Re: Stealth Mechanics in Audio Games
@4 I like some of these ideas, too.
It's a bit of a tangent, but one mechanic I really enjoyed in audio games and haven't seen since is how GMA Games' Lone Wolf handled submarine navigation around islands, mines, etc. You could hear that an island, say, spanned 85-95 degrees port. You technically could navigate around the island by turning port 84 degrees, but you also had depth to contend with. Depth decreased as you neared an island, and 84 degrees would probably ground out your sub. 80 might work, but took longer. Essentially, your choice for getting around an island if you had to was a longer more gradual circle where you could maintain more depth and stealth, or a quicker course where you'd need less depth and be more noticeable. Actually, now that I think about it, Lone Wolf was a good stealthy audio game, though I don't like how you needed difficulty at max for enemies to detect sonar pings. I think that should have been normal difficulty, with higher difficulties meaning enemies hunted you more effectively and were smarter about it. The stealth in that game was good, but pretty easy to game if you were just a bit patient.
Maybe something similar could be done with torches. A scan could, say, sweep around the player and play an audio cue whenever hitting an enemy's detection circle--a torch flame sound, for instance, Then you'd have another sound representing a sort of visibility cylinder oriented along your path. Navigation is a matter of threading your visibility cylinder through the circles of visibility cast by light sources and such. Maybe have a bit of a fudge factor such that, if you're threading super close to a visibility circle, you may be noticed anyway, particularly if you make a lot of noise. Essentially, you cast a shadow proportional to how much light there is, and if you're close to a torch, that shadow is probably visible even if you aren't. Since this is an audio game, don't worry about modelling that shadow with 3-D light sources unless you're a masochist.
I think your and my systems are a bit orthogonal, but that's OK. I like them both, and I guess which you use depends on whether you want a gritty, tactical/strategic feel, or a more story-driven, fudgy style. Thinking about them both, I'm not sure which I'll push for if I ever do my post-apocalyptic strategic roguelike.
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