https://youtu.be/8rwnoJbHX70
Who wants to take on a big bull elk like this one? Just in case our players do, we’re redesigning the Attack system in WolfQuest 3 so you’ll need both skill and luck to succeed. We’ve watched lots of videos of wolves attacking elk, and read a lot of scientific papers by our advisors Dr. Dan MacNulty, Dr. Dan Stahler, and many others, and gotten some direct guidance from Dan and Dan as well. As with any game, we’ve got to simplify and stereotype the most common actions into a few game mechanics that are learnable, playable, and of course fun.
First, some definite improvements, which apply to elk, moose, and mule deer:
- Wolves will only take damage when the prey unleashes a kick. That’s just basic realism.
- Then, to add some skill, we’re building a “Dodge” action that lets the player jumps to the left or right to avoid taking damage from those kicks — if you time it right.
So if you’re facing off against your prey, you’ll have to watch for signs of an imminent kick, dodge at just the right moment, and then make your own counterattack while your prey is taking a moment of rest. We’ve got this working now, though still refining the animations so it all looks nice.
Our next design challenge is damage. We’ve tweaked this over the years. In the old free game, you’d lose almost all your health in the course of taking down a single elk. That’s rather unrealistic (or at least unusual), so in 2.7 we tweaked it so you lose only about half your health. But that doesn’t feel completely right either — but here’s where it gets tricky. Death-by-elk or moose does happen in Yellowstone, but it’s fairly rare — and I’d guess it’s not from fighting with low health, but just having a really unlucky day. So we’ve thought about giving elk an enormous range of potential damage, with a small but real chance of dealing a killing blow to a healthy wolf. That might accurate in a simulation, but does it inject too much chance into the game?
The heart of this challenge is that wolves should approach an elk hunt with great apprehension. Sometimes it will go well, sometimes it will be grueling but ultimately successful, often it will fail, and occasionally it’ll fail with disastrous results for the wolf. But the key question is what factors determine how the hunt goes. How much is skill (comprising both thoughtful decisions by the player to find a weak elk and the manual dexterity to dodge attacks)? How much is luck (from randomized damage given by both wolf and elk)? And how much comes from a judicious evaluation of the odds?
Our goal in all this is to make the entire elk hunt more fun, so we can make it longer, which will make it more realistic! So tell us what you think would make the hunt more fun and interesting!
