This time, we're looking at another feature that has been in since the beginning, but has been shown by our players at shows to be in need of some upgrades - ghost mode.
 Spot the ghosts... there's two of 'em! |
From the get-go, we knew that players' characters needed to be able to respawn, but we wanted to do something a bit more fun and player-led than just a time delay before that happened. And since ghosts are almost as integral to a good pirate story as the pirates themselves, the idea we came up with was that when a player character died, their ghost would appear at the body's location, and the player would have to "corpse run" back to the respawn point (as made popular by a certain well-known MMORPG!) in order to join back in. And since ghosts can do nothing but move around, the faster the player got their ghost back to their respawn point, the quicker they could get back into the back-stabbin' treasure-grabbin' action...
... at least, that was the theory. But at shows, we started spotting a worrying trend - some players got the ghost thing immediately. Others needed a bit of explanation before getting it; fine at a show when one of our able crew is around to tell them what to do, but not a desirable quality in a release version. A significant number just plain struggled; either they did not realise that they were supposed to move the ghost, or where they were supposed to go, both of which were definite "red flag" situations! And finally, there were those who simply did not even see the ghosts... okay, it's not quite as bad as the image above when everything is moving, but still, totally unacceptable!
Our first thought was "okay, how about we switch over to a timed auto-respawn?", but taking away that control from the player just felt... wrong. Moreover, some of our more canny players had realised that ghost mode allowed the resurrecting "Water of Life" power-up to be used strategically - since a character's respawning causes a blast wave which knocks back and damages any nearby characters (a deliberate mechanic to prevent spawn campers!), a player could move their ghost into the middle of a treasure-rich area and fire the power-up to clear the area of other players and enemies before grabbing everything they could! However, we quickly realised that we could combine the existing ghost mode mechanic with a timed auto-respawn: if you got back to your respawn point before the timer ran out - great, you're back in play that few seconds earlier! If not, and the timer expires... well, you're still back in play, but you lose even more treasure on top of what you lost for dying in the first place! This double-penalty not only is designed to push players towards trying to respawn under their own steam, but also fits the game's plot concept: the heathen gods of the Iles de Ser-Lloyn will not let our bovine buccaneers rest until they have passed judgement on them!
So we've got a solution for making sure dead players don't end up just wandering around as ghosts - great! Now we just want to make sure we are not penalising players who do not realise what they are supposed to do when their character dies... we need the equivalent of Ben or Paul, or whoever yelling "Player two! You're dead - get to your respawn point, it's over here!"
Well, the first step was to make it very obvious which player's character was where. We had already made some changes to make it much more obvious which character was being controlled by which number player as part of another piece of work (which we would have blogged about earlier, but it involved UI work, so Ben doesn't want to talk about it!), so it was simple enough to add that information to the status panels. Next, a marker with the player's number was added for each character: while the character is alive, the marker tracks them around the arena. When the character dies, the marker tracks above the ghost instead - however, every few seconds, the marker will move across the arena from above the ghost to the character's respawn point, before fading out and reappearing over the ghost again. So - hopefully - this will provide some much-needed guidance for our poor, lost players who either don't realise they're ghosts, or don't know what to do about it! And, as a final touch, we made the markers configurable: show always, show only in ghost mode, do not show.
 Follow the pointy sword... or wait for the auto-respawn |
Of course, this is all theoretical right now - thanks to COVID-19, the chances of getting a show around our usual time in late September/early October are pretty much in Davy Jones' locker, and with them go the opportunity for any real public testing and face-to-face feedback. In fact, at the moment it's sketchy whether or not we'll be back in business by next February... so to everyone out there, we would offer the following advice: face masks look great when paired with pirate hats!
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