Mission Design

[Footman16]

Hey guys, I've been doing a little work on reforging my Lordaeron's Legacy campaign but I've also started work on a High Elf campaign for which the first mission is fully finished. Said campaign will cover Cataclys/Mists of Pandaria lore including the expelling of the Sunreavers from New Dalaran.

It is the mission covering the expelling of the Sunreavers I have a basic outline for what I want for the map but could use a little help with ideas for how specific level mechanics work.

So to start you have both your heroes in a section of the city separated from your base however one hero has a diamond of summoning-type spell to summon reinforcements should they need them and they are the ones going around arresting the Sunreaver "citizens" whilst being harassed by Sunreaver's attacking them and attempting to help them escape ala Malganis in the Culling. Your base will be periodically attacked to keep things interesting.

However I wanted to make the mission tense by adding a timer to it. One idea I had was a series of Silver Covenant bases that are inaccessible that the Sunreaver's are slowly fighting through to reach Veressa Windrunner which if they do she is killed and its game over.

Another idea would be to make you lose if they help too many Sunreaver's escape.

Another issue I'm wondering about is what system to use for the expulsion of the Sunreaver's themselves should I go along the Culling route of you attacking them until they're subdued at which point they get teleported to prison. The Sunreaver's will rather teleport them away, or should I go with something different?

I'm very keen to hear peoples' ideas

 

[deepstrasz]

Is this quite terrain related? It's not clear for me.
Looks more like Idea Factory.

 

[Footman16]

Is this quite terrain related? It's not clear for me.
Looks more like Idea Factory.

Comes under "Level Design" imo since the layout will be closely related to the gameplay

 

[Nowow]

I don't think adding another timer mechanic is necessary.

The Culling is already a very interesting mission in terms of mechanics, and it has an innate "timer" - once you lose the race to 100 citizens, you're done. If you want to make the mission more tense, why not add more malganis like players as time goes on? Let's say after 20 minutes or so another malganis like player activates, now you need to handle 2 groups at the same time, a full hour passes, and you need to contend with 3. This can be achieved without much effort if you already have things set up for one malganis player, and even two groups at once would make things much more hectic.

 

[Footman16]

I don't think adding another timer mechanic is necessary.

The Culling is already a very interesting mission in terms of mechanics, and it has an innate "timer" - once you lose the race to 100 citizens, you're done. If you want to make the mission more tense, why not add more malganis like players as time goes on? Let's say after 20 minutes or so another malganis like player activates, now you need to handle 2 groups at the same time, a full hour passes, and you need to contend with 3. This can be achieved without much effort if you already have things set up for one malganis player, and even two groups at once would make things much more hectic.

I don't know if it was clear in the original post but I only want one timer present whether that's the Culling Mechanic or the race against time for Vereesa, I was just wondering what would be more interesting from a gameplay/level design perspective. I'm also open to completely different ideas for the mission.

 

[Nowow]

I don't know if it was clear in the original post but I only want one timer present whether that's the Culling Mechanic or the race against time for Vereesa, I was just wondering what would be more interesting from a gameplay/level design perspective. I'm also open to completely different ideas for the mission.

It's actually not entirely clear what you want to do. From what I gather you want to have your heroes and base separate, while being able to summon units from base using some ability. The base will be attacked periodically and your heroes need to arrest sunreaver units (neutral I guess?), while a computer player tries to help them escape.

Now, you say you want a timer to make things more interesting, and I argue you already have one - the player shouldn't let too many sunreavers escape. And this is the best kind of timer there is - it's implicit, the player can control how fast it goes if they're good enough (by killing whoever goes around freeing sunreavers), and it takes no extra effort to make it.

Making in addition to that a simulation of a fight between two computer players (I assume the player won't control Vareesa, the base, and the arresting heroes) to justify some arbitrary timer is a lot of work for little gain. Instead, I suggest you keep with the culling mechanic, and if you want to spice things up a bit (speed the timer), you can add more groups to free the sunreavers with relatively little effort.