The last month of development has primarily been devoted to one part of the game, and that’s tag team matches. Up until now it’s only been possible to book singles matches, so adding more match types has been one of the biggest remaining tasks in the development of Championship Wrestling Promoter. After the jump I’ll dive in to how tag matches work, and how they differ from singles matches.
TAG TEAMS
Last month’s development update talked about an element of the game that was necessary for tag matches, and that’s Factions. A faction is any group of 2-4 wrestlers who share the same alignment (face vs heel). Tag teams are essentially 2-person factions. They’re created and managed in the same way as a larger faction.
One reason factions are so important for tag matches is that it allows me to do things like suggest likely partners for a wrestler when adding a tag team to a match. If a match already has Wrestler A, who’s in a faction, when you go to add a tag team partner the game will pop up a list of their fellow faction members rather than showing the full roster.
To a large extent tag team matches work like singles matches, but there are some key differences. One is that the simulation needs to keep track of which wrestlers are active in the match and which ones are outside waiting to be tagged in. This is displayed graphically in the game, but it also matters for the simulation because the two wrestlers who are legal in the match are the ones who are used when the game does rolls to determine the crowd reaction, and of course wrestlers each have their own move list, which the text generation needs to reflect.
There are some other fun little things that happen in tag matches. For example, the only way to break a pin in a singles match is for the wrestler to kick out. In a tag team match sometimes a pin or submission attempt will be broken up by the partner running in instead. Factions are also able to have a unique tag team finisher, so if the winning team in a match is in a faction together and the end of the match is set to “Finisher” (as opposed to “Count-out”, “Time limit draw”, etc.), the faction will use their double-team finisher regardless of which wrestlers are in the ring at the time.
Some aspects of tag team matches are still being ironed out. In particular, I need to balance the post-match stat changes that wrestlers receive against the fact that tag matches have twice as many participants on them. Tag matches should be fun, but if they’re “overpowered” in terms of giving you twice as many bonuses for the same amount of screen time as a singles match, then players are incentivized against making singles matches, which isn’t very fun!
Feuds are also likely to work differently for tag matches. In a singles match, the two wrestlers always gain some Heat between each other, and Heat is then spent for special match stipulations in future matches. That’s not going to work for tag teams (what happens if the four wrestlers in the match all have different levels of Heat between each other, for example?), so right now the way it works is that for tag matches Heat is earned between factions rather than between individuals. This does mean that no Heat is generated in a tag match where one or more teams is cobbled together without a faction, but I think it’s a good trade-off in order to make it easier to track how much Heat there is between teams.
With tag matches largely complete except for some statistical balancing, the next task on the list is to add three- and four-way matches for individual wrestlers. And after that, some new features that I haven’t talked about yet.