Tag
Development posts tagged warcraft. Tags cut across the categories, so this pulls together work on the same subject from different parts of the game.
9 posts
The map used to be a flat plane with rock painted where you could not walk. Now the ground rises, cliffs block, ramps are the doors, and high ground sees.
Water used to be a wall. Adding one terrain value gave the map fords that infantry wade, ships crawl through and docks stand in, and broke three things.
Two binary formats, two parsers, one shared intermediate form, and a guard that throws rather than let a source game's name reach disk.
Nine factions, each one changing a rule of the map rather than a column of stats: creeping corruption, hidden tunnels, crystal power fields and six more.
Seven personalities, difficulty expressed as behaviour rather than as free resources, and an opponent that reacts to what its scouts have actually seen.
Twelve damage types against eight armours is ninety six numbers, and no player reads ninety six numbers mid-fight. Half of them do nothing, on purpose.
One rule shaped every hero in the game: the player should always have a useful button to press. Four-ability kits failed it, so every kit went to six.
A Kobold Digger drops a healing potion 6.4% of the time. Every drop chance in the game is a real number you can look up, not a designer's feeling.
Creep camps, mercenary buildings and hero shops: the parts of the map that belong to neither side, and why an RTS map without them has a hole in it.
