I asked Milo Beckman to provide a brief discussion of his design goals for Standoff.
The original idea for Standoff was to make a game that was cross between chess and a scene in an action movie where a bunch of people are pointing guns at each other.
I was playing a game of chess where no pieces were captured for a very long time, and I thought it was cool how the strategy was oriented around the possibility of capture even though no captures were happening. This inspired me to make a game where the significant event (a shootout) only took place a few times per game, and the rest of the game was strategizing about that possibility. A natural fit for this seemed to be a “Mexican standoff,” like in a Tarantino movie, where you have to think about who would get shot if all the guns went off.
I added the briefcase as the goal because (1) if the aim was just to kill the other player’s pieces, it was too easy to quickly end in a draw; and (2) I liked the possibility that a full game could be played without the guns ever being shot. I upgraded to a 9x9 board (from an 8x8 chess board) to accommodate the briefcase in the middle. I originally wanted to have the pieces start in a predetermined position, like in chess, but decided it would be cleaner to have doors for deployment. The final arrangement of doors was actually the first one I tried, and it worked relatively well in playtests.
The final problem I encountered was that it was too easy to force a draw by picking off pieces one at a time. This is why I added the double-shooter, which created possibilities for strategically forcing a 2-1 shootout and made it harder to tell whether a shootout was worth it given the different values of the pieces. It seemed natural that the double-shooters wouldn’t be able to pick up the briefcase.
The game was constructed according to the above design document, provided to me by Milo in November of 2016. I tried to stick to the document as best as possible when developing the first draft of the application.
Early in the design process, I turned to the chess programming community for inspiration on how to structure my game’s logic. I quickly encountered a slew of different strategies, but the debate between piece-based vs. board-based representation caught my eye. In the former, data about the game state is stored as a collection of pieces; in the latter, the data is formatted as a 2D array of tiles. Both options provide a similar degree of expressiveness and flexibility, so the decision came down to contextual requirements in the end. I chose a piece-based style in order to more readily describe the functionality of a shootout - the projectile collision properties of a shootout are benefitted by a piece-first mentality. Under this formulation, the outcome of a shootout can be calculated using hit detection rays originating from each live piece. The decision to implement a piece-centric back-end became the foundation for my approach to the entire game’s development.
