Bay 12 Games Forum

Would be so cute if you took that picture and you have a pet fox.

Though they are quite a bit different then dogs and cats.

My net sleuthing determined it to be the work of photographer and small business owner Rob Lee.

Quote from: Jonathan S. Fox on April 27, 2013, 06:15:05 pm

Found the bug with inconsistent alarm for sneak attacks. The actual reproduce pattern was so obscure that it was essentially random, but the essence of it is that Conservatives not in the current encounter are able to notice you. We'll chalk the current inconsistency of it up to security cameras!

Is that update on the SVN, or are you going to put out a new version with bugfixes and such soon? Basically just asking how I get the unbugged version 

Timeline for release is to be determined. I currently have my code entangled with incomplete national LCS stuff, so I haven't committed the fix to SVN. Nonetheless, the next release, when it comes, should have this fix included.

Found the bug with inconsistent alarm for sneak attacks. The actual reproduce pattern was so obscure that it was essentially random, but the essence of it is that Conservatives not in the current encounter are able to notice you. We'll chalk the current inconsistency of it up to security cameras!

The name generator in LCS draws on a large and diverse list of names, each included for one or more of several reasons:

1. Names common in the US, to make it familiar.
2. Names rare in the US, to make it exotic.
3. Names with distinctive cultural connotations, to make it diverse.
4. Names of famous or infamous people, to make it funny.
5. Names that are just kind of cool or badass, to make it awesome.

Obviously this pretty much includes every possible name except random garbage nonsense, which is one of the strengths of the generator. But intentionally including all of these ensures that they all come up as it generates more names. A less intentional name list would mostly just have familiar names, maybe a few famous people, or a few culturally diverse names. LCS intentionally feels like it's a real grab bag from any name you might see in the US, including new names you've probably never heard before but can easily believe are real.

1. Further simplify location code so that it's even easier to set up and maintain large location hierarchies.
2. Get everything working in one city.
3. Get everything working in two cities.
4. Handle travel between cities and prevent casual cross-country raids.
5. Generalize the "needs car" thing so that what areas you can reach without a car depends on where your squad is based.
6. Ensure the display tags on cities are useful. I mean the <safe house> tags.
7. Have cities display with a short description on the right, especially for the benefit of players not familiar with US cities.
8. Any left over testing and quality control.

I thought setting up the cities I'd want to test with would be easy, but it's actually been quite a design puzzle to give multiple parallel cities a sense of place and accuracy to the locations, while also mixing in playability.

I'm going to start out with three cities: New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle. New York and LA because they're the two biggest cities in the country, they're geographically on opposite corners, they're very well known, and they're two of the three major US cities that have been modeled in Grand Theft Auto. Seattle is included as the starting city, or at least the default starting city -- it is the city LCS's layout and district names are based on, so it has almost no changes. At first I wanted to make everything follow a similar template to ensure that players wouldn't have to re-learn the city layouts when visiting new cities, but testing quickly showed that this made the cities feel like they weren't different cities, which kind of goes against the point. My best judgment now says that not knowing where a given site is in a new city, at least at first, is a small sacrifice for rule of cool; the districts will have unique names for each city, so it's not like it'll be all that surprising that they have unique contents anyway.

While I've decided to mix things up, I'm still giving each city roughly the same categories of locations: A downtown area, a less dense middle or high end area, a seedier low end area, and an outlying district. The dominant economic activities of these areas can vary based on what the nature of the given city is, however, so their contents can vary significantly. You might find that New York City has its army base in "Brooklyn and Queens" while its prison is on "Manhattan Island". Meanwhile, Los Angeles has its club, CEO House, and most expensive apartments in the "Greater Hollywood" district rather than downtown or in the outskirts, while its "Seaport Area" gets both the research labs and the industry.

I'm taking a relatively light touch with limiting distribution of the current locations: Cable News is only found in New York, CEO House is unique to Los Angeles, and Intelligence HQ is unique to Seattle. All three locations have prisons and army bases; I couldn't realistically give Seattle a nuclear plant, since the nearest one is across the State, but the other two have them. I gave each location one of the three CCS safehouses as a temporary measure; the CCS wasn't designed for multi-city play, but I can only fix one mechanic at a time for it, so they'll be on the backburner for a bit.

Ultimately, all this is a first draft. Like army battle plans, it may not survive first brush with live tests. But it's a suitable groundwork that I can use to start testing mechanics with. I also want to give fair warning that simply having cities won't make the game better -- it's everything we can do with the game after we have cities that makes this line of development exciting. The game won't play very differently until and unless some of the neat things that have been suggested in this thread are implemented: local newspapers, police hunt differently by city, cities with different political biases, CCS cells in different cities, ability to go to DC and visit unique locations there... the game has to capitalize on the ability to visit different cities before it really makes a difference.

Range shouldn't let liberals progress past 3pts in any firearm skill.
Introduce new NPC with range, NRA Range Safety Officer?

My first intuition is that the range should just be a menu-based location, like the business district sites (so no NPCs), but second thought makes me reconsider. It's an obvious place to attack for the Gun Control issue.

I agree entirely with limiting how far you can advance your skills, but I don't mind it being powerful as a way to skip early levels; training seems like a perfectly reasonable and intelligent strategy for making sure you're sending your squad out knowing something. I don't mind shaking up the balance of the game a bit, or introducing new best strategies; for example, the teaching mechanic in the game now is very overpowered -- you can make elite soldiers with zero combat experience -- but I don't think it's making the game less fun in the process, so I'm not really concerned about it.

*How old are you?
*Do you have a job?
*Do your parents charge you rent?
*Do you have a girlfriend?

An interview!

• I'm 26, which suggests the follow-up question of whether I went to college. I have a Bachelor of Science in Game Design from DigiPen Institute of Technology; I studied a blend of computer science, video game theory, mathematics, and art in college. I'm currently $24,000 in debt to the US Government for education loans.
• I run a business under the name Jonathan S. Fox Games. You can see some of my past work through the link. It is not rich living; most of what I've made I've then paid out in commissions and payments to service providers or other developers I've worked with. But it is something I love to do, and I turned down a job offer to work as a full-time game designer to do it. If at any point it all falls through, I'll have to get a "real job". That's not McDonalds; I am fully qualified to work as an industry game developer, I have connections and references to back me up, and I get inquiries from recruiters every so often.
• No, thankfully, or I wouldn't be able to do this. My standard of living greatly exceeds my income and, at least for the moment, the money I get goes a lot further than it does for most people. I pay for cohabitation with my parents by making life easier around the house, doing the shopping, and reporting on the performance of my venture in independent game development. My parents are "investors" in my business; they sponsor my housing and office space (I get two rooms of their house for this purpose), they bought most of the computer hardware I work on, they paid for a significant portion of my college education, and they have privileged access to my finances. I choose to allow them to have an incredible amount of power over my life, and they are concerned about my low income. What would really happen if I didn't get donations isn't that they'd kick me out; I wouldn't let it go that far. I would simply stop working on LCS until I had a more substantial income, whether from Zombie Survival Squad or from some other source.
• No, but I have a boyfriend. We've been together for more than a year now.