Hi everyone,
It’s Felix again with a continuation of our combat redesign. We’re all very hard at work to get a demo of the game to test in a closed alpha with you as soon as possible so it might be a bit shorter than what you may be used to from me.
Like last time I’m going to use a selection of screenshots from the presentation I made to our team when the new system was invented and this time I can actually also attach a few screenshots from the game as I implemented the Tier 1 version of the system just last sprint. Let’s jump straight in:
When designing the system I wanted to solve the following issues we had with our very basic system:
In order to solve these issues I - as always - stole a bunch of ideas from some of the games whos design appealed most to me:
The first step was to separate our health meter into a heal and an armor meter. This would enable armors to be used for what they were actually intended for, namely prevent injuries completely. With that out of the way I took a look at the health meter specifically:
The idea here is that a lot of hits you get in combat, especially if you are armored, don’t result in life threatening injuries. When you do get an injury however it needs to be treated properly, which requires the proper equipment (bandages, splints, etc) and recovery, which we abstract through cooked food that the character has to ingest in order to fully heal one of the bars in the health meter. One bar emptying in combat can result in an injury that needs to be treated fast, like a bleed, and that will force the players to find a break in the battle to tend to it. I shamelessly stole this from Hunt: Showdown which always stresses me out when I start bleeding or burning in the middle of a shootout. The visual changes to the character depending on the health bars they have left are a nice feedback as well.
On to the armor next:
Just like with health we split the armor into bars. It does not regenerate but it can be maintained up to the bar that is currently. Once a bar breaks it becomes very hard to repair. We’re currently thinking of having repair as a late game tech. This gives us the opportunity to use the limited amount of armor we have throughout the game as you’ll be able to find cutting edge armor early on that is almost completely broken. Still good but it won’t hold for long.
Here’s two in-game shots showing the difference between a pristine lorica and a pretty banged up one:
Last but not least there is the armor and damage type. This is where we give players a reason for equipping different armors and carrying various weapons:
It’s all pretty standard. Three types of armor, three types of damage and it follows a rock paper scissors system. One thing to note from this slide is that armors lose effectiveness the more damaged they are. So even if you keep bashing an armor with the wrong weapon you’ll eventually break it down and start doing damage.
As always this is in flux and when we implement and test all of it there will be changes. For now I’m happy with the theory and I’m excited to see it in action.
That’s it from me today. I’m going back to the pixel mines to work on stealth kills today. ^^
Cheers,
Felix
