Hey guys! I think I’ve got my window skin sorted now, but I could still use help from a scripter(although I think that’s almost worked out too!). Everything else is going abnormally well for this game, and it’s almost concerning, considering how dragged out production normally is for me. Well, let’s hope I can keep this up!

Today I want to talk about armour! So, as I explained in my blog about items, you use items and equipment as skills in my game. Which raises the question: how do shields and helmets work? The answer, of course, is very well, thank you!

Healing without potions
Healing in games is an odd issue. If you have it, it has a tendency to warp battles into something different to what you want them to be; it’s very easy for battles to turn into “heal, attack, heal, attack”, which doesn’t stay interesting for long. But without healing, battle balance can become very difficult, and will either be a cake walk or an impossible ordeal(unless you balance really, really well).

The issue becomes greater with free healing, which is so powerful that I very rarely used in RPGs, and is always a very watered-down version of real healing.

So, how do I get around this? Shields. Each type of shield blocks and absorbs a different kind of attack(there are three shields, and five types of attacks, with the two you can’t block being rarer than the ones you can; I may or may not cover this in another blog). Shields only work for one turn, so there’s very much a risk-and-return thing going on; if you work out what attack your opponent will use next, you not only stop them for a turn, but get a good chunk of health back; guess wrong, and you lose a turn AND the health. This gives you powerful healing, while only letting you “abuse” it if you fully understand your opponent(and even then, if there’s more than one enemy, or an enemy that doesn’t follow a pattern, you can’t abuse the shields at all). I hesitate to call it “abuse” when understanding your enemy is a large focus of the game.

Shields are given to you free, and can’t be bought or sold.



But what about helmets?

Helmets will save your life
So, with shields being such a powerful tool, what could helmets do to compete with that? Helmets don’t absorb damage like shields; they only block it, although unlike shields there is a helmet for every type of damage. The advantage of helmets is that they last for three turns instead of one. This allows you to avoid damage while still dealing damage yourself; the importance of which I discuss in my second blog. So, while the benefits of shields are greater, helmets are far more flexible and allow you to keep up your damage output.

Unlike shields, helmets have to be bought. You can stack the effects of helmets, too.

Thanks for reading this blog! Next time I’ll be talking about... weapons, perhaps? Or status effects? Perhaps stats and the types of damage. Time will tell, I suppose. Cya next time!