Wednesday, August 11, 2010

"Leaky" stamina, and other "balance" changes

So, I'm still hacking out changes to make Magecrawl playable.

The major change of the night implements what I hope is a solution to the HP problem I talked about last post. I decided the underlying problem was that going from 100% stamina to 5% stamina involved zero risk. Now, once your stamina goes below a cutoff (currently 80%), there is a chance that some of the damage will "leak" through and apply directly to the underlying health. The chance is inversely proportional to the amount of stamina, so you are much more likely to leak at 20% stamina than 75%. This changes make combat more dangerous overall, but having lots of stamina is still useful but not overpowering.

Other changes I've implemented this week include:
  • Map generator won't generate a horde of monsters on top of the player starting position
  • Monsters will notice the player from farther away when they are wearing heavy armor (noise).
  • Toughness skill will now give health instead of stamina, giving the player the option to "buy" more long term health.
  • Bug fixes, seriously lots of bug fixes.

1 comment:

droid factorial said...

One mechanism I have seen in Armored Princess 2 to counter a related problem is Rage. It gives you a reason not to hide under a table while you recharge and may trick the player into fights more frequently than rational. This behaves kind like mana, but it discharges outside of combat, and the only reliable way to increase it is to take or receive damage. So while you could wait a few hours to bring your mana to the top, doing so would completely drain your rage. Rage fuels a unique set of spells, those of your dragon pet.

The trick would be to make sure that points of rage fuel unique and useful abilities, otherwise you could get similar effects by ignoring rage and using a renewable source of energy. Also, you may want to prevent getting rage from damage dealt from rage fueled abilities.

And adding this feature would give you more to balance. Because balancing is easy - wait, that's not right.