Re: News from Valiant galaxy associates
A quick response to Dark about rebalancing Interceptor or TKS.
In the case of Interceptor, when we revisit the game we're going to totally restructure the game. It will use a map mode similar to TKS or EKS for movement related issues, and also to handle certain hazard and other issues.
It will be necessary to revisit all the issues you raised when we do so. The next iteration of Interceptor will not be the old game with a couple of tweaks. Weapon ranges will have to be changed, computer assisted shot needs to be toned down, and there's other things that need to be addressed.
We also want to try and make the computer opponents smarter about how they react. Since we'll be adding in engagements with multiple fighters at once, we also need to better handle damage from multiple vectors. I've already begun roughing out design notes for this, and it looks fairly simple on paper--but it always does.
We made a list of suggestions made by the forum here and elsewhere, as well as ideas we came up with on our own to make the idea of missions happen, as well as new weapons, new enemies, etc.
This will be a long term goal though.
With TKS, a lot of the changes to it involve more how to make money and not making it all about just flying from planet to planet. That's a slow process, and got abandoned for the last year or better while we went back to EKS. We are intending to finish it, but it might be longer.
Some of those ideas include missions that take you to specific places, playing the stock market, etc. We've expanded the map of TKS as well to bring it more in line with EKS' map, and so there's a lot more to see.
One project that I have mentioned here and elsewhere, that we intend to do before we move on to anything else is to finish an in house utility for generating map content for our games. This would allow me to set up map conditions, some character information, objects, etc, and Aaron could use generic code to make that information come to life for new games.
We're still experimenting with this, but if we can get it working correctly, we'll be using it in our next two mini games.
As a sneak peek at those, one will be a murder mystery game that uses a Clue style mechanic to randomize the who done it part of the game, and a few changes to make the game play more interesting than just talking to people about places, weapons, and suspects. I've not seen anything like this in audio games before, and I thought it might be a good game concept for the logic puzzlers out there.
The other game will be a pirate themed rescue game where you must try and rescue the governor's daughter from a pirate ship. Those are both not intended to be heavy weight huge projects, but we wanted to do a couple of smaller things after EKS. It has been much more of a slog, as Aaron loves to remind me, than I first predicted when I proposed going back to it.
I guess the short form of this post is, we're aware of some of the balance issues with the games, and in expansions they are being addressed. Probably not to everyone's taste, but I gave up trying to please everyone all the time a long time ago.
Thanks again for the good feedback,
Jeremy
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