Day 10 - Chances & Bleed

Day 10,

Designed new enemies for the last dungeon and did some coding to get more freedom for sprite manipulation. 

Alot of time got into thinking about my Bleed mechanic. If a player gets the bleed debuff, a random ability gets "take X damage" added to their effect. My idea was, that player needs to decide, either using the ability and taking some damage or avoiding it and using another spell. While testing the last days, I find it always bad and frustrating when I got the bleed debuff. It was most of the time to much damage to take and took to much freedom. Each member has 6/7 abilites to choose from, where 2-3 are core ones that are used frequently. Getting one of them to be bleeded, it just sucked and wasn't fun. So I thought about a solution today and had some iterations. One is that the player gets the ability to "tend wounds" which sacrefices a turn but removes the bleed debuff. While I like the idea, I think it will turn out to be as unfun as bevor. Another idea is to just lower the damage taken, but again it will either turn out to be to less to care for the player or still to much to ruin the fun. I settled on the plan to reduce the damage with the added effect of removing the bleed debuff, if no bleed affected ability was used. It should still be so little, that the player doesn't need to care, but on the other hand, they are motivated to use another ability, not cause of the damage they would take.  Using another ability as planned is now a decision with a positiv effect, and less of a non-negativ. Bevor it was either negativ or not negativ. Now it is not big negativ or not negativ & positiv. The decision should be way more fun now and I will see if Im correct on the next play tests.

Another thing I was thinking about is chances. I like randomness to make the game more chaotic and let each turn feel a little different, only cause some numbers are higher or lower. But a problem I was encountering was to make decision with low chances. One ability of the enemy has a 1/5 chance to apply confusion. Confusion can be pretty fatal and the chance is to low to realy care.  The times it applies the debuff feel pretty bad, cause playing around it isn't realistic. So the chance is either high enough to play around it or low enough to not and both feels frustrating of the chance doesn't trigger. So now I will tell the player bevor the ability hit (in the preview) if the chance will trigger or not. This will let me keep the low chance abilities and the high chance. On top of that the player can now play around the randomness, while still feel the randomness. I only need to think about a good wording for this....