TEW2008: Adam's Developer's Journal

[Adam Ryland]

[CENTER][B]Total Extreme Wrestling 2008: The Developer's Journal[/B] "[I]100 Reasons To Stay In This Summer[/I]"[/CENTER] I'm pleased to announce the start of the developer's journal for TEW2008. For those of you not familiar with the concept, this is an ongoing thread where I reveal the additions and modifications that will be part of the game. This will not be a complete list; some features will remain a surprise for the release. Neither is there any pattern to what will be revealed and when; somedays it may be a relatively minor feature, somedays it will be one of the "show stoppers", somedays I might stick do two features in one post, somedays it might be a screen shot. All that is certain is that there will be 100 entries in total, one a day (excluding Sundays) from now until the release of the game on June 1st. Only features that are already completed will be referenced.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#1: Personality Plus[/B] In TEW07, a character's behaviour was defined by a combination of Personality and Attitude. This has been significantly upgraded to become the new Personality Plus feature. Instead of two static categories, every single character in TEW08 has their own Personality, which takes the form of a modified version of a neural network. This network consists of ten traits, each defined as a scale moving from one extreme to another. These ten traits are: Humble - Egotistical Generous - Selfish Compassionate - Ruthless Optimistic - Pessimistic Naive - Manipulative Dependable - Flaky Social - Antisocial Loyal - Mercenary Timid - Bold Hesitant - Driven In each case, the trait is defined by a sliding bar - the closer it is to one end of the scale, the more extreme the character's bias. For example, if a character's Humble-Egotistical bar is set almost entirely to the left hand side, he will be virtually entirely without ego. Setting it near the middle would result in a well-balanced character who is neither lacking in self-esteem nor an egotistical jerk. In any situation where a character must "think" - which can be anything from considering a contract offer to deciding whether to form a relationship, from demanding a better push to how upset he has to be to walk out on a promotion - his (or her) Personality is consulted and his response based upon his network as a whole (this is a key point; their response is never based on just one trait, meaning that you never get one-dimensional responses). The important factor is that, like any neural network, this personality can evolve over time. Pushing a young worker to the moon may result in what was once a sweet kid developing a monsterous ego. Blasting a free spirited worker with a huge fine because he was late may help him straighten out into being a more dependable figure (or may just push him towards becoming a more anti-authority figure). For this reason, dealing with character's becomes more like dealing with a real person - with all their quirks and personality - and less about getting the same response each time. The TEW08 editor comes equipped with many "personality templates" that allow you to quickly assign a certain type of personality to a character, taking out the hassle of having to define a personality each time. All the traits are described in more detail in the help file.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#2: Bad Blood[/B] TEW08 introduces a new relationship type called Bad Blood. This is essentially a "negative Blood Relative"; it allows the game to know that two people are related to each other, but also that they should not get the positive effects that a family connection normally brings. This is ideal for scenarios where family feuds need to be simulated.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#3: National Battle[/B] One feature that should prove an additional level of strategy to the game is the new National Battle system. In layman's terms, "this town ain't big enough for the three of us!" A National Battle scenario occurs whenever a game area becomes home to three or more promotions who are above Cult size. As no industry can support that many titans, it becomes a war zone. At the end of every month all the eligible promotions are rated based upon the best show they have produced in the past four weeks. It then becomes a domino effect: whichever promotion comes first damages everyone below them; the second-placed promotion damages everyone below them; and so on. Of course, the worst place to be is last, as that means you take damage from every promotion above you, but don't get to damage anyone else. "Damage", in this situation, entails a loss of popularity in each region of the area in question. The amount is greater if the winner was already more popular, smaller if the winner was less popular. If the winning promotion has less prestige, it can also steal some from the losing promotion. Of course, the cumulative effect of this is that eventually the losses will cause one of the promotions to fall back to Cult size and out of the battle. There are certain extras at play. Firstly, if two promotions already have a War relationship, any damage done during a battle is automatically increased by 50%. If two promotions have a friendly relationship, no damage is done. There are also 'warming up' and 'cooling down' periods. When a promotion first rises to National size, it has a one month warming up period to get ready for the coming battle; during this time, it is exempt from taking part. This allows the company time to get ready. Furthermore, when a promotion falls back to Cult size, it enters a mandatory cooling down period. This is a six month time frame where the promotion cannot rise back to National size (even if it achieves the necessary popularity). This stops promotions zig-zagging between Cult and National, and makes losing the national battle all the more painful! The monthly "battle results" are available for everyone to see, in the form of a league table of sorts. The reason for this feature is to stop games becoming "top-heavy", i.e. loaded with big, successful promotions. In previous games it seemed to be the case that once you'd attained National status, your worries were over; or as King Louie eloquently put it, "I've reached the top and had to stop, and that's what's bothering me." Now you will have things to deal with; establishing yourself in the first place, potentially having to fight the big dogs that are already there, and then watching your back as up-and-coming promotions try to take you down. It also adds a huge amount of strategy when making your company a power player; it's no longer good enough to reach National size and then start slowly enhancing your roster, as chances are you might be just 28 days away from having to fight established super-powers. Furthermore, having your star workers stolen becomes even more dramatic, as not only does their loss hurt you, it actively helps your opponents attack you. In short, this feature adds a whole new set of strategy, worries, and challenges for the big promotions, putting an end to their relatively easy life.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#4: Injury Realism[/B] A small feature that has been added in order to improve realism, injuries now have the option of being defined as In Ring, Out Of Ring, or Either. As the definitions suggest, this means that the injury can be restricted to occur only in certain situations; this stops people getting Food Poisoning, for example, from in-ring activity.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#5: Multi Advance[/B] After making its first appearance in WMMA, the Multi Advance feature will be making its TEW debut in 2008. The Multi Advance is an optional tool that allows the player to skip through a specified number of days in a row, taking away the need to keep clicking. It will automatically stop if an event needs booking, an important e-mail comes in, a pending decision needs addressing, or a diary alert has been set. The TEW08 version is vastly larger in its scope than its WMMA counterpart, as it allows the user to skip up to [I]one year[/I] at a time. Furthermore, when selecting how many days to advance, the on screen display shows what the date will be at the end of that period so that it is easier to stop exactly where you want.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#6: Worker \ New Worker Combination[/B] In TEW08, the information that used to be divided into both "Workers" (people who start active) and "New Workers" (characters that become active at a later date) has now been combined into one section. Some of you will probably be thinking that that's not much of a change, but it actually leads to several subtle improvements, especially for mod makers. The first of these improvements is the obvious one, it makes organisation of files much easier. Rather than forcing mod makers to switch between the two groupings and keep them consistent, everything is in one place. Similarly, this means they can all be filtered in one go, there's no more importing from one file to the other, etc, etc. The second improvement helps both the realism of the game and mod makers. As everything is now in the same place, the former New Workers are no longer isolated from the rest of the editor. This means that they can happily given relationships, alter egos, etc. To take a real world example, if you have a historical database and have Harry Smith appear several years after the game begins, he can now not only come into the game with all his Hart-family relationships in place, he can also be set to correctly turn to the DH Smith moniker if he gets signed by the WWE. Of course, as everyone is now in the same file, you can also correctly set up entire generations of family relationships. There are no limits on time, so you could end up seeing existing wrestlers' great-great-grandchildren debuting if you wanted to. To answer a question that I'm sure will be asked, the in-game 07-08 converter handles the combining of the two files automatically, including generating the relationships.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#7: The Hall Of Immortals[/B] The Hall Of Immortals is the in-game "Hall Of Fame", similar to the one found in WMMA. Unlike its earlier counterpart though, the HOI is specifically meant to be far more exclusive, so that only the best of the best get in. As the game progresses, a record of achievements is kept on each wrestler. When a wrestler retires (or dies) that record is looked at, and if deemed impressive enough, results in them being inducted into the Hall. There are five possible achievements: [I]Major Champion[/I] (Has won a main event title in a major promotion) [I]Headliner[/I] (Has main evented a major promotion's historic or legendary event) [I]Show Stealer[/I] (Was in a legendary match with a major promotion) [I]Year Of Glory[/I] (Has been voted Wrestler Of The Year) [I]National Icon[/I] (Has reached iconic levels of popularity in a game area) All but the final achievement can be done multiple times, with each gives a certain amount of points (i.e. one Headliner achievement may give the character 20 points, but fifteen Headliner achievements may give the character 50 points; there are maximum levels though). If the final points tally is greater than a certain level, the character qualifies as a Hall Of Immortal candidate. Therefore, there are multiple ways to get into the HOI. One character may get the majority of his points because he was world champion multiple times and headlines years' worth of pay-per-views. Another character may get the bulk of his points because of the amount of legendary matches he was involved with, even if he never actually won any world titles at all. As with WMMA, all of this is also able to be edited; not only the Hall Of Immortals initial membership, but also what achievements a character has attained before the game has started (for those who are already on their way to becoming a legend).

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#8: Champion Replacement[/B] A small addition to the title belt section is that the user now has the option to instantly [I]Replace[/I] a championship-holding wrestler with somebody else on the roster. When the replacement is done, the user has the option of having it count as a new title reign (i.e. the title history gets updated to show the wrestler who was replaced as the former champion) or a continuation of the existing one (i.e. the wrestler who was replaced does not show up as a previous champion, and the reign continues with the new champion in place). This was primarily added to simulate the "Freebird rule" of being able to swap tag team titles around a stable of wrestlers rather than being stuck with just the two who won them, but it can also be used to award a title to someone (i.e. replace Vacant with a wrestler; similar to just handing them the belt without them needing to wrestle for it) or to do a "phantom title change" (i.e. starting a new reign with a new champion, but without the need to actually have a match). This is all done via the regular title belt screen.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#9: Potential[/B] A new stat for workers in TEW08 is [I]Potential[/I]. This is a measure of how good they are likely to become. This is used when the game is creating the "stat caps" for each person, and is used in conjunction with the existing Destiny stat. The higher the potential level, the greater the chance that the stat caps will end up being quite high, which therefore means the worker has a better chance of turning into a really good performer. Of course, it has little to no effect on workers who are already established or old, as clearly potential doesn't really apply to them. The main use of this stat is for young or "future" workers, particularly in historical scenarios, as it allows for added realism. Potential can be set to Random via the editor for those who want to keep the random element in place.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#10: Chemistry Store[/B] A small but probably popular feature that has been added to TEW08 is the Chemistry Store. Very simply, every time you discover a new piece of chemistry in the game it is stored on file. You can then access that information at any time by viewing a worker. This allows an easy and convenient way to keep track of everything.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#11: New Game World[/B] The thirty-three region game world that was in TEW07 has been upgraded to become a forty region game world in TEW08. The biggest change is the (re)addition of one new game area, Australia, which consists of four regions. Europe has been upgraded, and now also consists of four regions; Central Europe, Scandinavia, Mediterranean and Easter Europe. The UK has been expanded by one, and now includes Ireland as its fifth region. The final addition is that the USA has been expanded by one, and now includes Hawaii too. To address the question that I'm sure is to be asked, no, the USA is not changing to a state-by-state breakdown as it was in WMMA. The positives that would come from that change (being able to fine-tune popularity to a greater degree; being able to see what state you are in) are outweighed by the negatives (it would make the US alone bigger than the entire rest of the game world put together; massively increases the amount of data that needs to be held and edited; makes displaying data a lot harder as it can't fit on one screen; adds little or nothing to the game play; unbalances America compared to the other areas; etc.)

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#12: Location Prestige[/B] Coming over from WMMA, albeit with a slight change, is the location prestige feature. Every region of the game is given its own prestige; this is a measure of how important it is in the game world, so traditional wrestling hotbeds like the Tri State region would be very prestigious, whereas somewhere with very little history like Scotland would have a fairly low prestige. Prestige is used in deciding a promotion's size. So if you were 80% popular in a 50% prestige region, that counts as 40% Prestige Points (80 x 50%). These are then used in the size calculations (i.e. "you need to get 25% Prestige Points in one region to reach Small size", etc). Don't worry if that sounds complex, there is an on-screen display that shows you exactly what is going on, you don't need to do any maths yourself. This feature adds more strategy to the game, as it means that not every region is as "valuable" as the others.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#13: Medical Exam[/B] When negotiating with a worker, you will now have the option of requesting that he (or she) take a medical exam prior to signing. For a small fee you will get back a report that will highlight any history of substance abuse that the lab can pick up. Although only a small feature, it does present a useful tool for those who prefer to keep a clean roster and do not want to unwittingly bring in a bad influence.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#14: Ring Rust[/B] To heighten the realism, TEW08 introduces ring rust. A wrestler who has been away from the ring for a lengthy period of time - whether that be through injury, unemployment, jail, hiatus or whatever - will accumulate ring rust. When he does return, it will take him some time to re-adjust to wrestling and to "shake off" the ring rust. Until he does, his performance will be slightly impaired. The amount of matches it takes to shake it off will depend on how long he was out for, plus his own ability to recover. This means that when you bring in workers who have not been very active recently, you will have to be careful to slowly get them back into fighting shape and won't simply be able to stick them straight into the middle of a 60 minute iron man match, for example.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#15: Less Predictable[/B] Taken from WMMA, TEW08 brings on board the concept of making the timing of certain incidents less predictable. An example is the retirement of workers. In previous games, as everybody will have noticed, a worker always announces his retirement on the last day of the month, gives himself 28 days, and then officially retires on the last day of the following month. There is nothing wrong with that, but it does get predictable. In TEW08, people can announce their retirement at any time, adding to the realism. This applies to lots of different possible incidents, and so means that there is no longer certain "trigger" days to watch out for. This makes the game flow better and with a more realistic edge.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#16: Development Territories[/B] The way development territories work has been overhauled in 08, in order to make them simpler to use and more effective. There are several modifications that have been made. The system for sending people to and from development has now been made much simpler, and is done simply by clicking a Send \ Recall button when viewing a worker. People can be moved around at will, there is no longer any negotiations necessary. When sending someone to a development territory you can now give them a reason \ focus. This can be; skill development, conditioning, to remove ring rust, or to act as a trainer for other workers. Development territories remain as separate organizations that are run by the AI, but a slight change is that the "parent" company now has to pay some of the "child" promotion's costs. This is to make up for the fact that you have such a large say in their booking by lieu of the fact that you can move people in and out of the promotion at will. The speed that a worker will develop has also been altered, to allow characters to improve at a more realistic rate. This is done by having him improve on days when he is not wrestling, to simulate the fact that he is training. Therefore, even if the promotion is only running one show a month, the worker can still improve quite a lot. As usual, the level of improvement depends on their personality, their Destiny, their maximum possible skill levels, and who they have to train with.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#17: Graphic Repetition Reduction[/B] Not a game play feature as such, but one that will likely prove popular with quite a few people, TEW08 has been redesigned to reduce the amount of repeated graphics. It does this by introducing a new folder called Pictures, which can be divided up into separate folders - each of these contains the folders like People, Logos and Belts that you used to find inside a database. The key point is that each database can be set to reference a specific Pictures folder. To illustrate, imagine that you had three different Cornellverse databases; the default set, the 1975 set, and the 1996 set. In TEW07, each of those three databases would have their own internal set of pictures, meaning that there would be a lot of repetition. Most likely, you'd have several hundred pictures that were duplicated in each. With TEW08, you would have a folder within Pictures called CornellVerse. This would contain all the wrestler pictures, logos, etc. Each database would then be linked to this folder. The end result is that rather than having three copies of each picture, you only have one. This has several advantages, including a massive reduction in hard disk space, easier to distribute pictures, and a much more organised filing system for mod makers and users.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#18: AI Angles \ Angle Storage[/B] A two-for-the-price-of-one post today. Firstly, new to TEW08, AI promotions will actually use angles during their shows (if appropriate for their style). In previous games angles were always taken into account on a conceptual level, but never actually explicitly shown - now you'll actually be able to see who attacked whom, which wrestlers were involved in a confrontation, etc. The only slight difference between the human and AI angles is that the AI uses several pre-programmed generic angles (like Beatdowns and Confrontations) rather than using the angles in the database. For the user's benefit, only the major angles are shown, as obviously it would get old very quickly if every show report had loads of 1 minute "Wrestler X was shown warming up \ walking down a hall" angles all over the place. The second feature is related to this; angles are now stored in the history files along with the matches. This means that when you review a show, you will be able to see everything that happened, not just the in-ring action. When storing human-booked angles, it will use the segment name text - this is simply because it's a lot simpler and more effective for the user to pick how the angle will be referred to than having the AI try and put together a description of its own.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#19: New Graphic Specs[/B] Given that there is such a large and active graphics community here, TEW08 will feature more types of graphics in order to create a more visually appealing interface. I have decided to announce what they are, and their sizes, now so that there is plenty of time for those people who want to get started well in advance of the game. (NB: Please note that all graphics are JPG format.) Worker pictures remain the same. Promotion logos are now expanded to 150x150 (they were previously 100x100) to bring them in line with the worker pictures. Promotions will now also have optional banners, much like they do in WMMA. These are 500x40 pixels in size. These banners run across the top of certain screens to add a bit more personality to the promotion. There are a further three 150x150 logos for media-related items; pay-per-view carriers, TV networks, and TV Shows. These are used throughout the game whenever media is involved.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#20: Openings and Closures[/B] This next feature is specifically designed to fit in with the fact that a lot of people seem to be playing long-term games nowadays, once than span many years. In order to make for a more vibrant game world, Dojos, TV Networks and Pay-Per-View Carriers now all have definable Opening and Closing dates. These allow them to appear and disappear at the correct times. Of course, these can be left blank, if you want to just have them stick around for as long as the game world is in operation. For ease-of-use for mod makers, closing dates come in two forms, Hard and Soft. A Hard Closing Date means that the thing in question will always close on that date, regardless of anything else. A Soft Closing Date means that the thing in question will be ignored if the game begins on a date after that (i.e. they've already closed, so aren't relevant), otherwise it will appear in the game world and won't have a set closing date. This is really for people who might be planning to make databases that span the ages, as it helps keep a consistent timeline. This also of course has the advantage for historical mods that you can successfully simulate the pre-PPV wrestling world, but not at the expense of having to go through the rest of the game without them; you can now have the PPV Carriers debut at the correct time. Although it has an obvious answer, I'm sure someone will want to ask "what happens to my TV show if the network I'm on closes", so I'll answer it here - you lose the TV show. Simple as that.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#21: Extended Biographies[/B] In a minor change, but one that I imagine will be quite popular with people, the biographies \ profiles for workers, promotions and contracts have all been increased from a maximum of 500 characters in TEW07 to 1000 characters in TEW08.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#22: Habits[/B] The workers' habits \ personal choices have been expanded in two ways in TEW08. The first change is simply that there are more categories: Smoker, Drinker, Soft Drug, Hard Drug, Steroids and Very Religious. The second change is that they are no longer merely tick boxes, instead they are a double-ended scale. The first scale is current use; any of those stats can be set between 0 and 100 to indicate the level of current use. The lower the number, the less it is used, and therefore the less effect it has on the game. So, for example, someone with a Smoking level of 2 rarely smokes, and so it would have virtually no impact on them whatsoever. Someone with a Smoking level of 100 probably chain smokes down to the ring, and so will see his cardio taking a hit. The second scale is previous use \ reformed user. Again, this is a 0 to 100 scale, and is for people who have quit. So somebody with a Reformed Steroid use of 100 used to be an extremely heavy user but has since quit. This means that they are still impact by it (higher risk of heart attack, etc), but not as much as if they were still using. The higher the number, the more chance they have of relapsing too. The scales also mean that a person's use can change over time, so rather than simply finding one day that a person has gone from not drinking to being a heavy drinker, it can build up over time. This also allows for better management during the game, as a stern warning might not stop them from taking soft drugs for example, but it might reduce their usage to a more acceptable level.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#23: Different Event \ TV Products[/B] Part of a promotion's product definition has been altered for TEW08, and now includes the ability to make separate entries for Events and Television Shows. The following items fall under this split: * Booking AI * Match Ratios * Match Lengths This means that you can create a product where the promotion will look to concentrate on mainly lengthy singles and tag matches with virtually no angles in between while running their big events, but could switch to having more triangle and four way matches, with shorter bouts, and plenty of angles, when they are on television.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#24: Event Name Improvement[/B] A small addition, but event names can now be set to be followed be either a year or a number. This is purely to add a little bit more realism and as a nice visual touch. For example, this allows you to have "Winter War '07", "Winter War '08", etc, as well as "Total Mayhem 11", "Total Mayhem 12", etc. Obviously the number is automatically increased by one after each event. Events can still be set to have no number or year after them, it is optional.