The Kingdom of Philtopia

Currently I have 7 missions in production and about 14 or so in development so this year I should be pushing out a lot of content for Vendetta Online. You might think “14 ,wtf , that’s a lot on the go” well yes and no. Those aren’t necessarily 14 separate story lines most of them are part of a campaign I have been developing for some time. If you are Itani you may have played “The other side of the universe” series which is actually a sampler for this campaign. 9 of those 14 missions I have the go are part of that campaign. Any ways on to the point…

Counter strike, the mission to end all missions.

What drives me to make missions? I want to play combat missions that stress the fuck out of you as you scramble to try and complete them barely scraping by successfully or being beaten down to hell by what seems impossible odds. Nothing in VO really offered that nor really does to this date (except a mission or 2 I have in game of course). I designed a story 2 years ago for the Itani to accomplish this. The basic jist of the story is the Serco are trying to sneak in the back door through Jallik bypassing Deneb to attack Itani and you must fight them off. After fighting them off you get promoted to a training position in the capital but tragedy strikes as your trainees are killed by a Queen and you vow to seek revenge. Impressed by your revenge ass kicking you get assigned to the Counter strike fleet in the Ukari and Helios system with the goal of keeping the Serco bottled up to their own affairs however the Serco do not care for this plan and fight back….

Sounds simple? it could have been, my previous missions break each story line into 4 separate missions with the 4th usually being the climax to the story but I decided the envelope needs to be pushed and VO’s mission engine stretched as far as it can fucking go.

The Super mission concept

Other MMO’s have these massive missions that take you extended amounts of time they usually call them Quests or dungeons or whatever but VO did not have anything like this. Missions are generally short and to the point with a little bit of substance here and there so I decided the entire Counter strike story would be contained within 1 mission.

Stations as your base are boring…

Secondly I decided your base would be a trident frigate instead of a station. You would be required to dock to get missions, repair, and so forth. There was a cheat event “dock any station” and if you require the player to stay in that sector you can effectively use the capital ship as a docking event yay!

Keeping it simple

Ever read Taggarts tactics in the Claw Marks magazine from the TCS Tigers Claw? Have any idea what I just said at all? Well basically Missions can be classified into a few basic types of Patrol, escort, defend and strike. These are the formats for the internal sub missions of the game. In total there are about 10 sub missions contained within this one missions and I would say average play time is probably around 1.5 hours depending how fast you are at the sub missions.

Careful design

I had to make sure when I built this mission that I was mindful to clean up NPC’s after each sub mission otherwise this mission would crush the servers resources. Usually with a jump out or mission change or when the player was out of site a simple go away (warp out) would suffice. I learned from Other side of the universe 4 that this was important because that mission 2 years ago used to crash the test server so being mindful of your resources is very important! To give you an idea of the scale of Counter strike it is currently 60 stages using 10 sector destinations, 9 timers, 27 individual npcs and 36 npc groups. Lots of stuff. More than anything currently in existence made by a player.

NPC choreography

To make sure everything happens how you want it in a twitch based game can be pretty difficult because you cannot predict the skill of the player and forcing things to blow up on their own is lame. For events where you are supposed to lose I usually make use of a timer that keeps re spawning the enemy or friendlies in a x minute interval until the desired scripted event is achieved. Also, despite your beliefs from the border war, Capital ships can destroy each other!!! Maybe the devs should play my missions and take tips?

Testing

This is the hard part, getting people to test in the first place is a huge challenge but in a mission of this scope if any massive bugs were to be found they could unravel any stage jumping set up and require hours of work. Currently the only other player besides me to play this is mr_spuck and he seemed to quite enjoy the mission. I sat back and watched him play the mission and took some screens which I have linked below. Keep in mind when I am developing I turn all the fanciness off and run in an 800×600 window.

Stay tuned, this one is Coming Soon!

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