Cycling between characters

[didory123]

So this is something we should actually discuss among devs, so I'm opening up this issue to talk about it.

In the game, do we want the player to be able to switch between characters? If so, how would we implement that? Through the menu screen?

[MaddieM4]

Here's a wild and crazy idea that probably won't make sense short term.

Instead of playing solo, you collect a "party" of AIs at the beginning. During the game, you can switch between which party member you're playing. If your avatar dies, you are automatically switched to one of the party members that is still alive.

This is also forward-compatible with multiplayer in a fairly straightforward way. At any time, you can have 0-N people playing, where N is the number of party members. As long as there's an AI member to act as a free slot, players can switch characters. If you die and there are no free slots, you get to be a spectator ghost until you hit the action button (which actually you could also do for single player mode, there just wouldn't be much point).

The problem is that this depends on having somewhat-competent AI for the "free slot" party members. And that will probably be a dealbreaker for anyone who doesn't want to wait on that. So short term, it should probably be done via the pause menu, and then if we still felt like going this route when the AI catches up, we can switch to the party system.

[edisonout]

I quite like @campadrenalin 's idea of picking a party of characters to play with - my only frame of reference for this sort of thing is Crash Nitro Karts. When you start a new game you pick a team (in that case either Team Bandicoot or Team Cortex) which each had 3 fixed characters in it. Then whenever you selected a level, you could pick between the three of them as they each had different abilities - one was good at corners, another at accelerating etc.

In the meantime, I think either an option on the pause menu, an item in your inventory which gives you the option to switch or a wardrobe node at certain points in the level which allows you to access the character menu. Or maybe when you save the game, you get the option to change character.

EDIT: The multiple characters might also be good for the final Cornelius boss - i.e. play as Troy & Abed with the dinosaurs to destroy his legs, then switch to Jeff & Britta in the blimb, then Shirley & Annie in the helicopter to destroy another part of him, then switch to Pierce to finish him off. I think I'm getting a bit off topic, I'll shut up now.

[kyleconroy]

I'd like to keep this thread going. I'm not sure how we'd handle a party system. The issue is that the game we saw has no concept of a party system. Yes, you select 7 players at the start, but all those players are real humans. Nothing is the show (apart from the final boss fight) actually show them working together in any coordinated way.

If we added a party system, what would you guys like to see?

[MaddieM4]

Well, I know that the primary goal for a lot of people is going to be "reenacting the episode", but it might be simpler and more fun in the short term to program the NPCs to be able to join your quest, if you ask nicely via the dialog tree.

Not sure how to implement the switching menu - I always kinda visualized it as analogous to ALT-TAB in functionality, so we might be able to borrow some visual cues from existing window-switchers.

[edisonout]

Fixed by #2009

[NimbusBP1729]

I don't know if #2009 is really the same as the spirit of this issue?