Latest Playable

 I took a long walk with Legacy, over the last few months. I rewrote a large portion of the client and server to work with multiple domains and an entity-component system. I integrated all of the work I did on the puppet lab animations, and that meant gutting a lot of the client side rendering code. I broke up the concept of a single client that commands all the units.

So now in the latest playable on dropbox you'll find some big changes.

Units are animated. They idle, run, attack, dodge, get hit, and die. Pathfinding. Monsters are now controlled by AI. They are not very smart yet, but that's just a matter of work. If you have suggestions or want to hack on them, let me know. :-)

If you play, I recommend the random cave scenario. I spent a bit of time improving the site generation and I'd like to get some feedback on that.

So, now I think we have another crossroads. I still have a big combat backlog with things like line of site, implementing more units, and a lot of the "standard" combat that we've talked about. But I wonder if I should head back to the campaign first?

Relatedly, I was thinking about X-COM, and one of the things that has always bugged me about that game (the new one) is the squad size limit. It is honestly, laughably ridiculous that a well funded intergovernmental military organization would send "4" soldiers to confront an unknown alien force with superior weaponry.

I understand that it makes the gameplay faster and well, better, but it really hurts the theme of the game, to me. One of the things that appeals to me about Legacy is that I think the theme fits the gameplay better in many ways, but the squad size thing has remained a puzzle. If you're successful, why not send all your heroes on every mission? Why wouldn't you?

So the idea that occurs to me is, what if your heroes are not really on retainer. They charge you per mission. So for a given mission you choose how many to bring, and more experienced heroes demand more loot. That creates a natural tension where the player is playing a metagame of "well, I think I can beat this with 3 guys..."

What think? I think maybe putting a straight up number on your heroes cheapens things a bit, but perhaps each mission has a 'par' number that you get for free, and you can add more by paying, but you don't really get anything for doing the mission with less than the par number of heroes. Or something. Even if we don't use the mechanic per se, it seems like a good way to explain mission limits in a fantasy setting. Gotta pay for that shiny armor, and uh, all those nights at the tavern.

So what's next for Legacy? More combat, or a working campaign?