Re: Real-time or Turn-based?

[Morbus Iff]

>> c) Real-time or "turn based" - meaning, do we wait for the player or let
>> them lose out on things as they look at the "Unofficial Strategy Guide".
>
>My end goal is real- time interaction, because I think that lends an
>urgency that helps make it compelling, however...

I tend to agree although I wouldn't throw out turn based as of yet, as you
seem to agree (however...). I like real time because of the fact that if
this is interactive, then it should be as close to real life as possible.
The world shouldn't stop because you go to sleep.

The problems with real time are that you could miss an important plot
point. Or that you have to work an extra day this week, and you had already
made plans to meet Woman Plot Device A over dinner. Losing that dinner date
in the game might be terribly disruptive.

Of course, now we're dividing real time into three different avenues:

	a) Real time based upon our real time.
	b) Real time based upon played real time.
	c) Real time based upon everyone's real time.

A) assumes that even if this is a one player game, the next time you play
the game, it's gonna take a look at your clock and find out that you missed
the dinner date. If this were possible, we'd have to worry about ways to
prevent people from turning back the clock to relive that dinner date - a
real game time machine.

B) assumes that if you stop the game at 1:03, and go to bed, when you
restart it, the game life resumes in real time as if it were 1:03. This is
probably the most likable of all the one player options.

C) assumes that we have Ultima on our hand and that we're not stopping for
anyone. You go to sleep, you've missed the dinner date, and your arch rival
just happened to be in the vicinity at the time, and guess what. This is
one of those times when you are playing deep into the morning. The question
arises, should we give the players a respite after X hours of constant
playing? Should we give them a breaking off point?

>Todd and Steve and I have been looking at taking some of the concepts
>we've come up with and making a first pass at implementing our concepts
>via a real-time strategy game. One of the things high on Todd's list is
>that the game be multi-player. And eventually he got me to agree with him.

Multiplayer or multiplayer internet? Games/stories won't fly unless they
are on the internet I think... That's a rather harsh one sided opinion, but
in the long run, it's probably a better thing.

>But one of the things that still disturbs me about this is that it is
>extremely difficult to tell a story without temporal breaks. One of my
>coworkers remarked that Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" is a great story, but
> <snip>
>dead-end, or watching every mouthfull the couple on a date consumes in a
>restaurant (not that I can't imagine some tremendous possibilities with
>the latter).

Quite true. This becomes evident when we look at real time. We've got
Anxious Player who wants to hurry up and accomplish something. We can't
fade out for him and continue later unless it's a single player game.

The only thing I could think of it this regard is to implement some sort of
Wandering Mind mechanic. Sure, we don't want to watch every single bite of
my date, but as we boring engage in conversation with a horrible AI (note
to self: get Turing on game dev team), we day dream. Perhaps we remember
something about the past, or our game notes that we've taken float by, or
we have a weird plot device vision that gives us something to think about.
Day dreaming would be another step toward true interaction.


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