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Seeking advice for single player missoin design..


biller

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Hello designers and fliers,

I am looking into how to use ideas in other games to make the single player mission more interesting and interactive.

I know that there is some dynamic campaign's demo in the forum but the DCS:World has not fully supported an official dynamic campaign.

 

And instead of targeting at pure realism, my plan and goal is to get some dynamic elements into the game and add more gameplay. And the player will have a unique experience and a unique result each time they play this mission.

 

So I come up with this design proposal and I'm looking for your opinions.

 

First is the background:

You're in blue side.

 

You and your allies are trapped at Tbilisi airport.

The red side has surrounded the entire area.

 

You have to fight and help your allies escape to the Sukhumi airport.

In order to achieve the goal, you have to fight the enemies and open up a temporary safe zone. Each time you create a safe zone inside the hordes of enemies. A group of your allies will fly into this zone. It marks as a progressive success.

And after you fight and create enough safe zones on the paths to the Sukhumi, your allies and you can all land there and this will be the final success.

map.thumb.png.bde2a0e7d2f5e997e6bbbbd053c7f8ca.png

So, in order to make all FC3 planes be suitable for this mission, I'll set up three main combat zones (marked in red areas) with different tasks so both attackers and fighters can be used. The southern zone is for A2A combat, the middle one is for SEAD tasks, the third one at the north is for A2G in mountainous areas. The three combat zones are optional, it means the player is free to pick one of them.

 

So in ACE Combat Zero there are mission that allows player to choose one out of three routes...The player encounters different enemies on each route and receives different rewards.( http://acecombat.wikia.com/wiki/Ace_Combat_Zero:_The_Belkan_War/Missions, level 8 Merlon, you have alpha team, beta team and theta team….)

 

 

And, as you fight enemies. The system will pickup some random side quests(blue question marks on the map). Such as reporting a crashed ally, saving an ejected pilot or helping to capture a helipad..

There will be enough scripted quests, and the system will pick 2 or 3 suitable ones.

 

If you've played Payday2...

payday2.thumb.jpg.10ec69212effdafde76dd226fa49cc7d.jpg

You might notice that in level "Hoxton Breakout", when Hoxton is hacking servers, you have to defeat waves of agents coming in different diretcions. And the system will ask you to do some quest such as "hacking another server or put a bomb at xxx room"

 

 

And, as we all know that flight sims always challenge player's flight control skills. Clear weather flying brings minimum challenge, land in adversary weather with system failure brings great challenge. And in FSX, the default missions are also ranked in this difficulty hierarchy..So you may also experience the degeneration of the weather.....

Finally it is about the challenge balancing on the primary tasks..The scripts see what the player does in one encounter in the main combat zone; and if the player is a killing spear, that means the difficulty should be raised. And then the script tells the units in the later stages fight more aggressively to challenge the player.

 

I'm not sure if this kind of single player mission is fun for your guess, so I'm asking for your advice or ideas. (Since I'm individual developer, I have to make sure that the time and script workload needed for the mission is within one person's ability...)


Edited by biller
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Hi biller. This is a pretty ambitious design concept but if you can pull it off, more power to you. :)

 

There are a couple of issues I see -

 

You're working in a very small area. Unless you're planning on only activating a tasking type if that particular aircraft is flown, there's going to be significant overlap; your fighters are 20 miles away from your SEAD tasking and will kill your strikers, the Buk site's WEZ overlaps both other taskings and will be firing at your CAP and strike flights.

 

What's stopping me from just flying along the mountain range to Sukhumi where all that stuff can't get me? ;) Some ground forces that you need to assist, or some other reason to force the route you've planned, might be a good idea.

 

Depending on the level of realism you're going for, Sukhumi is in Abkhazia; a separate territory (only partially acknowledged) with poor relations with Georgia. It is one of two breakaway territories that declared independence in the early 90s. Senaki might be a better choice or, alternately, reverse the script and have forces retreating TOWARDS Tbilisi (Georgia's capital city.)

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Hi biller. This is a pretty ambitious design concept but if you can pull it off, more power to you. :)

 

There are a couple of issues I see -

 

You're working in a very small area. Unless you're planning on only activating a tasking type if that particular aircraft is flown, there's going to be significant overlap; your fighters are 20 miles away from your SEAD tasking and will kill your strikers, the Buk site's WEZ overlaps both other taskings and will be firing at your CAP and strike flights.

 

What's stopping me from just flying along the mountain range to Sukhumi where all that stuff can't get me? ;) Some ground forces that you need to assist, or some other reason to force the route you've planned, might be a good idea.

 

Depending on the level of realism you're going for, Sukhumi is in Abkhazia; a separate territory (only partially acknowledged) with poor relations with Georgia. It is one of two breakaway territories that declared independence in the early 90s. Senaki might be a better choice or, alternately, reverse the script and have forces retreating TOWARDS Tbilisi (Georgia's capital city.)

 

Hi feefifofum,

Thanks for your advice. Indeed I forgot a few details.

My original plan is to limit the time required to play the mission. So I think the most fighters are going to be dogfighters or fighters with limited BVR capacity. Then it will only patrol or fight in a small area. And they will not march across half of the map to interrupt player.

Moreover, thanks for pointing out the level of realism factor. I think as long as the scripts work, scaling the metrics of the mission and increase the elements of realism is not hard. And then some more advanced fighters can be added in.

Finally,I’ll add some “support ground troops” story (maybe just audio clips…in DCS) to the air-to-ground missions.

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