missionOverrides

missionOverrides defines how important game development aspects are for a topic during development and during calculation of the review scores.

If no missionOverrides are specified for a given topic then a game follows the default behavior of the genre.

The default values for all aspects (referred to as missions in code) are:

Genre / Mission	Engine	Gameplay	Story / Quests	Dialogues	Level Design	AI	World Design	Graphics	Sound
Action	1	0.9	0.7	0.6	0.9	1	0.8	1	0.9
Adventure	0.7	0.8	1	1	0.8	0.7	1	0.9	0.8
RPG	0.7	0.8	1	1	0.8	0.7	1	0.9	0.8
Simulation	0.9	1	0.8	0.7	0.9	1	0.8	1	0.9
Strategy	0.9	1	0.8	0.7	1	0.9	1	0.8	0.9
Casual	0.6	1	0.7	0.7	1	0.6	0.7	1	0.9

These are the default weightings for games in a given genre. The values are best read in group of threes, corresponding to the development stages:

1. Engine, Gameplay, Story / Quests
2. Dialogues, Level Design, AI
3. World Design, Graphics, Sound

Example: By default Story/Quests will never be as important as the Engine or Gameplay for Action games.

While this might be true for most Action games it isn't true for all of them. missionOverrides can be used to rectify this issue by providing custom overrides to this matrix.

Example (topic definition for the Music topic):

{
	id: "Music", 
	name: "Music".localize("game topic"),
	genreWeightings: [1, .9, .6, 1, .6, 1],
	audienceWeightings: [1, 0.9, 0.8],

	//overrides matrix: rows: action, adventure, rpg, sim, strategy, casual
	//columns: engine, gameplay, story/quests, dialogues, level design, AI, world design, graphics, sound
	missionOverrides: [
		[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.8, 0.9, 1],
		[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.9, 0.8, 1],
		[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.9, 0.8, 1],
		[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.8, 0.9, 1],
		[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.9, 0.8, 1],
		[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.7, 0.9, 1]
	]
}

As you can see the above matrix provides the missionOverrides values for World Design, Graphics and Sound to essentially say that for Music games, Sound is always more important than the other parts of the game. The rest of the matrix are 0 values which indicate that no override should take place.

Tips:

When using missionOverrides, it's usually best to override all values in a development phase (if you override Engine for example, you should also override Gameplay and Story/Quests). The values work best when they provide a range of values inside each development phase. Each phase should have one area rated 1 and one that is rated <= 0.8. This makes the slider selection more meaningful and the review algorithm is tuned to expect such a structure.