Capstone Blog Post 8: Giving meaning to territory and a new name

Our focus this sprint was to provide something meaningful to capturing territory aside from simply the fading mechanic. Our ideas were to either give the player passive buffs by being in the territory or by giving the territories stage hazards that are specific to each color. We initially thought that passive buffs would be an interesting way of doing this because it was a cleaner design stage wise. However, we quickly ran into problems trying to contextualize what those buffs or debuffs would be, and this combined with trying to figure out how we would adequately convey this to the players drove us towards having stage hazards. Reason being, is that stage hazards are easy to understand typically as they are part of the traditional lexicon of platformer game mechanics but also tie in nicely to our games warring color kingdoms theme and they are extremely visual.

Along with including stage hazards that benefit the territory owner by only damaging opposing players, we also included a mechanic for which we are renaming our game finally around, Chroma Throne. The Chroma Throne is a fancy switch that, when a player sits on it, changes all of the stages territory (including their stage hazards) into that players color. This object appears at random points in the maps different territory zones and appears every minute of gameplay.

We also spent time integrating art into the build as well as fix some critical bugs and completely rewriting our color checking functionality on that player that tells them what colors they are in at any given point. This last point was because we ran into issues with reliability with our old method which was using the trigger system. The new method is now much more flexible and scalable to more then just two colors as well. This paves the way to integrate more colors down the line in a much easier fashion. After completely rewriting the system, the new method works flawlessly and is even more friendly to use. Instead of parsing a single list of objects with color properties to figure out when the player should fade, the new method has a list per color which then allows us to simply ask via code if the player is in a specific color all by simply doing basic math like addition asking if one color is greater in presence then another.

Concept art for stage design with stage hazards