TOASTER_TEAM'S PROFILE

Is anyone following what's been happening in Hong Kong?

What's your take on it?
Do you think the 5 demands are justified?
Are they going to happen?
Was Blizzard right in the way it managed its apology?
What about the NBA?

It's a lot of questions which could probably have a thread on their own but I figured I'd throw all the topics and see where the conversation goes.

I've thought up of various combat mechanics for my game but I'm trying to get feedback about the actual designs:

Design A:

I just did a mockup of what I had in mind. In the example above, two PC are engaged in close combat. The thief is at ranged combat while the wizard is farther away. Players can move on the scale from turn to turn, going closer (towards the skull) or further away from it. I like it as a concept.

I'm wondering if three locations on both sides is enough however or if it's too limiting. I don't want too have too much for no good reason.

Design B:

I've tried to simplify things a bit. I'd like to integrate the aesthetics of boardgames (miniatures and dice). Instead of having two sets of terrain (enemies and allies), I mainstreamed things to just 5 tiles.

In order to hit the selected target (marked with a cross air) the player rolls a virtual die. I've identified the "to hit" target number, 6 if the enemy if the furthest away, 4+ one square closer, 3+ one more tile closer and the hand-to-hand tile.

The idea is to use risk-reward:
-The longer they wait to shoot, the more likely they are to hit the target.
-However, the closer the foe is, the more likely the player will end up being injured by getting into a fight with the foe.
-Since ammunition would be limited/it would take time to reload, the player needs to choose wisely when to do which action in combat.
-Once the player gets into close-combat, there should be some kind of price to pay. I'm not sure what that would be. I'm thinking that combat could become a lot harder and the player to deal a lot less damage.

Questions I have for people who have some game design experience or ideas:
1-How could I mitigate RNG? I can imagine how it would be frustrating to keep missing a target... This is a big one.
2-Could I arrange things better to have a more interesting UI? If so, where I could put things?
3-How could I deal with close combat in order to make it riskier since it doesn't use ammunition. In other words, how can I make sure that close combat becomes a last resort as opposed to a way to kill enemies without spending ammunition?
4-Any ideas as to how I could make things look better? More coherent?


Design C:

You'll notice I've changed a few things.

a. have added a bullet meter. Out of the six bullets, you'll see on bullet has been spent here.
b. A bullet would be potentially fired each round.
c. Instead of going for "all or nothing" I've modified the damage system to be less RNG influenced. While 1 or 2 is still a miss, anything higher causes damage, from 3 to 12 on a critical hit.
d. I've changed the die design as well to make it more elegant.
e. I've changed the design of the font.
f. I've modified the pathway to make it more coherent.
g. I've moved the cross hair under the position tile.
h. In this concept, I don't take distance into consideration however... which might be problematic as not very realistic. So that's one issue.
i. Another issue would be reloading. If the enemy advances one tile per round, there would be no point in having a gun clip as he wouldn't have time to empty it anyway.

Possible approaches:
a. Disregard distance as part of the battle mechanic when it comes to scoring a hit.
b. Have more position tiles or have the enemies move half a tile per round. That is to say, to spend one turn to move in between the tiles. Or have the enemy move slower than one tile a turn.
c. Use QTE to determine a hit:

The idea being that the arrow moves left to right and the player presses a key to determine the outcome with different colors dealing different amount of damage.


I still have to design:
a. Close combat.
b. Should I display enemy health?


Design D:

I've dramatically reduced the bullet size to make the UI more appealing.

I've gotten rid of the die. This will give the player agency over the result he is going for. This also allows me to implement distance.

The further away the target, the more red zones (miss zones) present. The closer the target, the more green and yellow zones.

If the opponent reaches the player, hand-to-hand is handled this way:
The HP (100 and 50 here) goes down by their damage factor.
The player has 5, the monster has 10. Both their HP goes down by the damage factor until one reaches 0 and dies. So it's important to avoid hand to hand at all cost.

Thoughts on UI design and the combat ideas?

Hello,
I'm looking for someone who'd like to design maps from assets I make in an dilapidated urban setting. I need someone to map apartments and building interiors.

I'm also looking for that person to design puzzles to solve in said locations. The game is meant to be resident-evil inspired but I'd like for the puzzles to be more complex than that. I'd ideally focus more on art and creating assets and gradually give more leeway to the game designer.

The game uses a typical point and click interface: look, take, use and use inventory.



I'm looking for someone:
-reliable who can promptly reply to emails.
-Who enjoys designing puzzles and gameplay elements.
-Who is creative and imaginative and has experience playing video games with puzzles.
-Is familiar with the resident evil franchise and its atmosphere.
-Who is good at making credible maps.
-Who has time on their hands and can respect deadlines.
-Who can manage their time according to their goals.

If you're interested, contact me through PM with your hourly fee.

Thank you for reading.

Hello!

I'm looking for a scripter to code things for my RPG Maker MV game. I'm looking for someone who's an expert and can do anything.

Contact me through PM if you're interested.

Alright so I want to do away with "hit points". It's a fossil in the rpg genre (my opinion) and too seldom questioned or pioneered upon. The reason is likely because they’re easy to handle in the rpg genre in general. More powerful monsters have higher hit points to compensate for stronger players.

I frankly don’t like it (which is problematic since it’s pretty much the only alternative out there). There’s a good reason for that; they’re difficult to replace. It’s easy to say you don’t like something, anyone can do that, the hard part is finding an alternative.

Now I’m using lower numbers in my game, probably going as high as 10 as a number but hopefully no higher. This includes health of course. If 10 is the highest, the most legendary of scores, weaker characters would need to be able to survive in-game without risking of dying in a single hit. That’s essentially the challenge of the whole thing.

I find a certain charm in lower numbers, it’s simpler and more accessible than having 9999 dropping all over the place. Darkest Dungeon is a good example of lower numbers being attractive. Paper Mario did that as well if I remember correctly.

The challenge is keeping battle realistic without being too lethal. It doesn’t make sense to me how someone could survive more than a couple of sword strikes for one thing.

One option is making it more difficult to hit in the first place and making the consequences of being hit more important. The problem with that missing too often means combat really isn’t progressing and that can drag on and become boring.

Having lower numbers also has the challenge of having a diverse set of weapons with their own pros/cons. You can’t just rely on damage to differentiate a dagger from a sword for one thing. Besides, damage output to differentiate weapons is also sort of a let-down, it’s creatively lazy I think.

Darkest Dungeon death’s door is what inspired me to do away with hit points entirely, that and the injury system of Shadowrun pen and paper. They both have game mechanics which are clever, especially Shadowrun. Shadowrun keeps track of your injuries. It becomes harder to fight the more injured you are. I think that’s not only smart but also realistic and consequentially something I wanted to have in my own game.

So I’m thinking of using injuries as opposed to abstract “points”. I liked the idea of having random injuries selected every time a character is hurt. I couldn’t just have all the various injuries as one big pool, I needed various “levels” of injuries; from light ones to potentially fatal ones. I also needed to tie this in with the health characteristic of player characters and implement a way for opponents where it wouldn’t end up being too complex.
_________________________________________________________________________________
So, basically, that’s where I’m at now and what I’d like to discuss. My objective in creating this thread is to read suggestions from other people and also to point out where the HP alternative I’m putting forward comes short so that I can fix it before it’s hard coded in.

Everything written in this original post is brainstorming, nothing set I stone. I’m trying to organize and tidy up my set of ideas to make them practicable,
unique and fun.

For example:

Suppose a wizard has a health of 2. He therefore needs to be fragile without being a glass canon.

My starting point would be too each unit of health represent being able to sustain a certain amount of injuries. A first reaction might be to say: “Well, what’s the difference with hit points then?”. For one thing, every type on injury would have different impact.

Suppose a health unit means you can sustain a certain amount of injuries before being in a critical state (think Darkest Dungeon Death’s Door here) where every single hit might mean your death, regardless of the gravity of the wound sustained.

So basically, how about something like this:

Graze: has no immediate effect on a character but they’re being kept track of. Once you reach a certain amount of grazes, character are inflicted a single light wound. Grazes are dismissed post-combat. They’re too light to really amount to anything outside of combat that is. It’s sort of a safe “injury”. Three grazes could lead to a single light wound.

Light wound: light wounds have consequences. It can be something like an injured arm which lowers combat effectiveness for example. Light injuries carry over after battles so they’re to be taken more seriously so to speak. You can’t die from light injuries however. Since they do stack, getting healed before the next encounter becomes important (whereas grazes do not carry over). As you stack more light wounds, the next injury leads to a serious wound. I’m thinking of 3 light wounds to keep with the grazes vs light wound concept.

Serious wound: Serious wounds are well… serious. They have much more serious consequences than light wounds. Serious wounds can lead to critical wound which in turn can lead to death. Serious wounds are also harder to heal. Stacking up 3 serious wounds leads to critical wounds.

Critical Wounds: These do not have consequences per se but each critical wound increases the likeliness of dying for each consequences wound.
_________________________________________________________________________________
This doesn’t mean that the only way to die is to gradually stack wounds from level to level. All sorts of injuries can be sustained in battle.
So that’s about it right now and this message is long enough on its own. Let me know what you think!