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Post news Report RSS 5 Reasons to completely remake Gameplay Style

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was thinking about a new gameplay type

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It's weird, that, after years of code writing, I'm going to delete almost everything I've done. But it something that needs to be done, as I mentioned in the last post, and here I'm gonna give you the 5 reasons that led me to remake everything.

1 - The code is outdated

When I first installed Unity and learned the basics I was 15 years old, I didn't even made object-oriented programming at school yet, I learned it with Unity. Ternion was my first project ever. Obviously I couldn't be as good as I am now, that I work as programmer in a company and I've a lot of experience thanks to my past games. When I see things like "GameObject.Find" on Update function I just wanna pop my eyes out.

The method I used for saving is horrible (there is a "Save game" script but it doesn't do savegame... it's somewhere else).

The script controlling the character was based on a example script of Unity called "ThirdPersonController", unfortunately now it contains 3540 lines.

Half of the scripts are made in JS and half in C#, when I have to combine these two some demons randomly gets summoned from the hell.

2. The gameplay is a mix of too many genres

What I mean is... Ternion right now doesn't have a specific genre. It tries to combine RPG aspects with FPS and with TPS. Everything becomes clear when I'm telling you the first sources of inspiration:

  • Transformers
  • Mass Effect
  • Final Fantasy VII Crysis Core
  • Quake III Arena

Yeah. You can agree with me there is something wrong with this list. The reason why I wanted multiplayer on Ternion is because I wanted to make a competitive multiplayer like the one of Quake III Arena/Serious Sam.

Now, it's not a good idea mixing all these genres, what comes out is a complete mess. Unless if you are Guerrilla Games and you make games like Horizon Zero Dawn, but unfortunately I'm not Guerrilla Games.

3. The old type might be repetitive

You see an enemy, you take weapons. You shoot the enemy. If the enemy it's still not dead when you're quite close to him you take the sword and you start pressing the "attack" button repeatedly. There is no parry system, there is no a complex dodging system (you can actually dodge, even if running is more convenient), enemies doesn't protect them-self anyhow.

This might be entertaining when enemies are weak and you put no effort into killing them, but as soon as they become stronger it just gets annoying. You want action and not repeatedly press a button.

4. The new type is more original

I know there's is nothing original if I copy a Final Fantasy, but it's not just a copy of Final Fantasy, it's something different.

I prefer starting from a genre I know very well (because it's my favorite) and develop it in a complete way. It's not about taking something from a genre and something from the others, what I wanna do is to make a simple but clean gameplay, well thought out and reasoned to be enjoyable from the beginning to the end.

Also, none of the recent AAA games (I know very well Ternion is not an AAA game, and it does not pretend to be) has this type of gameplay, so actually it is somehow original. For this generation of videogames at least.

5. Tactics

On the type of gameplay I have in mind, you have all the time you want to think about what to do.

I wanna make it "hard" just because you have to think in advance of what to do next based of what the opponent looks like would do. Something like Chess. Of course Chess is one of the best games ever.

You will be able to see the order of the next turns, because you'll not going to fight alone but together with your fellows, and you'll need to heal them if you don't wanna take all the attacks for yourself and so die alone.

Time will stop (or slow down) between one action and another, if you could see the battle in real-time it wouldn't look like a turn-based game.

Conclusions

I'll probably continue on this path so you'll soon (probably in the next months or years, I can't tell) see another post talking in detail about the combat system and I'll come out with another video. In that case... see you soon.

Thank you for your precious time, bye!

P.S.: Did you see the last video? I can make a cutscene with a very little effort with the events system I've made. I'm quite proud of it and I'm considering pubblishing it on git hub.

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