Hydration 2: Oasis

Let's see how many times I can start and stop the same game before actually finishing it.

After a lengthy hiatus we are back on this thing.Way back in the RS! release we wrote down a list of every piece of commentary we got and we're still addressing them. I'm hoping to get the list done in a week or two and have another private demo. If that goes well, then we'll finally do a second public demo. Essentially before getting on with the content of the game we're trying to nail the underlying player usability and the like.

Some recent changes:
-The controls have been entirely redone. Instead of the crazy WASD/Arrow key setup, battles are now done similar to Lufia with holding the arrow keys in conjunction with pressing a key to select an action. Likewise, escape now opens the menu and enter confirms things/talks/opens chests. (Ideally these will be configurable later on as well).

Additionally, we finally decided on some core game elements:
-No more player chosen stats. Just plain too hard to balance, we'll be moving to static gains.

-Two of the skills the player has available at any time will be determined by the area they're in. The third skill will be determined by an equippable item slot. Since the game deals with a limited subset of available skills in-combat making the player decide what to equip for an area is just annoying trial-and-error, this approach gives the player their paintbrushes and lets them figure out how to use them (heck, I may even remove the equippable skill).

-You will NOT be able to use items in-battle. One of the most common feature requests of the demo. There are two reasons for this: I coded the game like a year ago and it's entirely not designed to handle this so it would be a major change to the engine that would consume a lot of time for a minor feature. More importantly, I realized that this is a pretty core aspect of the battle system. The game is about -avoiding- damage, not soaking it up (for instance, the defend command nullifies ALL damage / status effects). Virtually every RPG in existence uses in-battle HP recovery so this will likely take some effort for players to cope with, but should lead to shorter battles with emphasis on using what you've got properly rather than drawn out endurance challenges that dominate the genre.

-There will be an overview map of each area that will be entirely filled-in terrain wise before you step foot in it. I struggled with this for a long while, but ultimately decided that Hydration isn't really about typical dawdling game exploration. It's about making tough decisions on where to go on the limited resources you have. There's a strong chance you'll only have enough water left to explore one side branch of an area and the game needs to give you that information if you're going to make a thought out choice.

Other thoughts:
-I'm thinking about changing the battle system to be much slower in speed, but add a "speed up" button to accelerate it. No matter how hard we try to optimize the battle screen, there's still just way too much information getting thrown at the player at once in several different locations. At least with a slower speed maybe they'll have a chance to process the information, with the speed-up button preventing boredom from waiting. I'm not entirely sold on this idea since some of the action-esque moments I saw in the demo were my favorite part of the battle system, but we'll see.

Hopefully more updates to come!

Had a private test with a few people today (Thanks Hachi, Overkill, Sal, Willy), tons of new feedback and stuff to improve upon. Probably the most important thing I learned was from Hachi's commentary that skills are basically useless. Up until now I had been trying to balance them as a regular component of battle but it just doesn't work with the hydration system. Simply put they need to either be overpowered as heck (but potentially screw you over with hydration usage) or nominally powered but with very low hydration costs. Trying to go between those two points is murder.

Besides that, the difficulty is still out of whack for the beginning of the game (hooray for being too good at your own game) and plenty of smooth user interface problems and general bugs.

Now with colored battle text. The battle system is pretty fast paced so being able to parse text lines quickly is ideal, though the change to the speed statistic in the last update has slowed it down a little bit as well.



and the fancy new bars applied to the map screen.



There's still a boatload of battle improvements to be done, but I may as well let you folks in on a few of the other planned changes. The biggest one is that the game will now take place across a world map instead of the originally planned continuous map. Additionally, each area will only let the player take a set amount of water with them so the game should always be beatable in some form while keeping the water pressure during areas. I'll go into a little more detail on other functions of the world map tommorow maybe.