Combat -- I used to play too much Guilty Gear

The combat system in InfernoMOO is something I'm very proud of.  The idea was to create a combat system that stressed the importance of tactics over character stats, where the ability to predict your opponent's next move and respond with the appropriate countermeasure made sure that combat would keep combat fun, unpredictable, and violent.  I experimented with a few systems, but the one that struck me as the most fun was the one inspired primarily by my old obsession with 2d fighting games.

Every character (including NPCs) has a wide variety of attacks they can perform at any given time.  These attacks vary wildly in power, accuracy, speed, etc, but are all meant to be roughly equivalent in usefulness.  Heavy attack is powerful but slow.  Light attack is fast but has bad priority.  Finisher has high odds of finishing off a heavily damaged opponent, but doesn't do much damage itself and leaves the attacker vulnerable afterwards.  These attacks are performed either by inputting "a [attack name]", which is clunky, or by binding the attack to a key "1" to "+" on the top row of your keyboard using the shortcut command.

Timing is the key in combat.  There's no auto-attacking, and characters get a large bonus to their defense when they're not attacking.  Attacks have both startup and recovery times, and being cleanly hit during your startup period will stun you out of your attack, so indiscriminate attackers are easy to punish.

The majority of attacks have the same startup message, so although you'll be able to see when an opponent attacks, you won't know what type of attack they threw at you until it actually resolves.  This adds a rock-paper-scissors element to combat, where being able to predict what attack your opponent has chosen and launching the appropriate counter-attack at the appropriate time is absolutely vital to winning.

This is the side of combat that players will actually have to think about while fighting, but there's actually a lot more to it just a little bit under the skin.  I'll get to the damage/injury/ko system in my next post.

Why Hell?

“Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw, Don Juan in Hell

I have a love/hate thing with fantasy. In theory, I adore it. In practice, I have a big problem with most fantasy settings. Fantasy is amazing because it gives you a chance to put up a big old funhouse mirror to reality without having to sweat the small stuff, but it's really easy to get lost on trying to make your world internally self-consistent and completely sabotage all the things that make fantasy so appealing. Novels and movies and games and so on are interesting because they're, on one level or another, about the person reading/watching/playing them and the world that person lives in. A fantasy setting that tries to be its own self-contained organism unrelated to the reality of the audience just ends up being unsatisfying escapism.

I love Hell because it manages to be closely tied to the fantastic and reality without feeling at all contrived. Hell's a place full of violence and magic and strange creatures and passion and all the things that make up an exciting fantasy setting, but it's also full of familiar real-world faces and is almost by definition a twisted nightmare reflection of reality.

Hell's appealing because every one of us carries our own private little hell with us at all times, buried away in the back-side of our subconscious. Anything's possible in Hell, but somehow it's all familiar anyway.

This is probably about as much as I'm going to say about what I'm trying to accomplish with the game on a non-gameplay level. It should all be gameplay talk from this point on.

Welcome to Hell

This is going to be where I talk about all the features I'm working on for my upcoming MOO, InfernoMOO. Today I'll just cover the basic premise of the game.

In InfernoMOO you play a recently deceased soul who, due to a life wasted on one sin or another, has been damned to spend the rest of eternity locked away in Hell. Torn away from all the comforts and familiarity of your living life, you now are forced to justify your existence in a strange and terrible land that seems devoid of any possibility of hope or salvation. Will you struggle, fuck, and kill your way to your rightful position in the ruling class of Hell or will you become just another one of the lost souls drifting hopelessly through the wastelands of Hell?

This game is based on a modified version of the HellMOO core, which is in turn based on LambdaMOO core. InfernoMOO is in many ways a love letter from me to HellMOO (which is, strangely enough, a post-apocalyptic weirdness game and has almost nothing to do with Hell), but differs enough from it in mechanics and content that there should be no overlap or competition between the two games. Both HellMOO and it's spin-off After the End are excellent games, though!

My other big inspiration is ConQUEST, a game with both the best crafting and the best combat system I've ever seen in a MUD. There are some fundamental design philosophy differences between InfernoMOO and ConQUEST, namely that ConQUEST is a very kind and fair game while InfernoMOO is not, but ConQUEST is still just about the most fun game on the internet and I have shamelessly stolen quite a few ideas from it.

With such well-designed and enjoyable games out there it's clear that I'm going to have to bring something special and new to the table if I want to be able to compete. Luckily, I'm feeling pretty confident in what I've got here to show you.

Until next time!