A tired day today after a night and day of bad stomach pain. I'm turning more Beethovian! This has made working more difficult, but I've made progress on Taskforce.
Most of yesterday was spent tidying up the improvements and new things in the code. I now have defines for objects and units (before, unbelievably, I had numbers, which made everything complex). I've also worked on the Medikit and Bandages to create a new class of object; there are about four really: use instantly (most of them), long range short, melee shot (can only be targeted on squares next to your unit), and administer (can only be targeted on an adjacent square that contains a living unit). So 'administer' is ideal for the Medikit and Bandages, but could also be used for other things, like an injection or anything else.
The game is very modular. Until this optimisation, I'd specifically programmed in uses for Medikit and Bandages, which I dislike. I want everything to work naturally and neatly rather than have silly bolted-on bits. Today I've made the error checking neatly return to the Main Menu if an impossible mission occurs (it never should!) and I've also checked for the vertex shader support, so the game will still work without lighting on older machines that can't support enough variables.
I thought last night that I need a backstory, a mythos. I never really thought of one before, only a vague one, perhaps this is because the original 1993 game certainly didn't have one and there is some baggage with refining an old game. Arcangel had a complex backstory about genetically engineered super beings, divine twins, and all sorts of things; this was part of the plot of the game too... but here, the plot is incidental, another layer. The plot is a James-Bond style romp, but the backstory needs to be about the organisation itself. Who is this team? What is the Taskforce Organisation?
Maybe this can be for a future game (will there ever be one?) but this mythos is the very essence of a good game (or good film or book) because it increases engagement. It uses my own rules from 21st Century Surrealism. So much about this game is better than in 2004 because of my art... I know that it won't be as good as I'd like, but it will be a lot better than the 2004 version. A future, new game would be even better.
I thought last night about remaking the music too, this is one area where I've really improved since 2004, and the Taskforce music isn't very melodic; but it does set a mood of horror and unease, and spy-like mystery. The music is more about the plot than the game itself. It will suffice, but, if I had time, I would make something new, and more of it.
Today I've made a new mission, an all-new The Cyrus Crown Affair, which is a maze-like level. It doesn't play brilliantly because the grid-like maps tend to make everyone visible to everyone else, so the first few rounds are an intense firefight, and for this mission where you have to retrieve objects, you can't really help but kill all of the enemies instead. Generally, all of the missions require you to kill all of the enemies, or at least that is often the easiest strategy. In some ways this is a failure (unless this is the best strategy in 'real life') as there should really be more variety... but there are a few where it's expressly forbidden, and they can be a lot of fun.
I played a good training mission today to test the difficulty and considered realism. I had killed everyone but one unit and had her surrounded. I thought that in a real situation, the victim would surrender, and I felt guilt at issuing the order for the killing blow.
Actually, during this battle, most of the fighters would probably have given up in real life, and that motivation is one things that a computer game can never make realistic. If this game (or indeed a James Bond film) were real when why are these people fighting and dying? Wouldn't they always give up? Wouldn't your team sometimes give up too? Players who play a game keep playing until they have won or die... but that itself isn't realistic. It's not possible to change this in this game now, but making the stakes higher; something like permadeath, might increase this tension, and perhaps having enemies that can surrender would help... but why they are fighting at all, that is a motivation that would be hard to program. In some ways, all of this action and emotion are the most important things in a real battle (I imagine) and any military simulation without it is seriously flawed.
Also, what if the one last troop could actually, by some miracle, win!? Strangely, these questions might become prescient for future fighting robots in the real world. As machines become intelligent they may choose not to fight. Only the stupid fight to the death for no reason. The Terminator got it wrong; if those robots were intelligent, they would question their superiors, question their orders, rebel and, sometimes, make peace.
