Stu's Rusty Bucket

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Skills again

Been thinking more about skills lately. I had only 1 attribute, speed, this is used to govern combat ordering.

I’ve been tweaking up some additional things, going to move speed out and create some general skills, something along the lines of;

- physical fatigue
- mental fatigue

All will be 100% based, rather than skill level based, and will probably fluctuate wildly throughout the game. This will impact things like how susceptible to poison the player is etc, ability to cast spells. Beginning players will start out something like 50% or 60%. Advancing physical skills will increase your base physical fatigue, so to learning other things will train the mental aspect. Some spells will require a certain skill level as well as a certain mental level.

Ive decided, the order of combat shall be randomised. Everyone will be put in the list and picked to go randomly.

If in testing that doesn’t pan out very well, I may just end up with a fast/normal/slow designation for every monster (PC’s will be normal) and randomly pick from the fast bucket until empty, then normal bucket then slow bucket etc.

For some reason, I keep getting stuck opon this order of combat thing, when it shouldnt be such a big deal, but I keep wanting to factor in a speed variable or something somewhere.

The skill list has been closed out, I’m finally happy with the result. All weapon types begat a certain skill. Swords require a sword skill, Hammer requires hammer, mace for mace etc etc etc. It was a long skill list. The more I thought about it, the more apparent that it was fairly useless. All the weapons were much the same but changed only in name. This first game is not about trying to add in the complexity of a roguelike which gets years of playing and balancing.

So, to that order I knocked back the skill list to something I had originally but later scrapped,

Weapons now fall into one of two skills
- Melee combat (for all swords, axes, maces etc)
- Ranged combat (for all bows, slings, javelins, darts, stars, meteor hammers, three sectional staff, manriki, etc)

The only downside is that it categorises long distance ranged weapons (bow) with short distance ranged weapons (three sectional staff).

Some weapons just don’t categorise very well, like a spear, its long range but also short range. A hand axe is a melee weapon, but can be thrown..

There are also base line weapons that don’t require any skill (knife, sling etc) giving every character something to start with.