Classic/Survival Mode Begins!
I am on holidays for this week, which means I have lots of time to get on with personal things, which includes CC2! And amidst the house hunting, music composition, and web design, I have been making lots of fun progress on CC2. If you follow Parabox Games on twitter, you’ll have noticed I made live updates while doing bits and pieces. Always good to follow us on twitter!
Some ‘minor’ changes done this week..
– Preparers fart a lot less often. 
– Added pause/save/return to menu dialogs
– Can now use arrow keys as well as WSAD to control Craig
– Created an extension system so that custom spritesets and scenes can be created. See http://twitpic.com/6td4ms/full
– Cavemen actually dodge dinosaurs properly now.. can’t believe I missed that.
Past these little bits and pieces, most of my work has been surrounding the ‘classic/survival’ gametype. If nothing else gets you hooked on CC2, this will. The gametype mimics that of the original Caveman Craig – your goal is to get your tribe as large as possible without being obliterated. When Craig dies, you lose. Additionally, some of the key features in the conquest gametype are introduced in the classic mode too. Your cavemen can eat from the fruit pile to restore health. You can see individual stats from each cavemen. There are new dinosaurs, new rewards, and so on.
There will be a lot of testing and tweaking going on over the next couple of weeks to resolve some of the balance/difficulty issues in CC1 and CC:SE. In some versions, you’d be doing just fine until suddenly a billion raptors would appear and tear your tribe apart. Other versions left you overpowered once you got a certain number of hunters. We don’t want these frustrations to come across in CC2. Some goals I have for the classic mode…
1. It must be very challenging. Getting more than say 8 cavemen will be a decent accomplishment. Having huge tribes of 20+ cavemen is for the conquest gametype, or those who are truly hardcore cc fans.
2. The difficulty can’t plateau. The game should get harder and harder and you shouldn’t reach a point where you have nothing to do but sit back and watch your hunters wipe out the T-Rex population. Think Call of Duty WaW zombies.
3. The scoring should be determined by how good your tribe was at its best, not when Craig dies. If you reach 30 cavemen, then lose all but 3, and then Craig dies.. you get a lousy score, even though really you achieved a great tribe size. Perhaps the game should end when a certain number of your cavemen have died?
Has anyone got any suggestions to help us?
Take care!
Rhys
Honestly, I really dislike the idea of losing once a certain amount of cavemen die. I always enjoyed the challenge of having to start from scratch again late in the game. But I suppose that’s just my opinion.
That’s valuable to hear! I’m still on the fence so it’s helpful.
Wow, the picture makes the game look really fun!
In my humble opinion, you should be able to lose all of your cavemen without actually losing the game. To me, it seems that it is already challenging enough just keeping Craig alive, you shouldn’t have to save every single caveman that falls in the way of danger. I liked that the cavemen were expendable in the original, but again, this is just my insight.
That’s fair enough. Of course CC2 is fairly different and the whole dynamic and balance changes. Craig is a lot stronger and only where there is strength in numbers does the player truly struggle to keep alive. The struggle is in keeping others alive.
Sorry, but I’ve read this article atleast 3 times and I still don’t see where you say that you lose after a certain number of Cavemen die… All I can find is “your goal is to get your tribe as large as possible without being obliterated. When Craig dies, you lose.”
…I like the idea that the game ends once Craig dies, but how did you guys get that you lose after ‘a certain number’ of casualties?
Right at the end of point 3 in this blog post, I write: “Perhaps the game should end when a certain number of your cavemen have died?”
-Rhys
Also I like the idea of caveman’s being expendable.