What I hope to see in patch notes pt.4

Topic 4 : Cooperative Abilities and Mechanics

Woop, I found some free time again, so let’s keep this train going!

(Links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, just in case you want to catch up.)

Today I want to talk about cooperation in group play and how the game itself could encourage that and reward players for participation.

This is not a new concept at all, it’s something we’ve seen tons in the past leading up to our current gaming landscape, Chrono Trigger had itsTechs, fighting games have longsince seen group attacks, and we’ve even seen this done in MMO games like FFXI. We've also seen MMO games implement this in a way that I felt missed the mark. Put in its simplest terms it’s a way to reward people for working together. 

Having played ffxi for a few years, I’m quite familiar with their implementation of the system. This game had a third, resource called TP that was built during combat, upon reaching a set amount of TP the player had an option of spending their accumulated TP for a powerful attack called a weaponskill. After a weaponskill was used on an enemy, there was a small window where if another weaponskill (with the appropriate elemental property) were used, it would chain together and add bonus damage, then cause another window for a third participant. The more attacks that were chained, the more powerful each step became. This system was extremely rewarding and allowed for involvement from all party members, even healers and tanks could get involved in to the chain by casting spells of the appropriate element at the right times.

Chrono Trigger on the other hand was a single player game, but using the techs allowed for special abilities to be completed by having your party members attack in tandem. You could have the caster character imbue the fighter’s sword with flames and proceed to unleash a large and powerful flame attack on all of your enemies. They called them “techs”, and you’d be hard pressed to find a chrono trigger fan who didn’t have their own, personal, favorite techs from the game.

Regardless of how it’s implemented, the general concepts of “two or more people working together is stronger than a single person’s actions” remains a pretty enjoyable thing to participate in as well as being extremely rewarding to execute. So my question is, why don’t we see this in more mmo games? By their very nature mmo games seek to make group play center to their worlds. There are group activities, and a group is unquestionably stronger than a solo players. You could argue that group play by it’s very nature is creating this team work and that simply by having a healer you’re making your tank and dps classes more effective. While that is an unquestionably true statement, it’s also pretty boring. Being in a group in most modern mmo’s you’re still only really doing things that your able to do solo, you’re stabbing the boss, controlling the monster’s positioning, or keeping healt hbars in the black, all of which is general gameplay that people can and do while playing solo. What these cooperative systems add is a new layer of involvement focused around what your group members are doing and what they are capable of.

Plus, it’s awesome. It feels good to see your character doing something cool and powerful. It’s rewarding to see the completed result of something you know you contributed too. It’s fulfilling to know you’re your group couldn’t have done that without your involvement.

There are so many ways it could be implemented. Why can’t we go the chrono trigger route and have a mage jump on a warriors back and both of their attacks become enhanced for a few seconds? Why can’t a healer launch an orb of energy that attaches to a player and mimics one attack before moving to another ally at random, then after bouncing to 5 or 10 allies the healer can redirect the orb to unleash its latent energy (multiplied by number of successful jumps) on a boss? Maybe a tank opens up a “window of opportunity” debuff on a boss that only responds to a fire attack, once hit with a fire attack, the window changes itself to requiring a poison attack, if each person in the group participates the debuff explodes with a massive amount of damage.

These abilities could also be quite interesting in a pvp environment. If a tank were able to apply this “window of opportunity” to an opponent, suddenly the target’s defensive priorities change. “Oh crap, if I get hit by that mage in the next 3 seconds, I’m in trouble.” Forcing the player to reassess the threat from each member of the opponent’s team and change their play to appropriately handle the debuff. Or in the case of tandem attacks (the mage jumps on the warriors back), people are forced to go into a risk v reward decision. This could be a dangerous mave as now two members of the team are in the same place, sacrificing any ability to flank or misdirect the opponent and making your own team more vulnerable by putting two health bars in one place. But ooh that big damage might be worth it.

Put simply, I really want to be able to do some cool group moves that I can’t do while I play solo. I want to feel my group in my gameplay. I want to be rewarded for participating in group game play. I want to piggyback my classes specialties on those of my group members. I don’t want to feel like I’m playing alone, even when I’m in a group. 

What I hope to see in patch notes pt.3

Hey, You’re back! Thanks for that.

(If you’re interested, here are links to Topic 1 and Topic 2.)

Topic 3 : Questing for Me. Not for everyone. 

*Let me apologize in advance if anything here is poorly written or hard to follow. I've been coming down with something past 48 hours and it's making me cloudy. I'll likely make some revisions to this as I feel better.

                OK, so we've talked about a few QOL tweaks (only a few, that list could be massive on its own) and dabbled into a bit of reward for veteran players. Those all sound fine and dandy, but what would trying to do something with what we already have? Let’s talk a bit about questing.

                My readers may recall (both of you) that I've touched a similar topic in and old post back during Cataclysm. While a lot of what I was saying there is still quite applicable, I want to go in a bit of a different direction this time. That previous post was focused a lot more on the mechanics of quests and the play involved. While this post is more about the mechanics of questing zones, and the experiences taken away. 

                One of my personal gripes with questing in general is the static nature of it. If you've quested through the world once, your next trip is going to feel pretty damn similar. In truth, it’s nearly identical. Quests have traditionally been built as a way to tell the story of the zone and guide a player through the experience. This works well, and it makes for each zone to be a nice little self-contained game of its own. But going back and playing that game again gives you almost nothing new. It looks like they are trying some new and exciting things with the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion, which is awesome. Hopefully the WoD changes don’t invalidate this post entirely. We’ll see.

                For quests, I’m talking about class and racial quests and/or modifiers. We can plainly see that the quest system knows what class and race I am, tons of quests refer to me as an orc, and the new quest reward system just gives me the most appropriate item for my class. But the quest itself remains static and dull. Let the quest have modifiers based on my class and race that factor into gameplay. After all, as a player I want this to be the story of me and my hero. Not the story of the zone.

                To be clear, I’m not asking for huge sweeping crazy quests like the warlock green fire, or anything that big. I’m asking for small quests that are inserted into other quest lines that are specific to either class or race. I love the idea of two people going through the game and having different experiences. Let’s say everyone does Quest A that asks to kill 10 boars. But quest B is flagged as a “racial quest” if the player in question is an elf, the next quest will be to put the bodies of the boars to rest peacefully in the garden. If the player is an orc the next quest would be to butcher the boars and feed them to the wolves. In essence it’s a “dispose of the bodies” quest, but how you do it could be slightly tweaked. Quest C now has us going to a new camp, and Quest D is a “class quest”. A class quest is based on, of course, our class. If you’re a hunter it’s to snipe these birds from the trees, if you’re a warrior it’s to chop down the trees, if you’re a druid it’s to heal the damage to the trees.

                This could be tough to navigate at times, as it would have to still navigate the zone and tell the story of the zone. But it’s the forks in the road are what make the road interesting.  Have an area full of were-rats? Awesome! Let’s have warlocks steal their souls, priests heal the infected npcs, shamans try to purify the were-rats, while warriors go fruit ninja and just slaughter them all. This could even be expanded into combinations of the modifiers. Let’s say priests heal, and warlocks eat souls. We are heading into a questing area that is full of npcs from an evil blast-mining operation. If I’m an orc, then my goal is to heal orcs to save them (as a shaman) OR to eat the souls of humans (if a warlock). Yet if I’m a troll, then I need to cleanse trolls (shaman) or consume dwarven souls(warlock). This would allow for essentially the same quest to present a huge number of variants. While one or two quests this way wouldn't make a huge impact, think if you leveled a troll warlock and an orc shaman back to back, while you go to all the same areas, and interact with the same world, you would get two significantly different experiences.

                Better yet would be to make these quests pop up somewhat randomly through play. Quest A has a Monk only variant while Quest D has a Troll variant. By sprinkling these in at a seemingly unpredictable interval, you could make it harder for players to define the pattern and attempt to mitigate the prediction of “ok, this next quest is a class quest because it was last time”. The end goal here is simply to make questing through a zone feel like it’s unique to me, and that it’s different from the last time. Let me make the world my own.

                I’d also like to see some varying rewards in the areas of art and animation. I’d love to have a bank of two or three casting animations for my character, and being able to assign them myself. Maybe my paladin reads his libram while casting a heal spell, but Ted’s paladin meditates for while casting. Maybe my troll uses an over-the-head style cleave while Ed’s troll cleaves with a low sweeping motion. On the art side you could award new hair styles through quests, or facial features. “I earned this scar fighting off the rebellion under the world tree” while a healer gets to say “I read from this book that I obtained while healing the fallen draenei under the world tree.”  

It could be very tricky to navigate this with the concept of group play in mind, as many people do play and quest together (we are talking mmos after all). But I tried to provide examples that could allow for multiple people of different roles to act simultaneously. If you have a mage and a warrior both questing together and they have different objects, but all of which are in the same general area, they can most assuredly quest together and stay a team in the process.

Sadly, this also results in an extremely expensive investment for a studio, I know it seems like little details here and there to most of us, but as someone who’s built even very small and simple games, I can assure you this would be a ton of work for any studio. I suppose the million dollar question is whether or not this would be worth exploring from a studio.  Would this breathe enough life into a world to make people want to re-experience it again, but differently? I can’t really say. But, what I can definitely say right now, is that I dread the idea of leveling alts because everything I’m tasked with doing feels like I've already done it over and over again. Maybe, just maybe, letting that experience be just  unique enough would make me want to see what the world looks like from the eyes of a warlock or a gnome. 

What I hope to see in patch notes pt.2

Welcome to Topic 2 of my "things I want to see in WoW" series. If you want to go back and read part one, you can do so here : What I hope to see in patch notes pt.1

Topic 2 : Veteran Reward Systems

This is one of those things that I keep expecting to see. It seems like a no-brainer to me. Let’s take a look into sales a bit for this one.  I’m sure that everyone reading this has at least one “rewards” type card within reach. Whether it’s a credit card that gives you points back, or a 10^th cup of coffee free punch card for your favorite java dispensary, or maybe it’s papa john’s website, where after spending 250 bucks you get a free pizza. No matter how you do it, it’s worth doing. That’s the reason these companies do these reward programs. It builds repeat business. It rewards loyalty and continued use of your product. As a consumer, it also feels pretty damn good. I personally seek out reward systems like this in credit cards and eateries. If I’m going to give you money, I want to get as much back as possible. I always love the feeling of getting that free pizza, or spending those amazon points that I’ve accumulated on a shiny new video card at no cost to me.

World of Warcraft has a lot of players. Like… a whole lot… so many that it would be impossible for us to even think about defining the whole player base in one broad stroke. Some are new to the world, exploring it for the first time. Some are veterans who are leveling their 10^th character. Some love pet battles, some love to raid, some just like to get on and chat with their guilds. No matter how you break it down, I guarantee you that some would feel far more valued if they got some veteran rewards. I can say this confidently, as I am one of them myself.

I’m going to confess something here, that I think backs this and probably tells you too much about my personal insanity. Final Fantasy XIV came out with their reboot “A Realm Reborn” on August 27^th 2013. Being an MMO junkie, I picked it up and played it hard until I’d reached max level and consumed all content the game had to offer at that point. I maxed out multiple jobs and crafting professions and hit the ceiling on what I felt like the game had available to me. All of this happened well before Christmas 2013. I honestly could have walked away at the end of my free month, feeling like there weren’t many stones unturned for me. But I decided to pay for a month to keep in contact with some buddies and give me more time to help friends catch up. After the second month, I was pretty much done, as much as I really enjoyed that game, there just wasn’t much content. I eventually decided NOT to cancel my subscription due to veteran rewards and the possibility of coming back a few patches down the road. I’ve given these guys 13 bucks a month for 4 months simply because I felt they deserved it, I might come back, and if I do come back, I want the cool stuff. It makes me feel special.

As someone who’s played wow off and on for 10 years now but never let my subscription lapse, I feel like my loyalty is granted me pretty much nothing. In fact, I feel like there have been promotions in the past that actually reward a LACK of loyalty. Look at the scroll of resurrection promotion. If someone hadn’t played (or payed) for X amount of time, they were given an option to come back to the game with free game time and a free boost to level 80. (To be fair, this promotion has since been discontinued as character boosts are now here) This was enticing and great for people who were on the fence about coming back, and I felt it was a slick promotion for sure, but what about the people who never left? Where is my incentive to stay? As a veteran who’s never left I felt like my loyalty was less valuable than someone who’s been flaky. To be honest, I felt taken advantage of. Here I am, being a good customer, sticking with a product I believe in through thick and thin, and mister quitter gets a free level 80.

I believe the game world should seek to reward the behavior that has been deemed favorable. Play for 2 years uninterrupted? Here’s a cool transmog item. Play for 3 years? Here’s an awesome vanity item that makes you big and sparkly.  The reward possibilities are endless, from a free month here and there, to a free transfer, or boost, or mount, or vanity items that give no player power, maybe even a slight discount on a subscription after 4 years of play? You could even take a page out of old pvp-ville and build a veterans lounge area that is only accessible by people who have 5 years on their account.

I’ll never forget the Champion’s Hall in Stormwind. Originally access to this room was barred to anyone who had not reached rank 6 in pvp. While it was just a tiny room, with a few vendors in it, I’ll be damned if that didn’t make me want to pvp my heart out to get in. Just the simple fact that there was somewhere I wasn’t allowed to enter drove my behavior to get me in there. This is tangential for sure, but it illustrates that exclusivity can be a very powerful motivator, even if the reward itself is small. The topic of exclusivity will undoubtedly make a return over this series of posts, as it’s something I personally hold pretty dear.

That’s enough for now, as I’m running out of time and need to head to work here. But don’t worry, I’ve got quite a few more topics to cover over the next few days. ^_^

What I hope to see in patch notes pt.1

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what I want from WoW lately. Not so much about the content specifically, but more along the lines of features and systems that I feel would improve my overall experience and enjoyment in WoW. Some turned out to be simple quality of life improvements, some ended up being drastic changes to existing systems, some ended up being entirely new features. The end result was a notebook full of doodles and scribbles that I decided I wanted to write about.

This is going to be far, far too much for a single post, so I’m going to post my thoughts here over the next couple of weeks. Currently I have about 8 primary topics to touch on, but as I write I tend to have more things pop up, so who knows how long I’ll be ridding this train.

To get us started, I’ll include topic number one with this post.

Topic 1: Quality of life in Azeroth:

This topic alone could probably fill a whole blog. From big complex systems like making mounts BOA, down to super fine details like where to place your items in your bags, this topic alone is massive. With that in mind, I’m just going to cover a few topics that I think could have fairly significant impacts to my experiences as a wow player.

1) Effects Dampening / Filters

When I stepped foot into my first Molten Core, I remember being in awe at the sight of 40 people nuking the crap out of a molten giant. I’d never seen anything on a 40 person scale before and it truly made me feel like I was part of something much bigger than myself. Going from 5 and 10 player instances to 40 felt like a huge leap and the visual experience of it was intensely rewarded.

As wonderful as that was, the game has significantly changed since those days. There are so many HUGE effects that fill our screens and the world now, that it feels excessive at times. I can’t tell you how many times I've heard people in raids blame failing a mechanic on the inability to see the mechanic, or heard healers yell at people to get in the healing rain only to have a dps respond with “WHERE?!”.

As a raider, it feels pretty awful to fail a mechanic simply due to visual clutter. There is just far too much useless visual noise in modern wow raiding. I would kill to see an interface option to disable or dampen abilities from other players. This would free up my visual bandwidth to focus on the ever-important boss mechanics, as well as to focus on what I’m doing at any given time. Of course, this would take quite a bit of exemption to ensure that important effects weren't disabled, but I believe a majority of raiders I've met wouldn't mind having those arcane explosions, pets, totems, and chain lightning’s purged off the screen.

2) Too much junk in my trunk!

On the topic of clutter, let’s talk about bags. We've all seen the devs making efforts to help keep our bag space tangible. I have to give them a lot of credit in slowing down the bag race that we've seen in previous expansions. Let’s be honest, bag space in general is already getting pretty ridiculous. With 28 slot bags (36 if we count professions), and 4 bags equipped at a time, plus a backpack, it’s entirely normal for people to be walking around with hundreds of items in their inventory. While I’m all for giving people a reason to return to town now and then, it’s gotten to the point where I feel it’s unmanageable without some type of addon. And when any part of the game feels like it requires an addon, I believe that’s something that could be improved on.

I think wow is already on the right path with this one. Specifically with the efforts they've made to help here already. We've seen mounts and pets taken from our inventories, as well as word about ‘toys’ and transmog being taken out as well. But the biggest areas where I've personally struggled with bag space is in the area of of gear and professions. The gear manager already does a great job at allowing us to manage gear sets in game, why can’t the gear manager also house the physical items? This would have the added bonus of effectively equalizing the bag space across all classes. No longer would a druid or paladin being punished for playing their classes to its full extent. If I could house 1 set for each spec my class is capable of, I’d be a happy camper. Moving to professions, I really loved the idea of profession specific bags that we saw introduced a few expansions ago. I feel like this was only half of the solution though. Why can’t we have a profession tab that stores 200 of every herb in a single tab? If you want to farm your heart out, you may need to make some trips back and forth to town just like now, but if you want to carry enough mats on you to be able to craft an item for your healer in a moment of need, I think you should be able to do that without sacrificing half your bag space in the name of preparedness.

3) The Macro System

I feel that the core purpose of macros is to help make the life of the player easier. They can automate some of the more mundane tasks that we players need, save us that oh so valuable hotbar space, or even help us to figure out complex math calculations or specific encounter mechanics. Macros are extremely useful and wonderful. If you know how to use them. Which brings us to the problem, they aren't approachable at all.

The macro system feels old and clunky. We've seen so many systems reworked and updated over the years, yet macros stay stale and unapproachable. The simple cause of this is that macros are complex. It’s basically programming in tweet format. You've not only got to know how they are structured, but the syntax as well. Think about trying to explain a macro to a new player. You’d probably have better luck providing tech support over Morse code.

I’d love to see this system updated. First, add in macro sharing (similar to how weak auras allows aura sharing). This could allow a guild to have a single macro-savvy member share their macros out quickly and efficiently. Yes, this is theoretically possible already through external tools, but if you've ever had to stop a raid so everyone could go to the forums and get the macro, you know that being able to do this quickly and efficiently in game sounds fantastic. You could also implement a visual macro building interface, and an in-game dictionary for keywords, commands, and functions. I've seen a lot of “visual scripting” systems online lately and adding a similar system into the macros would definitely make them more approachable and player friendly. Though, honestly, that does sound extremely expensive from a development standpoint, versus simply allowing players to link them and letting the small number of already fluent players do all the work.

OK. So I cheated.

I used a single topic to cover 3 specific features that I've been bouncing around in my head. Sue me. Or better yet, leave a comment. What do you think? What are your quality of life gripes from WoW? With such a broad topic to a game with such a massive audience, there has to people out there who have opinions on this. Or just leave a comment and tell me you disagree and that makes you angry.

Either way, stay tuned, I should have another topic coming in the very near future. ^_^

2D platformer... thing...

Lately I've been putting together a 2D platformer.

I had this idea for a game that revolved around a single item. In this case, a table. I know, it sounds odd. The idea was that you'd find a multitude of uses for a single object, rather than having a whole ton of objects with single functions. It sounded great in my head.

So I started working on it. But, the more I built the prototype, it just wasn't nearly as fun in practice as it sounded in my head. I built out the first function of the table (blocking) and was starting to work on other functions (as a parachute, a springboard, a weapon, etc, etc) only to find that instead of making each of those functions cool, it felt like each of them were really forced. So instead, I made a gun and put that in. At that point, the whole concept was shot(get it?)

I guess that's the beauty of prototyping though. You can flesh out a concept enough to judge it without having to commit fully to developing something.

Either way, I learned a ton about Unity's new 2D tools, a lot of what-not-to-do's (specifically with physics) as well as a lot of better practices. Even with a failed prototype, we succeed if we learn something right?

Honestly, after the first thing I built failed (years ago), I felt pretty crummy. But now, it's a lot easier to focus on all the things I've learned in the process. Even a project that I consider to be an abysmal failure, I still feel really good about the things I've picked up along the way.

I still really like the idea of the character and the "item" having independent movement. It kind of reminds me of smashTV where firing wasn't tied to character position or facing. Sadly, the table just wasn't fun. *shrug*

(And before you ask, NO. I was not going to steal graphics from Castlevania. Alucard just happened to be the most complete spritesheet I could find with a quick google search. It allowed me to play with animations and such)

You can check out the prototype here: 2DGameTest

(wasd/space for movement, ijkl control the table. I know the controls feel awkward, but it was intended for dual joysticks, and it was just a proof of concept prototype, you understand.)

Slowly, but surely.

Progress!

I'm starting to get a bit nervous about potentially needing art asserts in the future. I feel comfortable handling all the coding/logic/scripting/etc, but when it comes to creating art assets? pfffft. newp.

Over the past few days I've been able to implement the following:

• Mouse wheel lets you zoom in and out! yay.
• Ability to switch camera modes. 
• push the "End" key to toggle between modes. 
• Mode1 (default): Fixed camera, chases you around. 
• This mode is intended for use with click to move (default)
• Mode 2 : full camera control by holding right-click and dragging
• This mode is intended for use with WASD movement (Not implemented yet)
• Added a player health bar
• Very ugly placeholder. -- but works
• Added an "Action bar"
• Ability icons (temp, thank you http://opengameart.org)
• Ability tooltips
• tooltips are dynamic, they update automatically based on damage/target/range numbers.
• Clickable ability usage
• Eventually abilities will be able to be dragged from slot to slot. 
• Vital to the ability advancement system in the future. 
• Enemies will auto-acquire targets when they are damaged. 
• Added enemy spawning. 
• Made 2 variations of the fireball
• Variant 1 homes in on target
• Variant 2 is a "dumb fire" spell and moves in a straight line no matter what.
• Created an enemy ability control system that defines what abilities enemies use and when. 
• Allows for customization of spell order, preference, decision making, etc. 
• Made a flag for abilities to "require viable target"
• This prevents you from using the fireball spell without a potential target. Before you could cast it, nothing would come out, and you'd still suffer the cooldown. Now, it requires a viable target or won't cast/animate at all. 

As usual, you can check it out below the break.

Creating Abilities, Testing them out, and adding some feedback.

Well, here we are again.

Lately, I haven't been able to spend nearly as much time in Unity as I'd like. I know, it's mostly my fault... well... Borderlands 2's fault I suppose (have you checked out the Tiny Tina DLC? I loved it!). 

I've still be able to find some time to work on how the ability system is going to play out. 

Last time I gave you a look at the targeting system that I'd built for use by abilities, this time I've put together two simple abilities and added some really basic animations to them. This is mostly just to figure out how all of them pieces work together and to get things to actually work. This is all, of course, very very placeholder prototype style stuff. I am NOT an artist, or an animator... so this is what you get. :P 

With that out of the way, let's look at what we've got here. 

• You can use the buttons at the bottom to increase/decrease the number of targets these abilities can hit. (make the numbers big, it's way more gratifying).
• Character is HUGE -- I exaggerated the size of the character so I could see how things move.
• He should kind of breathe a bit during idle. It's subtle, but it's there. 
• He carries around a sword now, that can be easily swapped to whatever other weapon we want. 
• He runs, sort of... Due to how huge he is, he can get stuck going ON TOP of the enemies in the scene. 
• the 1 key will allow you to do a melee ranged cleave with the sword. 
• The damage should happen right in the middle of the swing.
• the 2 key shoots a fireball
• The fireball should launch when he extends his hands, and do a little "burst" when he launches it, then the same "burst" when it hits. 

Working on this has actually given me some great emergent issues to work out. 

• The character needs a "dead range" where he decides that he's in melee range and will stop running towards a selected target or point. 
• (when you mouse up, if you do so on an enemy, he will target/chase the enemy and get all wonky cause he can't get as close as he wants. Versus releasing mouse on the ground where he just defines a point to run towards.)
• This can also cause for some "quick spinning" of your character, which isn't exactly bad... but compounds the next point. 
• The camera is a bitch. It can cause pretty significant confusion as to which way you are facing and where your spells/abilities are going to go. 
• I'm debating adding a "ring" around the feet of the character that helps to display which way you are facing. Similar to a selection reticule on the ground with an arrow or something signifying forward. I think this option will work very well, especially in a game with 5+ people and a buttload of monsters in the scene, but I feel like it's a bit ugly. Maybe if I find an artist that's something I can get help figuring out. 

Anyways.. I feel like it's coming along well. I'm still learning *BOATLOADS* by the day. I'm finding some of the most difficult challenges to be less about unity and the software, but more about keeping myself in check. Every time I learn something new, or really begin to click with some aspect of Unity, I have to fight myself from going back to previous parts and completely reworking them. I've already reworked this character, and the npcs at least 4 times now. In that same vein, every time I learn/click with something I have to stop myself from trying to add in 400 new features/mechanics that just seem to make sense with my new knowledge! 

I suppose there are much worse problems to have than "I've figured out a better way" and "oh, this gives me loads of new ideas!" 

Check it out below the break :