The world is full of big and scary things, or so at least our budding hero is about to find out; you'd think someone would have warned him.
At the heart of most RPG-style games are the bad guys. How they think and how they confront and challenge you will mark your game as either too hard or too easy. Sadly, there isn't any real middle ground (you can't please everyone all the time). However, we can ensure a fair system all round and engage the players with systems that will surprise and entertain them as they move around in the big bad world.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Planning for event systems
- State machines
- Basic AI techniques
When you're looking to engage the player roaming around in your game, it is best to throw them off guard and challenge them when they least expect it; this ensures that the player is paying attention while playing, and it also serves to keep them on their toes at all times.
The following methods help to achieve this:
- Fixed systems: This is where the places and interactions are actually planned in advance by forcing the player to be drawn in to an event at prescribed times/places
- Random generation: This involves using random systems to challenge the player within a given time frame or occurrence, giving the player a chance of an event but not a certainty of one
There are merits and demerits with either approach for the player as they interact with your game. Fixed systems are easy to implement but limit replayability (game becomes dull in the second or subsequent runs), whereas random systems can be trickier to get the balance right but it also mean the player will likely keep playing longer or get irritated very quickly.
Finding the balance between implementing events is a tricky process, which you will have to find the right sweet spot for in your particular game, and inevitably all games implement this differently.
Also, remember that there is no silver bullet and no reason not to use both systems together, using fixed systems to tell a story and random events to keep it interesting.