More Research on Weapons and Armor

Gettin up early for the win.

Today I just did more research. I finished looking at how Dark Souls, Skyrim, Battle Brothers, and Fire Emblem weapons are designed. It is usually pretty in-depth (aside from Skyrim). I pulled some good insights from them - durability seems to be a common feature (still don't quite understand why), need to have different weapon families, and need to tie the weapons into the progression of each character, among other things. Each of these games does things quite differently, it was very interesting to analyze. One thing I would like to represent in the game is weapon reach. I.e. a spear might have a range of 2 tiles while a sword might only have one.

Upon finishing these up I realized that I can't really design the weapons all alone and not consider armor, since those two concepts directly interact. So, I began doing another analysis of how armor works in each of those games. Usually, seems like armor is not as important as weapons. I would say Battle Brothers goes the most in depth with armor. Seems like the most important thing about armor is actually that it looks cool and distinct. Other than that, I need to do some thinking about how it will work - I could go with something like the Skyrim system, which is really simple; just damage reduction and the effect of the weight. Or, I could do something way more interesting like how it's done in Battle Brothers. I'm not so sure. I love how Battle Brothers does it but I think that the percentages of armor penetration and all might be a little more complex than I would like to go with this. We'll see.

Later!

Research for Weapons / Skills

 Today I focuses on researching how weapons work in other games. I have mostly figured out how I want vices and motivation to work, but I still am pretty unclear on how weapons and actions should work in battle. I think that it's worth figuring out how that should work before attempting to implement a skill tree or motivation because it might change how things work. Well, I could implement a lot of that without figuring out battle actions but whatever, I decided to do this research and design first.

Also today I got up at 6:30 to work and it went pretty well. I was able to focus probably about an hour and a half before I started to become distracted. Now I don't have much time before I need to get back to work and I think that is further affecting my focus. So, lesson for the future is that getting up early works, and need to have unbroken focus. It's difficult to get back on track once any distraction hits, and also the less time you have ahead of you to get sunk in the harder it is (for example if you know you only have 15 minutes then you are not likely to be able to focus very well).

I also know sometimes I would go to youtube to look for something important, for example gameplay of Fire Emblem which. I was studying, but I would immediately become distracted by so many things that popped up. Totally forgot what I was doing. So I need to set up a separate profile or something.

It's so weird how difficult it is to regain focus.

Continued Motivation / Vice Design Rework

More effort on reworking motivation and vices. I have come up with a simpler, more traditional system that still uses the ideas of Greed, Honor and Glory as distinct character traits. I'm basically going to use them like classes; so each one will have an associated set of unlockable perks. A character will only be one of these 3 vices, so we won't have as many stats to keep track of as a player. Motivation will be far simpler - it will just be at a set value at the beginning of battle based on the current Vice score of a character - i.e. Honor (4) will have a calculated motivation value in battle. The motivation stat will regen by a fixed amount per turn, and will not affect AP at all. At this point, it will only be used for different abilities the character can use. So all very traditional.

Still working out the details. Tomorrow or later today I'll clean things up a bit and see if I can get started breaking this work down for the next "sprint". 

Motivation Rework

 Today I did some analysis of Battle Brothers' Fatigue, Morale, and AP systems and found some very cool insight. I have decided I am going to just take Fatigue and Morale and combine them in my game. I've come up with a good description of the Motivation system: it represents the power of a character's aspirations, their will to live, and their dedication to their leader. It will be the long-term strategic resource that is used for actions, as opposed to the AP system being the short-term strategic resource, just like the Fatigue system was for Battle Brothers.

Kewl! 

Elegance Analysis

 Today, I just went over all the mechanics I could pick out in my game and rated each of them if by different "smells" of elegance based on the "Designing Games" book. 

As I sort of already knew, three things stand out as not elegant:

• Naming the character (or the concept of having a player character)
• Vices
• Motivation

Motivation/Vices especially are an issue. The way they work is just complicated. I think what I should do instead is just look at how other games' energy systems work and just use those, but keep the concept of vices and the 3 motivators. Just instead of a completely unique system (that is also really confusing and bad), I will just have a barely unique system. Which is fine. I do not need to be unique, I just need to make the game.

Tomorrow I'll fix up the scaling and put the game up on itch just to have it up there, and then I'll begin planning the rework of the system by doing research and playing some strategy games. 

AI Bugs Fixed and Itch.io Page Up

 Alright so I finally figured out most of the bugs w/ the AI picking tiles that were not appropriate. Now I am creating a web build for itch.io. Hooray! I want to just get it up and out there and start getting some feedback on it to see how things go. Obviously there's plenty to work on. But I think when I start getting feedback on a game it can be motivating, and recently with the game I think I've been needing that motivation.

I'm excited about it all. I do want to change my business name from StyleHead Games to something else because I just feel a little cringey about it I guess. It's a neat name but I don't feel I can name by business something from breaking culture - no matter if I certainly can break or not I just feel like it's weird to borrow a name like that. So I'll probably rename it to something about chicken. That feels more like me anyways.

So yeah, the web page will be up soon and I'll start shooting it around for feedback. And then we'll decide what's next. Cool. Making progress.

I'm hoping that this can be my best work yet. And I don't see why not. I'm thinking right now I'm not going to be strict about a deadline, I'm going to focus more on making the game as best as I can. Of course I need to put the game out there at some point but I guess I would like to see how it can develop before deciding to bring it to a close. Survive the Squids was really rushed and it shows. Which was a fine experience but I would like to do things right this time.

Later!

Debugging the New AI

Working out improved AI. It's pretty straightforward which I am happy about. However I'm having some bugs regarding pawns moving into tiles occupied by other pawns, and pawns attacking eachother while not adjacent. It'll take some ironing out. Tomorrow I'll bet I can figure out how to fix this particular issue. Once I get this into a stable state I'll throw in the soundtrack and some sound FX and put it up on itch.io for some playtesting.

Cool!

I have been slacking!

So I haven't been working on this at all. That's crazy. I've hit the biggest slump in a good while. It's been like a whole month of slacking.

I don't really even know why. I just lost motivation I guess.

But I brought my computer downstairs from my office. I think I'll put it next to my bed and start my day every day w/ some work in bed perhaps. 

Yeah. Sounds good.