Plan for James W. Hofmann

qcs combat / in the groove

This plan has two parts: QCS and In the Groove :)

What prompted this update was my pleasure at finally getting some combat into QCS. It's not entirely complete, yet; but in the current version the player can march up one square underneath a dummy NPC character and press the 'a' key repeatedly with audiovisual accompanyment showing whether it was a hit or a miss, and when the NPC's HP goes below 0(0 counts as alive because I think it's fun to have an HP of 0) he is removed. Doing all of that meant putting in a whole lot of new structure so that it would scale up for the editor. The combat effects are done through the actions I talked about in some earlier post, not hardcoded material. The calculations for hits and damage are based on properties for both the attacker and his weapon. Proper usage of weapons(which I haven't done yet, hence the "only when beneath the NPC" restriction) meant including inventory, so I started on that and made a test weapon. Things are looking good and my design choices seem to be working out. It's not really gameplay yet, but it's getting very close.

Now on to part two...

Last Sunday I got up at 3am after attempting to sleep for about 6.5 hours(totally unlike my normal sleep schedule), so that I could make it up to San Francisco on various public transits for the official In The Groove Northern California regional championships; the top 8 go on to Las Vegas for the North American championship. I entered with no expectations of making that cut, even though I'm a pretty avid player; it's the only game that I still seriously play on a regular basis, rather than as just as a quick diversion or as research. In The Groove is identical to DDR in basic gameplay, but it has more challenge and a richer variety of challenge - I suggest the last two here for examples of the mods, or any video doing Pandemonium, Bloodrush, or Summer to see how fast the steps get: www.yuugiou.net/videos/index.php?dir=Tatsujins/Events/Ohio%209-16-05/

Anyway, I went over to this tournament, went around in a daze in a hot, stuffy and overcrowded room for some eight hours, lost every round, and was still quite happy to participate, and also to watch. It used a double-elimination format so it went on so long that I actually had to leave before the end! It got me thinking a little more about what makes the game special to me. It has a lot of sport-like qualities to it. But it's not like the current video games that are championed as major-league sports, which are almost all first-person shooters or strategy games. Those games are always at their best when you're a participant.

The difference here, I think, is that anyone with some knowledge of the rules can critique a performance, just as in popular sports; you just watch the players and the screen and you can see that someone's timing drifted off, or they misread a pattern, or they ran out of stamina, or (least exciting) the skill difference is too great for chance to be a factor. The last made the qualification and early rounds mostly very boring, but that seems to be universal everywhere. (It should be pointed out here that prior to ITG, when DDR was the main dance game in the United States, there was a slowing of interest because the top players literally had no challenges left to shoot for, and Konami had stopped arcade releases - five-panel competitor Pump It Up has not had this problem, as it continually ramps up difficulty to greater extremes, resulting in "RAW," a song which actually spells out a message in the notes, completable only by gathering a large group of players on the same machine(registration req.)) The good competitive qualities of this type of game can also accomidate many variations in interface, which leads me to predict that the music game genre will in time become a much more prominent competitive genre. Interesting stuff to watch. Hopefully I got all those links right.