Dressings of Fruits and Veggies

August 9, 2018

The focus of development on Sleuthhounds: Cruise this week has been for the side quest involving Colonel Napier Forsythe, an ex-military man. More accurately, it’s been on developing the tech needed to support the Colonel’s side quest. The Colonel is an avid player of a war board game called Dressings of Fruits and Veggies (DoFaV for short). A couple of times during the game’s critical path and a few more times during the optional Colonel side quest, the player will have the opportunity to engage the Colonel in this game.

The original prototype version of Dressings of Fruits and Veggies.
Click to view larger.

Over a year ago, while working on the critical path scripting for Act 1, I put into place a very bare bones version of DoFaV. The game is inspired by the tactical combat portion of Heroes of Might and Magic III, a game I played way, way back and really enjoyed. In this game, a player moves stacks of units of different types around a board, trying to defeat the other player’s stacks through simple automated combat. The game is turn based, so no time pressure, and is completely controlled via a point-n-click interface. It’s kind of not really like an advanced form of checkers.

For the prototype version, I got things working far enough for the player to control a stack and the computer (i.e. Colonel Forsythe) to control a stack. It kinda worked as long as the player just clicked on grid squares or the enemy stack.

The updated version of Dressings of Fruits and Veggies.
Click to view larger.

Fast forward to today, when I need to be able to integrate multiple DoFaV games at different points in Cruise’s story. In order to accomplish that, I’ve had to expand on the capabilities of the game and I also took the opportunity to introduce some more refined visual elements into it. Among the new capabilities the game now provides:

• The ability for the scripting side to monitor the game and respond to specific events. For example, the Colonel may lament the loss of a particular stack.
• Animated moves and attacks. Previously stacks just jumped about the board and attacks happened instantaneously. This was problematic for the computers attacks, as it wasn’t always clear what the computer had done.
• The mouse pointer changes to now indicate if a given stack can be attacked and, if so, from which direction.
• Some unit types now have the ability to perform ranged attacks so that they don’t have to be standing right next to an opponent’s stack.
• Summaries about the capabilities of stacks are now shown when the mouse is moved over them.
• Obstacles like trees, boulders, and ponds can now be added to the game board. Stacks can’t walk through these, but if they have ranged attacks they can attack through them.
• Stacks turn to face the direction they’re moving, attacking, or defending in.
• The state of the DoFaV game can now be saved in progress as part of a normal Cruise game save. In the prototype, saving and reloading would always reset the DoFaV game back to the beginning. Losing a player’s game progress is just as big of a no-no as depending solely on a single-checkpoint save so this was absolutely on my “must fix” list.
• The AI for the computer player now actually has a modicum of intelligence, figuring out where it can do the most damage and which targets are the biggest threats on the board. In the prototype the AI would just always charge at the first player stack that was still alive.

The tactical portion of Heroes of Might and Magic III has a lot more to it than what I’ve taken inspiration from. I wanted DoFaV to be challenging enough so as to be interesting but not have so many options that it would become overwhelming to players who have never played that type of game before. To that end, I’m also keeping the critical path DoFaV encounters quite elementary. And as a last resort, for those people who simply do not want to play the tactical game at all, there is a nice forfeit button that allows the game to be skipped.

Dressing of Fruits and Veggies is one of the gameplay types that I’ve included in Cruise that’s different from the normal walking from room to room and clicking on hotspots. As the game is quite lengthy I wanted to be sure to punctuate it periodically with different types of gameplay to keep things fresh and interesting.

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