theWulfen 2 – Blog

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Buffalo/Bison DROPPED

I’ve not completly decided on this race yet. Initial thoughts are for a buffalo/bull type race. Not as burly as a minotaur would be. However with thought, this may be too similar to the Tauren race from World of Warcraft, which would be a bad thing.

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Bear

Name TBD: Ursa or Beorning or other?

This race evolved from the bear. Large, burly and one of the few races able to out last their opponent. Generally they go down the route of the fighter, but some will practice magic.

This race benefits from increased toughness and a large health pool, but suffers from being slow and tire more easily if making rapid attacks or casting spells.

Look wise, I’ve not got anything in my mind that would define them other than that the race evolved from bears

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Big Cat

Bast evolved from the ‘big cat’ family, mainly from the Africa area (so Leopard, Lion, Cheetah), but the other big cats are represented as well. They have a culture that is heavily ancient Egyptian in feel, and decorate themselves in jewellery and similar (though not head-dresses). As with the big cats of today, it is the female of the race that hunt, but evolution as made the male of the race more domesticated.

Bast are exceptionally agile, and use their nimbleness to avoid blows from opponents. They are equally skilled in casting and fighting in close combat.

In game terms, Bast have increased speed but decreased health and toughness.

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Wolf

The namesake of the game, Wulfen evolved from the many different wolves of the world.  Wulfen learned that in order to survive they must fight as a united whole, so although very pack/clan orientated, they all fight for the common good of the species.

Wulfen are more akin to modern day humans than the other creature races, with some skill in diplomacy and the ability to use brains and guile rather than all out aggression. They are however ferocious in combat.

In game terms, Wulfen are the ‘balanced’ race, with no specific penalties or benefits.

Look wise, I’ve had in my head along the lines of a heavily built werewolf, slightly hunched over, and often using their arms/hands to propel themselves along when running. As with most of the races, there will be a great variety in how they look, although Wulfen distinguish between themselves by smell.

Culture wise, Wulfen are very spiritual in nature, and have strong ties to Ancestory. A number of Wulfen often follow the path of the Shaman (aka voodoo magic), these often tattoo themselves with the blood of fallen enemies. The tattoo’s become magically imbued over time and change with a will own. That said Wulfen are ferocious in combat.

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.

Combat

I’ve tried this, and it works reasonably OK.  Basically combat works on a combat queue & ‘tick’ system.  A player stacks up the actions they wish to take in their combat queue.  The queue has a number of available ’slots’ in it.

Each action takes a pre-defined length of time in ticks and some have a ‘reuse time’ before they can be reused (again in ticks).  The player clicks on any action they have available and it gets added to the combat queue.  Once there it can’t be removed (tough).

Now there are a couple of different flavours of this system.  The first and easiest to code, is that you only have a few slots of queue available, but a slot can take *any* action, and time.  So you could have 3 slots and have one action that takes 3 ticks, one that takes 2 and one that takes 4, so a total of 9 ticks worth of combat.  The other flavour and slightly more difficult to do, is that the combat queue is larger, but each slot is a single tick.  So if you had 8 slots, the sequence of events above wouldn’t fit in until 1 tick had passed.  The second method is actually easier to understand, although we could remedy that by adding the information about times to the first method (could be that the bar fills up left to right based on the total time).  Thinking about it, I think that the first option is probably the better.  Its less demanding on the client’s computer for a start, but also having the slot fill up will actually be more visually informative than lots of slots.

An action has a number of elements: onset time, total time and reuse time.  The onset time represents the amount of time before an action happens (think charging up a fireball).  The total time is the number of ticks that this skill requires (think charging up a fireball, shooting it and then waiting a bit until your vision clears).  Finally the reuse time, is the amount of time you have to wait until you can use that skill again.  Overall it sounds really complex, but in reality its pretty straight forward.  Additionally by seeing information in hard numbers the human brain can comprehend them more easily.

Now each tick is roughly 2 seconds.  More if there is lag, as the system waits until it receives a response from the server before counting down those 2 seconds (there is a timeout option as well to prevent people trying to hack).  Now 2 seconds is actually quite a long time, so weapon attacks and actions may make multiple ’strikes’ within each attack.  Take a sword for example.  I would say that you can swing an averge blade once every second, more if its lighter.  So a regular attack from a sword would have a time per action (1), damage per strike (3-4) and a strikes per action (2), so you ought to have 6~8 damage from that one attack (obviously each has a chance to miss/crit etc).  Now a ‘gigantic’ attack might go time per action(2), damage per strike (+400%), strikes per action (1).  So this ought to cause the same damage as 2 regular attacks, but as its a special attack will likely have an increased chance to cause a special effect (like a stun).  Its going to be one of those things that will need lots of testing, but probably the best way of tackling it.

As with all of W2, all actions are passed to the server to complete, the fancy javascript UI is purely client side and every action is validated by the server.  Amusingly what this means is that somebody could technically unlock a skill before its reuse time, and thus add it to the queue before they should be able to.  In reality this actually just delay’s the next action in the queue

Well thats the basics of the combat system in a very small nutshell.  Hopefully keeping everything simple and the interface straightforward will ensure that the game runs smoothly.  Although 2 seconds is a long time, especially when waiting for an ability that takes a while to use, it is quite fast when you’re using 1 tick actions.  I may also put in a control that compensates to a lesser extent on if you get big lag spikes.  Its not uncommon to see lag of 250ms when on the internet (time it takes to send and receive a reponse from the server), which makes a tick 2.25 seconds.  If I were to time this, then I could make the tick delay 1.75 seconds to compensate for the 250ms lag.  If I were able to get the server to decide on the amount of time to pause, this would make life easier, as its going to be fairly difficult to intercept for hackers.

Classes and Stuff

Currently I want to implement a pretty unique class based levelling system for W2.  I want to maintain a Feral feel to the whole game, so don’t want to use a regular warrior/mage/rogue type of class system.  That said, I do want magic (Magik) to exist in some form or other within the game.  I personally dislike regular levelling systems where you grind so much XP to gain a level and a skill point and/or stat points.  Having said that, creatures will require some kind of level in order to know what they should be fighting and how far they’ve progressed.

Anyway, levelling is for another post.  When it comes to classes, I am currently veering down the following thought line.  Each creture falls broadly into one of four categories.  Either a Fighter, Caster or Hyrbid (i.e. fighter with casting skills and the other way around).  As a creature battles they will fight in a particular manner, which will result in them going down a specific specialisation class (i.e. a sub-class, but not in a minor way).  This means that if a player wishes to end up with, say a Beserker, then they must play in that style from day one.  I’m currently tempted to make all starting creatures the same in terms of class, so they might all be able to fight with a sword and cast a small fireball initially, but once they gain their first level, they loose unused skills.  Hybrids would be difficult to begin with as you’d need to keep the Magik and Melee damage within sight of each other.

This would work relativly simply, by watching the amount of damage caused by a creature via their starting skills.  This could actually be quite straight forward, if all creatures start at level 0, then they could have a quest to kill 10 rats (i.e. the obligatory rat killing quest).  When the quest gets handed in, they get told ‘you are following the way of the <whatever>’ and then all their starting skills get replaced.  So a Hybrid would get a spell to imbue their sword to do magikal damage, Fighter would get a low powered melee attack and Caster would get a new magic missle.

Currently I’m thinking along the lines of the following Specialist classes:

• Blademaster/Gladiator – Weapon specialist, low armour, but high avoidance
• Beserker – Very high ‘in your face’ damage, but low defence
• Knight(?) – Fighter with magical skills
• Exemplar – Has self buffs and opponent debuffs
• Elementalist – Fire & Water caster
• Voodoo – Life & Death caster – heavy on debuffing and dot
• Arcanist – Lightening caster
• Spirit Walker – Ethereal damage
• Pyremaster – Fire & Death caster

Ok, ok, I have too many casters and not enough melee

Welcome

Welcome to the official Blog of theWulfen. This blog will be used to record the progress I am making on the new theWulfen game (W2). Its going to be a combination of ‘work done sofar’ and a sounding board for ideas.

Feel free to post comments, but please be aware that they will require approval before they appear on the site.  I’ve learned that mistake the hard way before now…