When you’re making a game you’re not building a singular, linear experience. It’s not a movie, it’s not a song, not even a book. Rather you’re designing and tuning independent mechanisms that harmonize to provide that said experience. We like to view games as toolests we provide players with, basically building blocks arranged in a certain way we deem optimal.
But at their core, game mechanics are building blocks. The game itself is our personal view on how these building blocks should operate, but we want to give our players the opportunity to give their personal spin to Bossgard.
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We started work on the Custom Game mode, which can be applied to local and online games. The first step we took was to open up the character roster, the boss roster, map rotation and basic stats like Boss/Viking hitpoints, the frequency with which characters use their abilities and number of lives.
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Bossgard will be played mostly online and giving hosts the ability to tweak games, to give their personal touch, to give them the opportunity to stand out among other hosts is something we care about.
We managed to lay the groundwork. And it's working. And it's fun.
(A game where players can only play Ziggy, the mushroom-growing Viking)
Games like Warcraft 3 and Timesplitters 2 remind us just how far a map editor or a custom game mode can go. Each of our Vikings has a distinct ability and each Boss features unique mechanics, we figured that if we allowed players to focus on one particular part of the game, entire new “mini-games” can spring out.
For instance the Fortress, one of our Boss characters, plays like a Tower Defense. By simply editing the Viking roster and assigning specific roles, a player can emphasize this sort of “siege” scenario.
Or take Krampus, one of our Vikings. He plays like a spinning top. If you limit the roster to Krampus and set the ability cooldown to 0, you basically get a Beyblade arena.
(A game where players can only play Krampus)
This is only the beginning, ground zero. We plan on exposing most of the game’s parameters such as movement speed, attack speed, dodging, projectile speed etc. Hopefully we’ll manage to provide our more fiddly fans with some nice, streamlined tools they can play with.
