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WE GOT BACK TO HIS apartment bubbling with excitement.
“So how do I do it?” I asked. “I built my game from an RPG template. Can I add strategy elements?”
“Elements, sure,” Ben said. “I don’t know if you could make it into a full RTS, but you already have a day/night cycle locking doors and changing encounter difficulty.”
Ben collapsed on his couch, fanning himself after the afternoon heat. I headed to his kitchenette. “Water?” I offered.
“Pepsi,” he croaked, like he was dying of thirst.
“Ooh, me too.” I said and poured two tall glasses. As I handed him his, I asked, “What does day/night cycle have to do with RTS?”
“Well...” he took a drink and sighed. “In an RTS, you capture resource nodes and develop them, and they give you resources over time. The quick and easy way to put RTS elements into your game is to add a few resources the player can develop and have them pay you over time.”
“Like a job,” I said automatically.
“Exactly,” he said. “Your starting job gives you $25 a day. Something like that. And if you add or upgrade your job, the daily income goes up.”
“That’s perfect!” I said. “How do I do it?”
“It’s all Transactions, right? You need to set up a bunch of little Transactions for the different states. One that requires you to have a level one job, and it gives you $25. Then add it to the Daily Effect in the day/night plugin.”
That all made perfect sense to me. I’d come so far. Everything interesting in the game was either an Asset or a Transaction. If you want to add a dagger to a game, you need a Transaction to take the player’s money and add the dagger to his inventory, another one to equip it from inventory and add combat damage to the character, and another for selling it as loot.
Transactions could be player-driven (like moving around the map or casting a Fireball) or event-driven (like monsters attacking when they notice you or the doors all locking at sunset). I also needed a new Hidden Stat for the player’s job level, but I already knew how to handle that.
I made the starter job “Web Developer” and set it to pay $25 a day. Then I added “Unemployed” at job level 2, and it paid $50 a day. My in-game Player Character was an assassin, but she’d need a day job for cover.
I already had an encounter with the Apartment Manager that was full of story drama. I modified that encounter to add a line of dialog to the PC. As she’s arguing with the manager, there’s a line where she says, “I just got fired!” I added an effect to that line that changed the player’s job level to 2. That was all it took to add it to the game.
But I’d been thinking. Strategy games were notoriously difficult to balance. Now that I was giving the player free resources every day, I needed something to balance that.
I caught Ben’s attention.
“To make it Strategy, I need the enemies to get more powerful over time, too.”
“You can add them to the same day/night events.”
“But what resource do I give them?”
“Money?”
“How would the bad guys use money?”
He grimaced. “You’re going to need an auto-spender.”
“A what?”
“You can set the scheduled event to give your bad guys money every day, then give each bad guy an auto-spender to use up any money he gets.”
“But why did you sigh?”
“They can get really complicated. It’s a priority table. But you’re good at thinking in Math. You’ll be okay.”
In the end, it didn’t make much sense to give the enemies daily money, but I set up the auto-spender to convert experience points into character levels, and they already had level tables set up. I set the daily event to award the bad guys 1,ooo xp per day per base they controlled, and started them with one base.
When I described that to Ben, he got really excited. “And you can do the same for the Player.”
I frowned. “How?”
“You need bases, too, right? Start your Player Character with two bases—the apartment and the car—and remove one when he gets kicked out of his apartment. Add one the first time he visits the college or my apartment.”
I glared at him, but it took him a while to notice. When he did, he asked innocently, “What?”
“The game isn’t about my real life. It follows the girl.”
“Oh. Right!” He knew that. He’d worked on all the game locations!
I waited while he thought it through.
“Well...” he said, “you see what I mean. Add daily experience once the player unlocks the safehouse. The backroom of the restaurant. The dive bar.”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “And I’ll lose the daily resource if I ever lose access to the place.”
“Exactly. Build it into the story events.”
The more I thought about it, the more story events we’d already made. The story progression was already set up. It was easy to add the basic strategy elements.
A real strategy game ebbs and flows. It isn’t straight progression like you get with RPGs. My plan was to add a regular flow of resources to the enemies and give them ways to capture resources away from the player during combat.
Ben was right about the bases of operation. I could use the player’s job level to reward daily income and the number of bases controlled to reward daily experience. I spent half an hour adding the ebbs and flows to the game events.
It wasn’t real-time. It was still turn-based, and the strategic resources only came through once per day. But as soon as I set up the auto-spender, I had a game with real strategy to it. It was incredible.
I thought back to the conversation Ben and I had had out walking. The kind of games I like....
“Hey,” I said aloud, “how do I add base-building?”
Ben was busy working on something, so he didn’t understand right away. “What’s that?”
“I’ve added strategy to my RPG. It took an hour. How do I add a little base-building?”
“Same way.”
I wasn’t surprised he said that, but I needed more details. “Specifically how?”
“Well...” he said, thinking.
Before he could answer, I got a message from Cass. “answer ur phone”
I held up a finger to Ben. “Save it for later. I have other problems.” My phone rang, and I answered on the first ring. “Talk to me, Cass.”
I felt really cool until she started swearing.