Oxtongue Heroes

My God, it's full of gray!





The central menu is about 95% done. (Box and font prettiness is not part of that total - I certainly plan on it, but not for the v0.7 release.) It tends to feel more like a burden to work on something when trying out battles isn't part of the testing, so I'm relieved to be back to a point where I can start battles and load saves.


So, about score!

I've posted before (here at least) that the mechanisms many RPGs have for regulating battle difficulty often don't work too well. I tend to attribute this to a few reasons: they're tied up with other things the player may want to do (sure, the fight will be harder if I don't explore), they look like in-game decisions (gee, not sure how far it is to the next save point, my smart option is to grind a bit), or in fact the reward for smart play actually makes the game easier (loot).

One of the things I aim for with Oxtongue Heroes is to accommodate a wide range of player skill with pretty fine granularity - basically, to get self-regulation of difficulty by the player. I hope this can be accomplished by getting the player to deploy no more force than he needs to beat each map, or close to it. Being able to deploy less units than might be useful is very far from a new thing, but in most tactics games I would hardly even consider it on most playthroughs; OH does a couple things to encourage the player to play along.

The first, paradoxically, is that there's no unit cap - if you want, you can send out all 17 PCs on every map. That should be overkill enough on most maps that people get the idea that completing every battle is not the sole thing they can be aiming for.

And the second is the score. The scoring penalizes you both for using lots of force, and for reusing the same characters across several battles while ignoring others; so the player has to both minimize numbers and figure out how everyone would be most useful. (The number in the screenshot is provisional, I haven't entirely settled on the formula yet.)

Nothing's going to force players to play to the score, and if someone doesn't want to I don't really have a problem with that; but I think it will improve a lot of experiences.


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Stuff to do before projected demo release

- Finish enemy deploys in the third map and test for balance
- Create and finish the fourth planned map
-- write AI modules that take advantage of NPC mages (actually didn't go with straight-up mages for this map, did it a bit different)
- Create a tutorial map
-- Let status effects be loaded from the map file that can show message boxes
- Show battle objectives from the end-turn menu
- Tie the battle maps together with a hub and scoring
- Other problems as they come up (ongoing)

The hub has occupied basically all my OH attention for the last month - nothing's done on the tutorial. So things will probably still be a while.