Hey guys! Today I’m going to talk about status effects! I’ve got them all working how I want now, so it seems apt to talk about them.

Tephra has four different status effects; Poison, Stun, Berserk and Curse. Let’s run through them.

Poison
Okay, so in case you’ve never played an RPG before(go play one right now), Poison deals a bit of damage every turn. In Tephra, it lasts for five turns. Nothing majorly innovative here, except for the fact that this Poison isn’t percentage-based. Instead, it deals a set amount of damage, depending on the strength of the poisoning(more on this later). This means that it’s a fairly balanced option on normal enemies and bosses alike, which means I don’t have to make many(or possibly any) enemies immune to it.

Stun
Stun in Tephra stops you from attacking for 1 or 2 turns(how many turns depends on whether you’ve already attacked the turn you get Stunned). Why (basically) two turns? So the player has a chance to act while the opponent is paralysed. Stopping an action isn’t much use in a single-character RPG otherwise! For the most part, Stun will either be avoidable, or only used by the player.

Berserk
Berserk(which I will forever be writing as Beserk) is probably the most unique status effect in my game(even though it is obviously based on the Final Fantasy model of what Berserk is). Berserk causes an enemy(always an enemy; Landis can’t become Berserk) to always use one skill. Which skill? That’s the major difference. It’s different for each enemy. One enemy might use a powerful attack, while another will start adding negative status effects to its allies. As unpredictable as this sounds, once you know what skill an enemy will use, it allows you to block or absorb it very easily. And sometimes you’ll get lucky and your enemies will start killing themselves!

Curse
Curse is Zombie under a different name. For those unfamiliar(honestly, play more games if this is you!), Zombie (and thus Curse) turns healing into damage. “Ouch”, I hear you say. Curse is cruel. Curse works very interestingly alongside shields; damage turns to healing, and then turns back to damage. The obvious point of Curse is to stop turtling(constantly staying on the defensive until a convenient chance to attack appears) in certain situations, to help the player around enemies that use blocking moves, and just generally to mix things up a bit.

Cruel, but fair
In a lot of games, status effects are almost entirely luck-based, over-powered when used against you, and completely useless when used by you. This is just frustrating; this sort of thing can cause the player to lose when they aren’t doing anything wrong, which isn’t any fun for anyone. In Tephra, status effects are still lethal; Poison can take big chunks out of your health, Stun completely incapacitates you, and Curse stops your ability to heal, and can damage you on top of that. But I like to keep things even, and this is how I do it;

1. If a statuis effect is going to work, it’ll work the first time. You either have a 100% or a 0% chance of success, so there’s no messy random chance.

2. If a status effect is tied to a certain type of damage, shields and helmets are able to block that status. So even if an enemy can Stun you, you can simply use a helmet and block it. This means that the player is actively involved in keeping themselves healthy, rather than just praying that they won’t get Cursed next turn.



So if you’re dying of a status effect, it’s probably your fault.

But I can totally see a problem with how you do Poison-
There is more than one strength of each status effect. In fact, there are three strengths: normal, strong and super strength(if you can think of better names, please tell me!). Each status changes in a different way as they get stronger;

Poison will deal more damage. This is the main reason for having up-scaling If Poison deals a static amount, then by the end of the game, Poison will be useless. Because of this, it needs to be able to deal an amount proportionate to the enemy’s health. The obvious way to do this without percentage-based status effects is through different strengths of Poison.

Stun will affect more enemies at higher strengths. This is simply because by the end of the game, you will probably have a ridiculous amount of weak Stunning items, which would normally allow you to stall out battles as long as you like. This way, you can add Stun to most enemies without being able to abuse it.

Beserk and Curse will last longer. This gives you more opportunities to synergise the effects of these statuses.

For the curious, the player will use status effects by shooting arrows. More on this when I get to talking about crafting, which is probably months off. Next week I’ll probably do something on difficulty settings, dying, and how I plan to handle heal-spots, simply because I’ve become inspired on how to handle some of these things recently.