I love video games. I love them so much that I've dedicated my life to finding ways to use this wonderful medium to inspire others, get across clear messages, and provide fun experiences to all age ranges. I'm a freelance game designer mostly active in my own projects. Though I'm a designer, I have a huge amount of experience in animation, music, and sociology, with rudimentary knowledge in various coding languages. My general duties in projects are to design, illustrate, provide basic code work, organize, animate, create gameplay builds, and research credible concepts, from the very beginning of game development to the very end. My only goal is to make games that'll put a smile on someones face and maybe even give them a new way at looking at life, as precious as it is. This, along with my love for gaming, is what I live for. =D

Report RSS 02.25.10 - Getting things done

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Considering I do a lot of work on a daily bases, and since I need to get back into using ModDB for the slur of work I'll have to put up on the VHEL ModDB page, I figured "hey, why not abuse the blog function for the lolz?".

So! That's what I'll be doing from now on (or until I suddenly lose interest).

At the moment, I'm stuck working through a few interesting mechanics I had recently added into VHEL's design document. The idea is to have a multi-layered health system that not only encourages the player to "evade", but gives both the player and the enemy an assortment of options to tackle a particular situation. We want less one-dimensional systems that only benefit the player, and more three-dimensional systems that can enhance the gameplay experience, but also force the player to make intentional decisions within the game world. Having already reworked the stamina system several times in the past, this newest iteration doesn't exactly boost my moral too high, but it does do something that previous builds didn't do to well: change the game and FORCE situations onto both the enemy and the player.

Although I can't give away details at the moment, the latest stamina system gives valid reason to run iso and group (a fancy way of describing the separation between characters on a given map), use cloak, cunning, or combat, and give meaning to the jobs each character has. All this sounds nice and all, but whenever you have a layered health mechanic in a game, there's a lot of complex jargon that has to be clarified for the sake of player education and playability. I've leaned quite a bit on a percentage based system similar to brawl since it gives me more room to insert my own rules and create a type of "ladder" that interconnects with stamina ratios (again, I'll probably clarify all this in a VHEL update in the future =P).

Considering this isn't the only thing I need to figure out (the art and storyline still have a lot of challenges in the way), I'm surprised how much time I've dedicated to solidifying major gameplay mechanics to make them genuinely fun and indefinitely rewarding.

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