Hi all. I am the lead art director on a little coldstone game demo my company is putting together. Our programming guru asked me to pose this question to the boards. Please help if you can =).

Here's the situation: We want the player to be able to cast a spell that is equivilent to a bard performing on a street corner for loose change. The player would move near a npc or crowd of npc's, cast the spell and, if successful, be rewarded with a little cash or small items.

Here's the major problem, our city is filled with agressive npcs who mingle with non-agressige npcs. The agressive ones are set to not attack until they are hit. How could we make an area effect song spell that would not be percieved as a threat from the bad guys?

We could set it up to only sing to one, non-aggressive target at a time. But what fun would that be? =P

The coldstone manual is a bit thin concerning beneficial spells and spells cast on allies.

Any help would be appreciated.

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Originally posted by severd:
The coldstone manual is a bit thin concerning beneficial spells and spells cast on allies.

Mr. Severd,

If you set a spell to affect allies, then it will not hit any NPC that is aggressive against the caster.

However, I do not believe that an ally affect spell will affect neutral NPCs either(those with a stamina of 0).

So this will take a bit of thought since you can't check to see if an NPC is on the screen, nor the proximity of the player from an NPC in a player-instigated spell.

Hmm.

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Ah, this sounds so close to possible it hurts!
An idea that popped into my head would be to have an event triggered by the spell which temporarily changes the player graphic to an identical one, but with a large collision circle so you can test for NPCs within a certain range... then have collision events. I havent really thought about it too much though, and I don't feel experienced enough to elaborate(!). perhaps someone who knows a bit more than me will expand on my idea (or rip it to shreds :p).

Edit: What the heck, I'll elaborate on it myself!
You could do as I've said above, with a global that moniters which graphic you are using to represent the player ("big collision circle" or "normal collision circle"). If the player is playing music (and therefore, say, "gb_musicplaying=1") then you can add a chosen amount to another global ("gb_howgoodistheplayerdoing?" perhaps...) for every NPC who is in range (they could, this way, have 0 stamina as you are not actually using a spell). This global is then used to define the amount of gold the player receives or the likelyhood of getting an item using a "launch item" event (the item's would appear on the floor next to the player, rather than in the inventory). Any good?
If anyone can see any flaws, please point them out cheers,

Migraine.

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(This message has been edited by Migraine (edited 10-09-2002).)

While I don't have any constructive thoughts for you, I will say that is a very neat idea.

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This is not the best solution - but it's the first I came up with.

Lets say you have a huddle of 5 NPCs or so standing around on a street corner. Make an event that sets a global variable to 5, then place it on all the tiles around the group. That way you could modify the spell to give out more goodies when the global variable is higher.

The obvious problem is that it requires the NPCs to stay within a much more confined area.

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Thanks for the ideas, while i have no idea what you're talking about, our coldstone expert is chewing on it.

Here is my brainstorm for a workaround to the problem:

You simply have the player cast a spell on himself that triggers several events. If the spell is succesful, a few npcs appear to gather around the singer and listen. After a pause, they drop thier cash, then dissapear. If the spell is not succesful, the authorities come running to arrest you.

Does that sound more feasable?

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ah... so you want the spell to attract NPCs. the ideas above seem to suggest ways you could use the spell to get gold or items off NPCs already around you (so you'd have to walk up to them, rather than them coming to you when you play your music). I don't know how easy it would be to get npcs to gather round your player and have it look convincing, but someone will think of a way I'm sure!
As for being whisked off by the police if you're truly a bad musician, that shouldn't be a problem. You could easily have the success rate of the spell linked to a global or your skill level or something (using the condition of casting link in the spell editor, thenusing conditional events which measure your skill level, for example). Then if you fail, your player is teleported to a jail (or whatever).

This game idea sounds great, by the way. I'm sure others. like myself, will be interested in any updates/news/screenshots etc have you got a site showing the game's progress at all?

Migraine

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(This message has been edited by Migraine (edited 10-14-2002).)