theWulfen 2 – Blog

Graphics

So, I’ve finally taken the plunge and advertised for a graphical artist to create illustrations for the main starting races.  Most likely Wulfen, Usra/Beorning, Bast and Buffalo (name tbd) – so this is Wolves, Bears, Cats and Buffalo/Bull.

Have posted on ConceptArt.org, unbelievably professional site with some awesome artists who look on it.  I’ve offered payment for the artwork, so with luck I’ll get a good artist respond.

Health & Death

One thing that I’ve been toying with for a while is how the whole hit point system should work.  This links directly into what happens when/if you die.  This also links into the travel system.  I personally dislike games that remove a specific amount of XP when you die, it makes things horrible if you die repeatedly.  Corpse running is a pain, and as I’ve not decided on how the travel system will work, could be a bit peculiar.  One system I have recently experienced is that when you respawn, you have a 2 minute debuff where you earn less XP.

Anyway, back onto the point.  One system I played had a clever setup in that not all opponents killed the character completely, instead they incapacitated a character which then took a short amount of time to come round at low health.  I’m thinking of playing on this idea a little.

I’d like each character (and opponent) to have 2 health bars.  One ‘vitality’ and one ‘wounds’.  Currently I’m thinking that vitality represents your regular cuts, scrapes and bruise, and wounds are more serious (and also require different healing).  In a fight, once a characters vitality goes, they suffer damage straight to their wounds.

Now on top of this, armour will reduce incoming damage by a specific amount.  Magical shields will also need to exist, but I can’t decide on their exact function yet.  My gut says to make them absorb a specific amount of damage, however this means that magical users will never need to use healing potions, so will be easy to play.  Another thought is that they absorb a percentage of a certain number of attacks, but this would be annoying for fast attacks (which would use the shield up quickly).  They could act like armour but only for magical attacks, though this would mean that people would end up picking caster vs caster and melee vs melee fights where possible, armour will also provide resistances against magical damage as well, so that would not be balanced.

I suppose that one way magical shields would work, would be to make them identical to armour in practice, but that they can only be used by casters.  On a plus, this would make class balancing quite straightforward as all creatures would have damage reduction of a similar style.