Cart Damage Mechanic

[MaritalWheat]

Related to Issue #21.

Wondering if there have been any ideas about how we want to handle cart damage as a game mechanic - I know part of Patrick's idea for scoring was based on damage in a round.

Are carts going to have health, or are we only going to worry about damage dealt? Cart health might be weird because it's a finite resource, and we probably don't want to knock someone out of a round early (unless we do?) - damage dealt could be something that just continuously accrues. Also worth thinking about is whether taking damage maybe slows down a cart, or otherwise impacts it over time.

For calculating damage, I imagined it would be based on velocity of the two carts colliding.

Anyways, this was something I was thinking about and would like to try experimenting with, but I was curious if anyone had design ideas about how it should work (also, if this has been discussed before, close this issue and point me to it please!)

[ErikBehar]

we talked about car damage, on art side, Cheese had some ideas about rigging up damage, but I think for this AF release we might stick with the easier health bar and texture changes.

Scoring wise might be challenging, due to the fact that when you crash you get probably equal damage as you give. At least if you only use velocity. We might have to come up with some system, where we can locate damage from several areas, so we know that your front is busted but your side and back are pristine.

[MaritalWheat]

If there is a cart health, what do you see happening when you reach zero?

As for scoring, maybe then some hybrid system where both velocity and maybe what part is hitting what to determine a winner vs. loser in every encounter might work - higher velocity * some weighting for part (for example, if you are ramming someone head on and hitting their side, front would give you a higher scalar while side would give them a lower).

[itsjustanothergeorge]

I will be interested in putting in some particle effects for the impact.

[Cheeseness]

Patrick's design notes talk about cart respawns, and point deductions for cart destruction (making keeping your own cart alive important and providing some risk to bad driving/focusing only on ramming people).

The thing about animating damage states is that they'd probably need to be done with blendshapes rather than a rig now that I think about it. We've got carts with different proportions, so skeletal animation isn't going to fly well there. So far as texture replacement being easier, playing an animation seems like less work to me, but whatever people want to do is fine!

@soon2bdead Awesome :D

[ChrAfonso]

I'm also in favor of blendshapes, with one "totally demolished" shape modelled we can morph to any intermediary state. Seems the easiest and quickest way to get good-lookin results :)

[elneilios]

I seem to recall that Patrick's notes mentioned Demolition Derby as inspiration. I remember the original game had an overhead image of the car in bottom right of screen with an indicator on each corner and on the sides. As areas of the car were hit the indicators would go from green to yellow to red then black when full damage was taken. A ruined section would affect handling, e.g left indicator black would make car pull to the left. Both front indicators black would wreck the engine. Perhaps we should look at this as a way of scoring damage as it also gives you an incentive to protect your cart so that it doesn't become difficult to drive. If the engine is wrecked then you respawn at the tee and have to find your ball where it last was.

[Cheeseness]

I remember the original game had an overhead image of the car in bottom right of screen with an indicator on each corner and on the sides.

Hmm, I took Patrick's reference to be to the motorsport rather than a game. Either way, an interesting idea!

I'm in favour of avoiding having handling deteriorate - a respawn time and points penalty is more than enough incentive for players to want avoiding getting damaged, and being disadvantaged during gameplay for a player who's already on the brink of having their cart destroyed feels like it'd be less fun than it sounds.

[thefro]

For bare bones you'd just need an overall health meter, cart goes somewhat slower and accelerates somewhat slower once it starts taking more damage (still should be fun to drive around). I like the idea of the faster cart in a collision taking less damage than the slower cart. If your cart is destroyed you respawn at the beginning of the hole with a new cart and lose points while the other player gets a bonus for trashing your cart.

Ideally the bare-bones version would be built in such a way that you could plug context-specific damage in later without trashing the existing work.

[Cheeseness]

If your cart is destroyed you respawn at the beginning of the hole with a new cart and lose points while the other player gets a bonus for trashing your cart.

I'm confident that this would end up creating too extreme a differential between players whose carts get blown up. A respawn delay alone will probably end up being more than enough (though only playtesting will be able to determine what works).

cart goes somewhat slower and accelerates somewhat slower once it starts taking more damage

Be wary of this sort of approach. This disadvantages players that are already at a disadvantage and moves in the sort of direction that makes comebacks harder (comebacks are what make games fun and exciting - nobody wants to be disadvantaged by an early mistake in a way that makes the rest of the game impossible for them to have a chance in).

Gameplay balanced more towards giving disadvantaged players opportunities to recover is worth aiming for.

[thefro]

Good points. The scoring can be balanced a different way (bonus just for keeping your original cart through the whole match and for each cart you destroy.. points wouldn't be a lot compared to finishing the hole quickly & in a limited number of strokes). I do think we need to give feedback to the player that your cart is about to be destroyed beyond just visual animations and a health bar. If the cart gets slightly slower when it's near destruction, that could be balanced with the player getting being able to hit the ball farther because they're angry about the cart going slowly.

[Cheeseness]

I think audio and visual cues (a-la GTA 1) are likely to be the best way to go. We can add ticking sounds and sad engine sounds, and maybe even some shake animation without actually impacting on the handling - this sort of approach can be very effective at communicating the impression of damage.