Random Topic of the Week - Resources
This week I thought I'd try to get some of the design juices flowing.
Resources is something that is found in a lot of games. The easiest examples that come to mind are RTS games like Starcraft and Age of Empires, but spending resources to buy units isn't the only way to implement the mechanic in games. Prince of Persia uses "time sand" as a resource to give you a limited number of "retries" for the level.
Resources don't need to be limited all the time though, take something like minecraft where trees essentially give you unlimited supplies of wood(provided you do the planting of course). You can even argue that mana in Diablo is an unlimited resource because it recharges.
So what I was thinking was that this week we try and see how many examples of games we can come up with that use the resource mechanic and try to think of ways on how they could be improved or maybe why they fell short.
Go!
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Resources is something that is found in a lot of games. The easiest examples that come to mind are RTS games like Starcraft and Age of Empires, but spending resources to buy units isn't the only way to implement the mechanic in games. Prince of Persia uses "time sand" as a resource to give you a limited number of "retries" for the level.
Resources don't need to be limited all the time though, take something like minecraft where trees essentially give you unlimited supplies of wood(provided you do the planting of course). You can even argue that mana in Diablo is an unlimited resource because it recharges.
So what I was thinking was that this week we try and see how many examples of games we can come up with that use the resource mechanic and try to think of ways on how they could be improved or maybe why they fell short.
Go!
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Comments
I think that this idea of attention as a resource that's something you're trying to "use up" on an enemy player really helps you think about competitive RTS play. It's also one of the few game genres where this kind of multi-faceted attention is required for good play (MoBAs have some attention-based mechanics, but it's not as demanding on that axis).
But, staying closer on topic: What do you all think about health in modern FPS games transitioning from a finite resource to a constantly regenerating one. Is "hide for a few seconds" as useful for game flow?
P.S. I can talk about resources in DD and designing so that people notice their resource usage until the cows come home, if people are interested in that kind of thing.
Although I don't particularly like 100 health units and critical existence failure.
Far Cry for me made the health regenerating more thematic and a bit more interesting. Having to stitch oneself up and exit combat to get health back sort of works for me. And the option of consumable quick health fixes (that were a resource) did make for some semi meaningful decisions.
I think there's benefits to both approaches. Both finite health and rechargeable health. For the running and gunning as found in Bullet Storm, finite health would never have worked... although what they really should have done was make epic kills recharge your health instead of just having to wait around.
Mad enemy ownage was already a resource in Bullet Storm, I think they could have pushed that concept further.
But still, there's nothing quite as adrenaline inducing as the every-bit-of-health-counts found in Left For Dead.
As a central concept, it's a model that can be applied to/used for so many solid game systems, as it basically states that resources as a mechanic shouldn't be an afterthought stuck onto a system just for the sake of it, but rather an integrated goal.
Starcraft's attention as resource turns me off - because I like to focus my attention (Tekken, DOTA, etc).
Any block-breaker tetris-type puzzle-style VS game typically has a resource attrition system - Puzzle Fighter, Tetris Attack (still my favourite of games of all time) all had a system where an attack on the opponent gave them a resource to counter-strike with, escalating the pace of the game from one attack to the next, so that in a good match, the resources come from being attacked, and it speeds the whole thing up towards an eventual demise (someone's mismanagement of their resource).
I really enjoy that kind of resource attrition, where resource drives the game towards a faster pace instead of a slower collection phase after each depletion.
Bulletstorm was almost there, but I do agree that it didn't push it enough.
Best I could come up with was a time-based resource collection of power-ups via either breaking bricks or simply waiting for a meter to fill up. Neither of those struck me as worth very much in terms of resource systems...
Which is when I started thinking about economies. To me, the key to an interesting resource system is value fluctuations, which is where the concept of economy comes in. In an RTS, the value of gaining more resources fluctuates over time: If you're about to get rushed in the early game, then all the resources in the world won't help you, units and defenses are more valuable; But if you're not getting pressured, then the value of having lots of units later goes up, meaning you need more resources now and more resource earning infrastructure ASAP.
In an action/real-time game, the resource fluctuations are something you have to intuit, based on the current and future states of the game. In a puzzle game, resource values need to fluctuate as the game progresses. In DD, different resources (health, mana, gold, piety, black-space, experience, monsters, walls and even blood pools) have different values as you progress through the dungeon, depending on the interplay between them and your current level. Learning those different interactions is what makes the game fun.
The real test of an economy though, to me, is if that economy is self-effecting: Can you use your resources to invest in the future securing of more resources. This is definitely the case in most RTS games, it's true in DD (you use your current resources to level up and secure more of some resources and make others more effective, but in general your resource pool is diminishing), but it's not always immediately obvious in FPS games. Is simply running along and picking up more health and ammo in order to kill things to allow for more health and ammo pickups a viable economy? Does that ever lead to novel game states that are only possible via that economic manipulation? I don't know...
Bioshock 1 and 2 felt like they had enough interactions between their resources to create something that felt like an economy in an FPS. The different ammo types and gun upgrades could create very different gameplay states in terms of what different characters would do and how they would play over the course of an entire story arc. Bioshock Infinite has less ways that those resources can interact with each other, leading many people to feel that all the guns are essentially too similar and get frustrated with the combat economy (among other resource interaction simplifications).
Maybe the thing about resources is constantly pushing our minds to try and comprehend a sufficiently complex system that we keep wavering between making correct predictions and screwing up royally? Too complex a system turns us off, too simple a system feels frustrating.
For FPS games I prefer having 2 health bars. One as armor and one as actual health. The armor can be replenished and can take a lot of punishment but your health only allows for one or two hits before you die. But that's my preference, not really saying anything about the design. I think that the replenishing health makes sense in game like CoD where you basically play from cover to cover. It makes it possible to sprint for cover and wait there while your troops move up a bit and you look for your new cover to go to.
@Tachyon, I like the idea of map control or controlling areas/spaces as well. I always think about how in Age of Empires I used to build walls of stone or palisade around gold and stone deposits. Also in something like Warcraft where there wasn't a population cap(you could keep on increasing it by building farms) it becomes important to have space to place extra buildings.
Another thing I have noticed with resource design is that the designers usually intentionally screw up the "perfect" system. Let's say for instance that you have a time management game where you need 4 eggs to bake a cake. It takes 15 seconds to produce an egg and it takes 60 seconds to produce a cake. So essentially every time you picked up your 4th egg you could directly start baking a cake. most of the time however the timing for something like that is slightly off. The cake for example would take 65 seconds to bake instead of 60 so even if the player is playing perfectly they have to start making manual adjustments to the supply chain to make up for the built in problems. Has anyone else seen that or am I way off base here?
Fixed :P I don't typically like to call them puzzle games despite that being their categorisation. A jigsaw is a puzzle game :P