If you'll excuse the obvious, skills are actions that a player can learn and perform. The game I am involved in making, Naruto Universe, makes extensive use of skills in a number of forms. Firstly you have attack skills, called Jutsus. These are part of the core mechanics of how a player does battle. There is also training skills, used to beef up your character. Both have something in common, which is that a player performs them. In BYOND, quick player-driven actions are pretty easy to write. Just make some verbs for the player's character (some kind of mob) to use, like so:
/mob/player
verb
skill()
src << "You've performed a skill!"
Ta-da, you've written a skill, it appears over in their commands. The player clicks the skill, and it does its thing. Pretty straight-forward and easy for the player to use. Unfortunately this gives rise to a few problems. Players get into a habit of just hammering away at skills, or perhaps feel it isn't terribly fun. I would agree; obviously there is some player skill in choosing the right skill at the right time, but actually using them is a pretty passive affair. Over the next few paragraphs, I'll talk you through one of a number of other approaches, in particular the one the team for Naruto Universe went with.
Our approach is somewhat datum-driven. In particular, we felt it would be more interactive to use a system of combos to perform skills, a bit like those old NES cheat-codes. So firstly we'll need something to represent combos:
/Combo
var
list/directions
Now, combos are not too neat on their own, unless you can perform them and activate a skill:
/Action
var
Combo/required_combo
/Combo
var
list/directions
Action/target_action
proc
registerDirection(var/dir)
if (src.directions[1] == dir) // They hit the right direction.
// Reduce the list, perform other cool things.
// If we're out of directions, we can trigger the action.
return 1
return 0
Now, we fleshed out this system a bit, but the basic idea is there. Players have a list (or something similar) of actions they can perform. Your interface can filter requests to start actions (perhaps you have something as simple as some verbs wrapped around this), then grab a /Combo and attach it to the player. Once the player hits the appropriate directions in order, the /Action does its thing.
The benefit of the datum-driven method comes from the separation of concerns. Combos hold the information on where a player is in a /Combo, while an /Action describes the general process and features of a player skill. In Naruto Universe, this system brings some real improvements on performing skills. For-instance, in Naruto the character performs skills, Jutsus, by performing a series of hand gestures, Seals. Combos are our programming version of those seals, so when a player hits the correct direction, we can change their icon to reflect the new hand gesture. It's no longer a case of click and go; the player is now actually performing the seals, just like in Naruto.
One final comment is that with having the actions as datums, it is very easy for us to add new actions without changing a single line of existing code. Similarly, it is easy for us to arrange them into things like skill trees, another favourite of RPG style games. If the interface has been done correctly, a datum-driven approach (perhaps like this, maybe different) saves you a lot of work and makes it very easy for you to add those cool new skills players ask for later on.
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Naruto Universe is a project aimed at providing BYOND with an immersive and innovative Naruto gameplay experience. The core of the game focuses on linking the player and their actions to that of their character, with character actions reflecting what the player does in more detail than ever. Naruto Universe is being developed by Mista Dougie, AmonR, Kalzar, T3h B4tman, Disturbed Puppy and the author of this article, Stephen001.
Stephen is a programmer for Naruto Universe, having come from a background of 6 years of programming experience and 3 years of formal education in software engineering. Stephen also assists in BYOND community management, acting as a moderator for both Dream Makers and BYOND Anime.
