EpicDuel PVP Game Design Notes

January 15, 2013

When Omega launches, every single action you can issue in battle, including Strike, gun, bazooka, all of your skills, all of your item special abilities, and well, everything is now handled by a 100% new "core-based" battle engine. Sound fancy? That's partly because it is. If you haven't heard, the 9500-lines-of-code-long battle engine that is the heart of EpicDuel has been rewritten for this release.   

Why would we do such a crazy thing?  The primary reason is for future expansion.  For all of you loyal duelers out there, you know that it takes us a good while to create new skills and abilities in game, and we all know it's these new abilities and custom builds that are the most exciting. Omega will dramatically increase the rate at which we can generate new, well-balanced, exciting abilities.

The largest code change in Omega is the overhaul of the battle engine.  So what's different about it?  First, every battle action we create now has over 100 different variables available to manipulate in the database!  This is an increase from only about 30 values previously. This means skills can have more unique effects, and we can recycle effects and functionality more easily than ever.  

Think of this example, say we wanted to have 3 similarly functional, yet visually different abilities... maybe three skills that rain down damage on your enemy.  Let's say we want one with a fire animation, one with water animation, and one that rains down a bunch of rabid monkeys.  In the old engine we would need to write 3 completely separate skills.  The fact that the skills were similar was previously irrelevant. 

In the new engine, Omega allows us to define "rule sets" that can be applied to any action.  These rules can now very easily be recycled and tweaked. So if Rule Set A defines an action that rains down damage, we can pair Rule Set A with Animation Set A, B, and C to create three different effects without creating loads of extra work. 

This flexibility will mean more exciting battles every time!

This core functionality will also be applied to bots, meaning bots can be created more frequently. In fact, it will be possible to create bots with two active skills or two passive skills. Hopefully this could become a more modular system and allow you to add alternative cores to bots for different battle configurations!

Tags: Titan Cores Omega bots code