char to train others. A team without anyone good at this will not be effective at training.
*learn - ease of which a character learns skills or improves through training.
* a morale scale - this scale would affect how easily the chars morale is affected. A low score means moral easily goes down, high means they stay positive.
*negative-positive - this affects character interaction. There are certain people you love to be around, others you'd rather not be. Superman would likely have a high score, Batman maybe not as the modern Batman has a tendency to turn people away.
*lethal - a scale that indicates a characters likeliness to kill in battle. Depending on how you're running your team this may or may not be desirable. Also certain characters may be tagged to dislike "killers".
*heroic - a scale that shows how heroic a character is. This affects the types of actions they're willing to do and how they interact with other characters.
Some of these need different names, and all of them need more specific work in determining their affects on the game but these are things that I feel are very necessary. The mental scale plays a huge role in constructing an efficient team. I want this game to be able to simulate different types of teams, like a Avengers team which is a very public, very heroic team, or a more Ultimates type team thats more about the ends regardless of the means. So you'd construct Ultimate Cap differently than 616 Cap and two really would not be effective on the same team.
I'll give some of my ideas on other elements of the game later. I've got ideas on stuff like powers, recruitment, training, patrols, funding, battles, information sources, and character tags.
On Speed, I figure it would affect who attacks first, and at high levels will probably grant extra attacks per turn.
I'm not a sports fan or gamer, but this sounds like a really cool concept for the superhero genre. I'd like to see somethink like this happen.
Never been into RPGs, but I'm a huge sports (basketball, boxing) fan, both in the real-world and in "fantasy" sports (which is basically D&D for sports fans, anyway) and I have something of a background in statistics (I helped design the weighted matching system for the CPU-controlled original character Danger Room tournaments from a couple of years ago). I'm busy enough as it is to be of any real help now, but here are some general tips on modeling games:
- While it sounds counter-intuitive, it's probably a better idea to define the statistics that measure general game performance before going in-depth into defining character attributes. For example, the most basic question to ask yourself in designing the game system is "what determines a win?" Does a team win by scoring the most "points?" Does it win by knocking out all the members of the opposing team? Once you've laid that down, you can then work towards defining more specific features, such as what a "KO" is, what a score/field goal/"successful attack" is, what a possession (or in RPG terms, a "turn") is, etc. This approach is similar to how sports games are reviewed, analyzed, and modeled where statisticians start with a result, and then work "backwards" breaking down as many of the quantitative categories that contributed to the result as possible. For example, if I were to design a basketball simulation game, before I can even start to assign player attributes such as rebounding ability and free-throw shooting ability, I would first have to define what a rebound is and what a free-throw is, and how they contribute to the team's final score.
- Once you've determined what the relevant in-game statistics are (don't be too worried about getting it all mapped out on the first try, chances are that you'll need to redefine and refine these metrics numerous times as you develop the system further), you can then start to define the attributes that determine a player's performance in the particular statistical categories. When conceptualizing these attributes, it might be helpful to think of them in terms of "per game" or "per turn" player statistics (such as the points per game stat in basketball) as opposed to coefficients on a graduated scale (like you see in RPGs), so that the correlation between attributes and game performance will be a lot easier to map.
- You'll probably be spending a lot of time tweaking character attributes and statistical measures of game performance until you get a reliable and significant correlation between the two. This is a very important step because you want the attributes to actually mean something with respect to in-game performance. If you've determined that there should be an attribute called "strength" or "speed," for example, you'll want to ensure that they are actually meaningful attributes in the sense that they can significantly (in the statistical sense of the word) affect the chances of a player's success in-game. You'll also want to weigh the attributes against each other (is strength a more significant factor than speed?). Don't forget to introduce an element of randomness in the game (via percentages, simulated dice rolls, and other techniques) to make the game more exciting.
- To carry the sports analogy even further, you'll probably want to define fixed team roles (positions) and create statistical categories that reflect significantly on position played, so as to open up strategy to more than just putting together a team with the highest composite ratings (remember, though, that you aren't restricted by sports conventions, such as the need to pit two teams of equal number of players against each other... you could have a system in place that would allow players to "tag-team" against one opposing player, etc.).
Designing a comprehensive and fair game model takes a lot of work and testing, I remember working on a more accurate model for playing fantasy basketball utilizing "new" statistics such as adjusted +/- (http://www.82games.com/comm30.htm) and Player Efficiency Rating (http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/per.html) a couple of years back but it was just so much work that I figured doing so would have to be a full-time job. The good thing about modeling superhero team battles as a "team sport" is that you don't have to account for and deal with all the messy real-world statistical aberrations and deviations that happen in sports all the time. You can basically just reference idealized test situations for defining and refining statistical categories and attributes.
Anyway, good luck with this endeavour, I wish I could give you some actual real-time help with this beyond these general tips, but hopefully somebody else with the time and the experience can be involved in your project.
Thanks for the advice, Zulu. I've been thinking quite a bit about this and most of the stuff you mentioned I've thought about to some degree.
Just a suggestion... -some- of the heavy lifting may have already been done... if you scripted it in Python under the FF system.
Podmark's comment got me thinking. Thanks to FF and the scripting community there is already an AI system, a 'watch mode', lots of power customization, and more. I haven't really kept up with the state of the art in FF scripting so there may be other pieces I don't even know about. Adding secondary attributes via scripting is certainly possible, though there would probably be a high kludge factor involved. The UI is not necessarily flexible enough, but some input via text files would work.
True, it might be more work to bend FF to the task than simply starting over. But as an FF mod you might get support from the FF scripters to 'make it so'.
I'm not advocating this approach, really, just offering it up as a thought.
Sweet idea!
have you ever played XAssault?
It's kind of similar where its a text based game based on the X-men, based in the morrison era (including the X-statix) and you build a nearly random team, and make command decisions, but its not as controlled as your ideas
i'll email you a copy, it might give you more insight
I don't think FF would work for what I have in mind, though it could potentially work for a simplified version. One of the trickier things I foresee is developing a decent combat simulator. Something like watch mode would be ideal, but it would probably be simpler to construct a text based combat system.
I think I have played X-Assault, it's been a while so I'm not 100% sure it was the same game.
To touch on some of Zulu's points. Ultimately the simpliest objective of the game would be to KO an opponent and to defeat an enemy force, much like Freedom Force. After that a large part of my idea is constructing characters that are more fleshed out than FF allows and taking that and detailing how it affects the running of a team. And yes random variables would need to play a big part in how things worked out.
I like the martial arts master attribute :)
mwahaha!!!
Quote from: Intensity on November 05, 2007, 10:23:30 AM
I like the martial arts master attribute :)
mwahaha!!!
Yeah it was something I felt was pretty necessary for something like this. The current mathematical evaluation of it is 'divide score by 4 and add to strength'. So your true masters get to add 5 points to their strength score. Though that's just a preliminary idea, like Zulu said alot of these things will require alot of review. It's also one of the attributes that is most trainable.
Strength is the attacking score that determines how much damage an opponent takes in a confrontation. Powers work separetly but I'll discuss those a little later.
I agree that this is a cool idea! But it sounds like a phenomenal amount of work. Is this even a feasible project for a small group of folks to do on their own? Anyone have any knowledge of what it might take to pitch a game concept to a developer? Does that even happen from outside?
Quote from: Uncle Yuan on November 05, 2007, 10:57:35 AM
I agree that this is a cool idea! But it sounds like a phenomenal amount of work. Is this even a feasible project for a small group of folks to do on their own? Anyone have any knowledge of what it might take to pitch a game concept to a developer? Does that even happen from outside?
According to the website of the guy who wrote X-Assault, he did it all on his own, just for love of comics. At least until Marvel shut him down.
And there are a lot of big open-source projects that basically started out with a small group of people who got together on an idea, most likely where one or two programmers did most of the initial coding.
I don't think you're likely to interest a major-league game distributor with a game like this, so it would have to be a group of volunteers or entrepreneurs, basically.
This might fit as an Interactive Fiction (Text Adventure) project. Some of the IF platforms are as fully developed as any mainstream programming language. I've fiddled around with Inform, but I don't understand it well enough to put together a full-fledged game... much less something as complex as this. But Inform does let you define attributes in very complex ways. Inform uses 'natural' language programming, where you (sort of) tell the interpreter what you want in plain English. It can be a bit convoluted, but the documentation is excellent and there are plenty of examples to learn from.
You may not be a programmer, Podmark, but Inform might be within your grasp if you'd care to take a look at it.
Caveat: It occurs to me you may be considering this as a multiplayer game, which IF would -not- lend itself to very well.
Got a link? I'll definitely take a look.
I hadn't considered multiplayer up to this point, though in a prefect world it would probably be ideal.
http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Inform%207.html