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I had this cool idea for a few things that could make Rat DM a bit more lively.
For one, you could model it after standard UT, with some differences, and put in little hidden rat powerups in places that would normally be obscured from a Thief or Guard's point of view, but not to a rat.
I brainstormed some ideas for rat pickups, just for fun:
Psychic Cheese "Lab Rat" - This cheese has a light blue edge instead of a red edge and cannot be picked up by guards or thieves (it's also smaller). If a rat attacks it, it eats the cheese and gains the ability to project a powerful mindray a short distance (the distance could increase the more psychic cheese the rat eats). The mind ray basically extends the range of the rat's attack.
Speed Cheese "Speedy Gonzalez" - This cheese has a yellow edge, and makes rats even faster than they already are.
Stamina Cheese "Mighty Mouse" - This cheese has a green edge, and allows a rat to survive getting hit by another rat which would normally kill it. It only works once, though, and then the rat would die with another hit.
Disease Cheese "Black Plague" - This cheese, which has a dark grey edge, gives the rat that eats it a disease, but the disease doesn't actually affect the rat. However, if another rat attacks and kills the disease-carrying rat, the killer gets diseased and will die within 30 seconds. If another rat kills that rat before he dies of disease, that rat gets the disease and will die in 30 seconds. You could possibly also make it so that the rat that ate the disease cheese can pass along the disease to other rats by simply being within a certain distance of that rat, and any rats that died from the disease would count toward the original rat's frags.
Spawn Cheese "They breed like rats" - This cheese, which has a white edge (or no edge maybe), turns the rat's attack into a limited AI-rat spawner. The AI-rats would have a very dumbed down intelligence and would just follow the rat that spawned them around and attack any other rats they saw. Once 3 AI-rats were spawned, the cheese would wear off and the rat would get his normal attack back.
The various cheeses should probably be somewhat rare and possibly spawn randomly in pre-selected spawn locations.
There should be a limit on how many rat powerups a rat can have active at once, possibly 2. Any other cheeses eaten after that will do nothing for the rat, but at least the rat can get rid of them so other rats cant eat them.
You could possibly even have a server-configuration option that would allow there to be rat corpses. There could be a setting for how long the rat corpses last and how many are allowed at once, so they wouldn't compromise bandwidth (an admin could just turn off rat corpses if he wanted)...
You could also possibly allow rats to eat dropped food, so there would be an incentive for people to not leave food lying around when rats start to show up... It could also be an incentive for mappers to design maps with food storage compartments that rats wouldn't be able to get into -- which is kinda realistic if you think about it.
Also, perhaps a second counter on the Rat HUD that shows how much food has been eaten, both powerups and regular food. This would be a seperate score for rats, sorta like thieves' loot.
And maybe include a seperate Rat-DM scoreboard alongside the main scoreboard. It could be smaller, but would be a nice feature. The Rat-DM scoreboard should show frags and food eaten.
For one, you could model it after standard UT, with some differences, and put in little hidden rat powerups in places that would normally be obscured from a Thief or Guard's point of view, but not to a rat.
I brainstormed some ideas for rat pickups, just for fun:
Psychic Cheese "Lab Rat" - This cheese has a light blue edge instead of a red edge and cannot be picked up by guards or thieves (it's also smaller). If a rat attacks it, it eats the cheese and gains the ability to project a powerful mindray a short distance (the distance could increase the more psychic cheese the rat eats). The mind ray basically extends the range of the rat's attack.
Speed Cheese "Speedy Gonzalez" - This cheese has a yellow edge, and makes rats even faster than they already are.
Stamina Cheese "Mighty Mouse" - This cheese has a green edge, and allows a rat to survive getting hit by another rat which would normally kill it. It only works once, though, and then the rat would die with another hit.
Disease Cheese "Black Plague" - This cheese, which has a dark grey edge, gives the rat that eats it a disease, but the disease doesn't actually affect the rat. However, if another rat attacks and kills the disease-carrying rat, the killer gets diseased and will die within 30 seconds. If another rat kills that rat before he dies of disease, that rat gets the disease and will die in 30 seconds. You could possibly also make it so that the rat that ate the disease cheese can pass along the disease to other rats by simply being within a certain distance of that rat, and any rats that died from the disease would count toward the original rat's frags.
Spawn Cheese "They breed like rats" - This cheese, which has a white edge (or no edge maybe), turns the rat's attack into a limited AI-rat spawner. The AI-rats would have a very dumbed down intelligence and would just follow the rat that spawned them around and attack any other rats they saw. Once 3 AI-rats were spawned, the cheese would wear off and the rat would get his normal attack back.
The various cheeses should probably be somewhat rare and possibly spawn randomly in pre-selected spawn locations.
There should be a limit on how many rat powerups a rat can have active at once, possibly 2. Any other cheeses eaten after that will do nothing for the rat, but at least the rat can get rid of them so other rats cant eat them.
You could possibly even have a server-configuration option that would allow there to be rat corpses. There could be a setting for how long the rat corpses last and how many are allowed at once, so they wouldn't compromise bandwidth (an admin could just turn off rat corpses if he wanted)...
You could also possibly allow rats to eat dropped food, so there would be an incentive for people to not leave food lying around when rats start to show up... It could also be an incentive for mappers to design maps with food storage compartments that rats wouldn't be able to get into -- which is kinda realistic if you think about it.
Also, perhaps a second counter on the Rat HUD that shows how much food has been eaten, both powerups and regular food. This would be a seperate score for rats, sorta like thieves' loot.
And maybe include a seperate Rat-DM scoreboard alongside the main scoreboard. It could be smaller, but would be a nice feature. The Rat-DM scoreboard should show frags and food eaten.
I have a few others, but they'd probably be too silly to mention.
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