hogsy

0 comments by hogsy on Jun 15th, 2012

So yesterday I started getting Ictus ready for some work and I plan on hopefully doing some quick experiments either later today or tomorrow. Nobody knows what Ictus is at the moment other than me really, I've told other people such as Eukos some bits and bobs on it but nothing on really what I have noted down so this should hopefully be a somewhat interesting post in that regard.
Way back in 2009 I wanted to make a game that took place in a city in the sky, that then evolved into PlanetShift around late 2010 and PlanetShift has pratically been in planning stages ever since then. Ictus is pretty much part of PlanetShift, it gives some backstory on things you would probably not see in PlanetShift or things that may have happened before PlanetShift takes place... I won't go into it too much since I don't want to give a great deal away but overall there should be a lot of depth in terms of story here.

Anyway nobody really cares about things like that, why is ictus special and why would you even want to bother playing it? Ictus could probably be compared to games such as Electronic Art's Battlefield series or Quake Wars but there's a lot more to Ictus than those games, you don't just start and rush out into your tanks or other vehicles but instead you have to prepare yourself, working together and making sure that you're prepared to both attack and defend. Now this doesn't mean some daft "get ready" period when the game starts as that completely distracts from the game, what this means is that players will have to be aware of the resources their team can spare and will have to becareful in how they manage those resources. The issue I'm having with the sort of system I have planned is that there's a lot of potential for griefing so that's something I'm currently focusing on sorting out but other than that having this reliance on resources should certainly make battles more interesting. Do you focus on defence, offense or just collecting resources and saving those up? Now I should stress that this isn't like Natural Selection or one of its clones as there is no commander on the team to direct everything, everything is being left up to the individual players to handle and coordinate others. I'm not sure what more I can say about it at the moment other than just write about a few ideas I suppose, one thing that I've slowly stepped away from while writing my notes is the idea of resource repositories where players can store all their resources which are then added to the global resource pile. It may end up staying in there with only a few objects being buildable by using resources from the main respository while smaller objects being buildable just from local resources... That could work I suppose but there's still the issue of people buying something purposely too expensive just to annoy the rest of the team.
As you can tell resources are fairly important here but there are other things too, it would be possible for example to build a small outpost in another part of the map which may provide some opporutunity to attack the enemies base more quickly, imagine players having to build a generator and then some sort of teleport station, the amount of time to build those two things should actually make it fairly safe from abuse.

I'm still putting a lot of thought into the style of the game as well, what we have planned is a rather rough style for everything since it's all been reused over and over again during the course of the battle with quick little fixes or adjustments made. Other than that I'm still thinking about it but I like the idea of WWI meets Halo sort of style.

There's a lot that's already been thought out which I haven't spoken about yet mainly because I want to keep most of it secret for now but I'm sure you get the idea. I'll probably talk about this again in the future in an official post or something.

Thanks for reading.