wick

neurobiologist ± game & web dev

My only two design tools:
[1] "What is the experience we're trying to create" is the first & constant question
[2] To make something seem more like anything, put it next to the opposite (big guy/lil guy, happy thing/sad thing)


Crescent Loom
crescentloom.com/
Gaaaaaaaay 🌺
wick.itch.io/aesthetic

It's so fun to be developing a tactics game while playing BG3. I'll notice a bug and then later be programming a similar system and be like AHA I think I see how they went awry, I see an edge case in my own game that'd cause what I saw over there.

Some examples:

  • their movement indicator doesn't always update after jumping or taking a movement ability. It's more efficient to send updates to that kind of UI readout than constantly reading from the game data, but risks sometimes not getting the memo and continuing to show stale data.

  • I think that the times when it just hangs on an enemy turn for like 10 seconds is it doing pathfinding/turn planning and getting caught in either an infinite loop or too large a possibility space, so there's an escape hatch where if it takes too long they end the turn.

  • It's easier to grant a separate action like "recast speak with dead" or "reapply hex" or "cunning action: hide" than to modify the first one to have a different action cost 'cause the abilities themselves are stateless, I bet. It'd be so much cleaner to just have the second version of the ability on ice and grant it to the character under the right conditions.


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