Controlling Players and Characters(5)
The Player Character
The world revolves around your PC, so most of your game development will go into
controlling him. PCs have the most actions and options available to them. Other
than those character actions previously mentioned, PCs have the option of managing
their game resources, which includes items and magic spells. In addition, character
building is used to build up the strength of the character.
The following sections show how each aspect comes into play when working with PCs.
Player Navigation
The most important ability of your PCs is navigation. It’s a huge world, and half the
fun of the game is exploring every nook and cranny in it. You must give PCs as
many ways as possible to navigate the world, whether they walk, fly, swim, or teleport.
Again, staying with the basics, the characters’ most important navigation method is
walking around the world. Each character in your game is assigned a value that
gauges the character’s speed of movement, and for your player, the faster the
movement rate, the better.
Resource Management
Resources are the items and objects that litter your gaming world. They make the
game worth playing.
The fact is that items are nothing unless there’s somebody to use them,
so now is a good time to review how your game players can interact with those items.
Potions can be consumed, weapons and armor worn, and gold spent—it’s all up to
how you design those items and how your players use them!
Not only are items resources, but they also can be magic spells. Spells are tremendously
useful tools, and in order to make it anywhere in the world, your PC needs
to learn to use as many spells as possible. How does a player learn to use spells?
Through ever-increasing experience, that’s how!
Increasing in Experience and Power
True to typical role-playing game design, characters can grow in experience—every
treasure they find and every battle they win increase their abilities. Think of experience
as a number, and the higher the number, the more powerful the character. As
specific levels of experience are reached, a character gains certain benefits.
For example, imagine that George, a game character, has just finished slaying his
one-thousandth Ogre. Throughout all his combat experiences, he has grown
increasingly stronger. He can now deal out three times the amount of damage with
his sword than he could when he started his adventure. His physical strength has
increased, and he is more agile and more able to dodge attacks. His mental abilities
have increased, and he has learned some powerful new spells.
Characters have what’s called experience points and experience levels. Every experience
increases the experience points of a character. At specific intervals of experience
points, a character’s experience level is raised. When an experience level raises, a
character gains benefits, which generally include an increase in abilities and spells.
gaining experience points comes from killing monsters. The amount
of experience points gained is coded into a character’s definitions. Killing a
homely little imp might give your character a measly 10 experience points, whereas
slaying a level-200 red dragon might give your character a whopping 20,000! It’s up
to you to designate the amount of experience gained for killing monsters.
Designating experience levels and rewarding advances are part of your work as a
game designer. A character designated as level 1 might need 500 experience points
to go to level 2, and going up to experience level 3 might require 1,200 experience
points.
When determining the experience points needed for a specific level, you might
gauge those levels of advancement by the average experience given from killing
monsters in a specific area in the game. For example, if your character is in “impland”
and each imp gives your PC 10 experience points when killed, you want the
player to kill at least 20 monsters to go up to level 2, which means that level 2
requires 200 experience points.
In addition to benefits going up, abilities and attributes also increase as experience
levels go up. The PC’s maximum amount of health and mana points increase; the
player becomes stronger and able to take more damage. Spells become easier to
cast, and with the addition of more mana points, your PC can cast more spells
before running out of juice. What really happens to PCs as levels increase is a matter
of a game’s design.