Mohawk Urban Ideas

This is where me and Will spit out ideas for Mohawk Urban. Once we have a full-on project underway, we'll have something more professional to benefit from. I'll also post stuff and whatnot.

Currently, the game is mostly interaction-and-response based.

I think it's a good idea, but it needs a little more.

Maybe a system in which the player could actually use words (predefined) to talk to NPCs as well as emotion?

Will wrote:Currently, the game is mostly interaction-and-response based.

I think it's a good idea, but it needs a little more.

Maybe a system in which the player could actually use words (predefined) to talk to NPCs as well as emotion?

Yes. You can still interact with the character by the item and sometimes even the combat menu... Bringing up a maximum of 24 dialogue options... Of course not all of them are possible at once. And there's questions you can ask. The mean and nice options are used as agreeing and disagreeing. The very mean or very nice options are stronger counterparts of those reactions. By the way, I saw Bioshock Infinite, and I liked it's movie-like value. Inspired me a little... It didn't give me any real ideas, I just had a feeling that that's similar to what Mohawk Urban would be like. There's a 15-minute demo on YouTube. Still, I'm figuring out ways to make Mohawk Urban compensate for it's hard puzzles, being cartoon 2D, AND not a first person shooter. Plus it has barely any RPG elements... Not exactly a mass appeal game at a glance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY3ZHiznXdQ

Could you name the RPG elements you plan to include?

5 Base elements that all characters have.

Endurance... Not how many hitpoints they have, but how many hits they can take. Max of 7. Some hits count as 2 or 3. Making it somewhat realistic. Because in real life, the toughest of the tough can only take 7 moderately sized cuts before being unable to fight. Likely will be developed on. Even bosses only have a cap of 7, but it's complicated on how it'd be a "boss fight".

Relationships... Every interaction Mohawk or any other character you play as has with another character changes what people think of you. A relationship can cap at 50 or -50. This is handy because you'll find yourself in many situations where you're at the mercy of even minor characters, and if you did something to tick them off a while ago, they'll have a hard time doing what you want. Relationships are not a skill, they're just consequences for your choices in dialogue, combat, and the plot itself. Ties in with Personality.

Personality. For the 1 to 9 possible playable characters, you determine personality by what dialogue choices you make. All the playable and non-playable dudes come with preset personalities. This could be an extremely important part of the game with the more characters you can play as. For example, Mohawk and Rapé team up to raid some dungeon. You can choose to play as Rapé, but instead of Mohawk being the way I specifically would design him in this situation, his personality is determined by how you used him up to that point. This depends on what Mohawk will do. Will he protect you? Will he ditch you? Will he agree with your choices in-game? Will he stop you from doing the right/wrong thing? I dunno, depends on how you acted when you played Mohawk. Okay, so the personality ranges from 100 to 0 for each type of base dialogue option. 0 is the most aggressive you can be, and 100 is the most charismatic you can be. These are percentages, by the way. Your relationship with the character affects choices the character makes. Like if your relationship is 50, it changes a 30% chance of a character doing something to an 80% chance. So it's a pretty big difference. And Relationships develop SLOWLY. You're lucky if you're at 50 with any character by the end of the game. This inspires the player to actually co-operate with other people in the game, because you can screw yourself over if you got a bad relationship. And I'm not saying a 0% personality is bad. If you like to go in and kick ass, Mohawk is great in a fight, but he'll just stand scratching his butt when you do a puzzle. A 100 personality character is more intelligent, you get the idea. Not always will disagreeing bring your personality down... Sometimes it's better to disagree or be somewhat aggressive to a character. And any major choice you makes affects ALL characters.

Hurt. The factor of how much damage you do. It's determined by your weapon. Needs to be developed.

Speed. Duh. Cap of 7. Needs to be developed on.

And then there's equipment. But I guess that's another story.
As you can see, I put the emphasis on the AI and relationship stuff. That's the most interesting part to me... But I'll explain combat and how awesome that is in the next post.

Thing is, I want there to be SOME RPG elements, but in the long run, you're playing a linear game with a plot you can barely control... So why should you do any grinding? There should be barely enough RPG for you to feel accomplished. The real combative design should go into actually fighting when it comes to a cinematic and flashy game like Mohawk Urban.

The idea is that there's 4 buttons you can press while in combat. Foot, Arm, Head, Item. But each one of those branches off into multiple things. Maybe instead of your arm for punching, you use it to slap or grab. And instead of kicking you jump or stomp. And Maybe you could trade out an Arm feature, for two leg features. And there's combos that somehow go as smoothly as non-combo button mashing. And each combo or move is some sort of comic reference. The next thing, is that you need to be able to change your line-up of movies quick... VERY quick. So maybe there's some way that you can select one of the four buttons, and then scroll through one of the 7 different things you can corollate with that. Meaning that you could change your moves IN COMBAT. And/or there's a very quick menu interface that changes how you fight ahead of time, so you can develop how you play. As for leveling... There's only 7 level-ups. You only get one attribute point or whatever to spend per level. There's no pitfalls, just enhancements to what you do. To some people, certain parts of the game would be frustrating, while to others it's not... So they can feel free to level up an attribute to remedy that frustration without feeling that they'll screw up the stats of their character. So it applies to your style. Many games do this, but we'll do it more subtly. It's not to be rewarding, or to have it your way, it's to make the game more convenient. Maybe instead of using points on Speed, Damage, or Health, you can spend it on a perk that'll help you do puzzles easier, if you're an idiot... or you can increase relationships. So if you're a strategy or an adventure game player, you can blaze through the puzzle part... But the combat won't be your cup of tea... So you make a power-character, knowing that you got other parts of the game handled. Same goes for the action players, who need a little bit to go through the smart parts of the game. And the fighting should be the best combat interface ever seen in a 2D game. And I don't know about armor and all that just yet. Lastly, it'd be cool if you could use any item in your inventory as a weapon.