Dev Diary #16

Hey guys,

Over the weekend Vahn, Crimson, and I worked on the UI and battle system. For the most part this was Crimson walking us through the battle system's code in detail, learning how it controls its state and how to send and receive messages between different parts. This is important to get right, and means that Vahn is now better able to create and maintain the parts of the GUI he has built. It was a long and not all too fun process to go through, so some appreciation is due to both of them for taking the time and being very diligent in their work.

It's coming along nicely and is beginning to look very much like the mockups shown here recently, and thanks to Vahn's expertise, most of it scales and changes shape correctly as the resolution and aspect ratio change too.

The next stage will be to work more on the back end of things, making the different moves do their job once the buttons are pressed and having the battle system move through the turns and change health, stamina, etc. values correctly. The continue button serves as a kind of stand in for animations, and is presented when the game isn't waiting for player choice. The new position of it and the automatic timer should hopefully make it much less annoying than it is currently.

From a design perspective, I've been thinking about what should happen when the player runs out of stamina. Its current design is more akin to your character's daily pool of energy to do things like travel, fight, have sex, and so on. Battle moves themselves have a stamina cost associated with them, and it's likely there will also be potions to recover stamina quickly. However, going without sleep for too long may cause your stamina to deplete faster.

My present leaning is to make 'Exhaustion' a debuff which reduces your battle effectiveness proportional to the amount of stamina you do not have. For instance, a small attack like a simple thrust or flirt, which costs only a small amount of stamina, would be affected less than a huge whirlwind attack with a greatsword, as the latter costs much more stamina to perform. That way the player can still fight, but there is a real benefit to staying well-rested and energised before tackling any challenging enemies. Of course, as you level up you'll be able to do much more on a day's worth of energy, but may also be presented with moves and activities which also require larger amounts of stamina to perform.

My aim is to have a degree of realism there, requiring the player to rest (which will include things like sleeping with NPC's, renting rooms at an inn, and camping in the wild), but not going so far as to have a survival game feeling where you need to babysit a thirst and hunger bar all the time. I believe striking the right balance will come mostly from tweaking numbers, such as how much time passes as you travel, and how much stamina is expended from moving around the world or in an average battle.

Let me know what you guys think; suggestions are always welcome. Until next time!