The Days 12 -17

Days 12 - 17,

The last days I did mostly work on the UI system to be easier to read for the player. I as the maker know what each ability and spell does, but the player needs to get the information first for themself. I tried to change the ToolTip of abilites in such a way, that it is easier to get what a spell does on the first look rather than reading a text. It should be fun to play the game, and I think reading a wall of text befor each turn just to figure out what happens might be nice for some players, the representation isn't suited for this. This took me a long time, cause  there are over 200 skills right now in the game already. Now there is the option, to see a detailed tooltip and an simple tooltip to get an easier grasp of what exactly happens.

"old" left . new right 

Here are some selected Spell-Icons I made. I have no idea how to make them bigger...:

The last one is one of the a start ability of  the class templar called "Arial Fling" and I just want to share the process of designing this abiltiy:

The Templar uses wind to aid him in the battle, lifting his enemies into the air and himself to unleas strong attacks. On of his build-path is centered around lifting the enemy up into the air. So a basic ability should help this strategy to flurrish. The status effect is called "Airlift" which is applied at the enemy and is does some good falling damage at the end of the turn. Airlfit itself is a pretty strong debuff and a weird one to play with too, cause it make the inflected resistence to damage (being in the air and so bein harder to hit). Cause it needs to played around in the  team, just giving each ability Airlift might be frustrating, cause some  times you just don't want to give an enemy damage resistance. So giving the start skill the ability to just apply Airlift has he want's, is either to strong or to hard to play with. So I settled on following start vision: 

"Deal damage and apply Airlift depending on enemy health and your strenght attribute" 

This feels like flinging the enemy into the air, the heavier (represented by  their health) they are, the harder it would be. This sounded fun, but practically it is a nightmare. First off, I need to design enemies with this ability in mind, second off, the player now needs to calculate each time, if he could fling a certain enemy into the air. Last but not least, the player is leaded way to much to just put everything into strenght to make this ability work as often as possible. So I changed it a little bit:

"Deal damage. There is a 50% chance to apply Airlift depending on the enemy health with this attack"

While I like it more for accessibility reasons, I wanted to move away from chance based abilites for the player on such a level. Now the player can't plan around an applied Airlift. So I choosed to stayed in the random aspect of the ability, but maked it more interms of the basic game mechanics:

"Deal damage. On Crit: Apply Airlift depending on the enemy health"

In my game, you know bevorhand if you the ability will crit or not, and there is a key mechanic,  to force crits. This still makes it random, but the player knows when it will happen, letting him play around it. One problem still remains, with a starting crit-chance of 4%, this will unlikely trigger unless investing in crit-chance and on the forced crit-round, the player will choose a strong skill to use most of the times. So I needed to increase the crit-chance. This would on the other hand mean, reducing the base values of this skill making it less attractive to use. Because the goal of this ability is to apply Airlift I found another way for this without reducing the base values.

"Deal damage. On Crit: Apply Airlift depending on the enemy health. Critical Damage is converted into Critical Chance"

This now increases the abilitys critical chance alot with the cost of never doing more damage on a critical strike, but that doesn't realy matter for the player, cause he doesn't use this ability for a big burst attack, but to just fling the enemy into the air to combo with other abilites. The last touch was to just make the Airlift amount fix, to make the ability less complex for the player and the effect shorter in the word-count.

The last days I realized just how much time designing such abilites and skills took. I'm still not finished which each class, and often I find myself thinking "just slap +10 Damage on this and I would be finished". Yeha alot of abilites has such upgrades, but I try to place  them in a way, it adds to the skill rather  than just be a lazy way to increase the content. Upgrading abilites should be more than a elementary school test to find out which number is higher.

Cheers