theWulfen 2 – Blog

All quiet

I’ve not posted anything to the blog for a week now.  As mentioned earlier, I’ve now secured artists for the website UI and for the main character portrait for the 4 playable races.  50% payment has now been made and that ball is now rolling.  I also have briefly spoken to an artist who does the most phenominal landscapes and he’s happy to discuss doing location graphics once I know what I need and have pulled in a bit more cash.

Once I have the website graphics I can actually crack into starting the site and putting together ideas/elements – its getting quite exciting!

Armour Pt2

One thing that drives me nuts in all games is that low level armour sucks.  I don’t mean in game terms, but in terms of naming and looks.  “Knackered Leather Armour”, “Armour with holes in”, you know the type of thing.

So as I do have a problem with this, I’m going to tackle the problem head on.  Naming is always going to be a problem anyway as you potentially will have dozens of different types.  My current thought is that common armour will be named simply – ‘Light Leather Armour’, have a category - (Medium Armour) and have a quality (Low~High) that will correspond to level requirements.  So High quality Light Leather Armour will be used by Hybrid classes at high level.  Its a simple solution but hopefully one that will suffice.

Obviously rarer armours will require different naming conventions.  Uncommon armour (i.e. with one benefit) will share the common name, but have ‘of Strength’ or whatever appended.  True tiering might be useful, but I’ll have to see how things go on.  I don’t want to overload the game with special items though – uncommon needs to be just that, same with rare and legendary, epic etc need to be like rocking horse poo.  Having said that all creatures need to have access to nice kit in order to encourage them to play.

D100.00

One of the key elements of the game is going to be the mechanics behind the combat aspect of the game.

In the original it was very simple.  Basically every creature (both playable and not playable) had an attack and defense value.  Dividing one against the other gave a chance to hit percentage.  In game, a random number was generated between 1 and 100 (in essence a D100).  The hit percentage was inversed (thus making a low roll bad and a high roll good), and if you got high enough then you hit your opponent.  If you rolled 1-5 you would always miss and if you got 95-100 you got a crushing (double) hit.

Now after a while I added creature specials once they hit level 10.  If memory serves these had a secondary chance to occur that ran independently of the main setup.  This didn’t work very well and the special abilities weren’t very well thought out.

In W2, I’m going to follow on with this method to a certain extent, but want to add extra ‘chances’ such as dodge, block (if using some kind of shield), critical hits, secondary effect and so on.  The important thing is that this has to be decided in one roll of the dice so to speak.  Now one game has a novel way of dealing with this, in that everything is placed into a chart, that has an infinite number of possibilities, but only the first 1~100 are used.  There are various benefits to this, but I’ll skip those for the time being.  The biggest bonus is that instead of a dedicated chance to hit (which is split into what type of hit has been caused), you have a chance to miss, chance to have your attack mitigated (blocked, parried), cause special damage (crit, crush, secondary) and anything else is a plain hit.  Now going for a method like this makes D100 pretty inaccurate, so instead I’ll use a D100.00 instead - i.e. the number generated is to 2 decimal places.

As in the original you will have an attack and defense value – but these will be secondary stats, calculated from your weapon proficiency, abilities, agility etc.  Your level and your opponents level will be irrelevant, as in the first game – but obviously a higher level will have higher attributes.  One key thing I will do in contrast to the original is to lower the chance to miss.  If you faced an equal opponent, then you’d have a 50/50 chance to hit and miss.    Hit chance won’t exist as a direct stat, and the chance to miss will likely be around 15~20% although this will be subject to change.

One things that has just occurred to me is that I can make two-handed weapons more powerful than I originally was going to.  I was thinking of making them half the speed and twice the damage, however this isn’t an incentive to use them, as one miss with a slow weapon reduces damage output by more than a miss with a faster weapon.  So what I could do is to increase the damage more, but give all opponents an increase to the chance to dodge.  This might sound like the same as a miss, but certain abilities will trigger after dodges, plus I’ll likely have skills that will reduce the chance your opponent can dodge.

Secondary effects are worth a quick note here.  All damage types have a secondary effect that they can cause.  Physical damage can stun for example, fire damage can cause burns (or ignite?).  Resistance to each type of damage will help reduce the chance of secondary effects.  This also opens up a balanced way of creating vulnerabilities, as I can decrease the resistance to a specific damage type thus increase the chance of incurring a special effect – which is more balanced than directly increasing damage taken from a specific damage type.

Progress

So then, I’ve made a little progress, though not directly as I’ve been snowed under with work.  Its now the weekend - infact a 4 day weekend due to Easter - woohoo!

I have now commissioned the 4 character pieces and a set of elements for the UI of the site.  They’ve cost me more than I was originally going to spend, but its going to be a worthwhile investment overall as these pieces will make or break the game.  Although its very shallow, the majority of people will rate any game on its looks first and gameplay second, so by putting their creation in the hands of somebody who is a professional makes the most logical sense.

I should have all of the characters by the end of April, and hopefully the same sort of timescale for the UI bits (or sooner).  What that means is that by the middle of the year, I’ll have at least something working – though far from finished.

Artist

After over 30 applicants, I believe that I’ve narrowed the character concept artwork down to a single artist.  Additionally I think I have sourced somebody to create all of the building block elements for the UI of the site.

Its all coming together!  I should then be able to get coding – woohoo!

Armour

I’ve been mulling over how armour should work in W2 for a while now.  Now it goes without saying that physical strength effects what classes wear what type of armour.  So strong melee types can wear nice spangly metal armour, but physically weak caster types will only wear robes and such like.

Now in W2, armour will provide damage reduction against incoming attacks.  I’ll be using what has become ‘traditional’, and each piece of armour will have a value.  This gives you an overall armour value that based on your level gives a percentage reduction in damage (e.g. a hit of 100 damage will become 65 if a creature has 35% damage reduction).

One problem is that you can’t give cloth armour the same armour value as plate armour, so it needs to confir a different bonus.

In W2, I want armour to have multiple armour values, for different damage types.  Probably physical and magical, and likely with special abilities for sub types (e.g. +X armour against fire).  Now I feel that its a mistake to give casters more protection against magical damage than non-casters (they’ll likely get magical shields and stuff), but armour needs to confir some benefit.  So currently I think that armour will have a power rating.  This works in the opposite way to armour value, and that culmulativly and based on level it will provide an increase to magical spells.  This means that getting good armour will be essential for all classes, melee types will last longer in combat, and caster types will cause more damage.  Hybrids will get the best of both worlds in a manner of speaking.

Travel

Have had a thought about travel within W2.  Its going to be difficult to have user interaction without going into complex maps, enemy tracking and allowing the player to direct their character.  So I’ve come up with what I reckon to be a good compromise.  Now there will have to be maps, that detail settlements across the land.  Settlements will be friendly and hostile towards different races – these will be mixed and matched as I fancy.  Once you’ve visited a settlement, you can quickly travel between them.  Quickly however will still take a portion of time – but you know a safe path between the two, so can’t be attacked.

Each settlement will have areas of ‘wilderness’ around it.  What you do is to enter a wilderness and then wander around/explore.  Each wilderness will have two settlements attached and a relative size.  This size will indicate how long it will take a creature to wander from one end to the other.  Each wilderness will also have a enemy chart, which represents the percentage chance of encountering an enemy, based on how far away you are from a settlement.  As such its possible to have Large Rats and Swarms of Vermin appear only within 5 minutes wander of a settlement, and that chance to become less the farther out you go.  Additionally there will have to be a density of enemy, which matches the percentage.  This should give:

Large Rat:
Chance: 95%, density: 5, distance: 0
Chance: 0%, density: 1, distance 5*60

So the key element will be distance, and then the chance and density can be calculated.

Now the way wandering will work, is similar to combat, in that there will be a poller that kicks off communication to the server.  Unlike combat, this time will likely be 5 seconds.  A panel will be present that shows enemies nearby (based on the above calculations).  I’ll have to come up with a clever mechanism that makes it realistic, as if you’re seeing one set of enemies its not going to completly change in 5 seconds…  Maybe it does a reverse calculation to see if you can still see an opponent and then adds any extra enemies necessary?  Either way the end result will be that enemies appear and disappear gradually.

During wandering there is always a chance of combat.  This can be established by the player clicking on an enemy, or by a hostile enemy engaging the player.  Now the exact mechanics of this needs to be worked out, else as soon as an enemy appears they’ll attack the player, so something along the lines of how long the enemy has been visible and give each a hostility rating (basically a percentage chance of them attacking the player).  Thinking about it, a hostility rating would be good as it means that we can make some enemies slightly hostile.  Perhaps the chance an enemy will attack has a increase/decrease based on the length of time they’ve been visible?

Anyway, thats going to be the way that travelling works.  Hopefully its going to be realistic enough to keep peoples interest, and not too tedious.  The pure issue of the player not being in control of travel is a difficult one.

Background v1.1

Tada

Could actually have Tada settlements within Fens as well as other lake/watery areas.

No more buffalo

After a number of reseravations and a flash of inspiration last night I’ve made the decision to drop the idea of having a buffalo creature as a starting race.  This was because I felt that the final race would be too similar to other computer game races and could end up as a minatour type creature.

Thus I am now going to have Tāda, a toad like race.  This also means that I quite convieniently have a race wth every combat style covered.  I have the generalist Wulfen, tough Ursa/Beorning, agile Bast and now magically adept Tada.  Although ultimatly, any race will be able to perform any combat style, some will be more suited than others (thus ought to progress faster).

Background v1.0

Tāda

The Tada evolved from toads, and have maintained their amphibious abilities to a certain extent.  They have a naturally high resistance to poisons and other toxins, but due to their amphibious nature are more susceptible to fire based damage than the other races.  The Tada are the most magically attuned of all the W2 races.

Visually they vary greatly, I imagine a Boss Nass (starwars) type look, perhaps verging towards warhammer Slaan.  Definitely not Mr Toad from wind in the willows…  Most will have the ability to change colour between two or three patterns and colourings, thus many have ‘war glamour’

An ancient Inca feel would go well, but could be a bit too stereotypical – the Mocha tribe worshipped Toads as a hallowed creature.

Culture wise, they are sophisticated by comparison, and have perfected the art of water manipulation.  Most structures float on natural and Tada made lakes, but are anchored to prevent catastrophe in bad weather.