ROCK ONLINE – Da Specifics

Basic Game Play

I had the controls imagined like this; you would have the arrow keys to move your character around, duck, and so forth, then something like the M , N, and B keys for close combat weapons, and the K and J keys for primary and secondary fire on ranged weapons. Then both the H and V buttons would be Jump. Aside from that, uh, Escape for the menu, or perhaps I for inventory, T for chat and trading sub-bar, etc. Also, the Attack buttons would be Accept for making menu choices and the Jump buttons would be Decline, or Go Back, or Fuck Off, or whatever.

Save Points

Traditionally in a sidescroller, a save point is a place where you can store all your progress and info up to that point in the game. Then, if you die, you can reset the game back to the last point you saved from. However, seeing as how this would be an online game, if you traded items with someone or got scammed into buying an item you didn’t like, you could simply reset back to that save point and everything would be hunky dory. SO, what I’m suggesting is that save points be purely for the purpose of saving your location. If you die or log off the game, the next time you fire it up, you’ll be able to start back at wherever you saved instead of the basic home-base shopping mall everyone else starts at.

I’m not sure how this usually works in MMO games but the way I see it, if an item is traded or some experience gained or whatever, it should be automatically saved so that if the game is turned off or whatever then you’ve still got everything you had before you turned it off. This way you can’t cheat and duplicate your items just by trading and resetting the game. Basic MMO stuff, right?

Dying

Generally speaking, your classic platform game has Hit Points, and Lives to gauge health. When damage causes your HP to drop to zero, you lose a life and you have to start over from the last checkpoint or save point. When you run out of Lives, you have to start over the level, or perhaps even… The game! However, we’re not talking about contra here, we’re talking about an online game. I think the best option would be to have some sort of monetary penalty for dying, but not too harsh.

Say your rocker gets thrashed somewhere in the course of the game. The screen switches from a gang of bums jumping on your character’s corpse to a scene of Rock Hell, where you must barter with the Rock Demons in order to make your way back to the land of the living. You have to give them, say, forty bucks… or one of your instruments. Some sort of choice like that. Then they send you on your merry way back to the last save point you checked in at, hale and healthy.

It might be a good idea to have a point in the game where you can find or earn some sort of item that allows you to bypass the bribe and come back to life for free. For every thirty zombies you whack in the cemetery, you get one free soul, or something.