Update: This week I've been designing the combat and item system. But before we get into that, be warned, ahead there lies:
*** SPOILERS ***ItemsAlright, you like spoilers? Good. Items in Moonman are now defined with a number of properties. Here are some of the basic items and their properties:
The first four columns include the name, sprite, and notes to myself. STY indicates the style -- all these are melee weapons, except for the spear which is a jab-type weapon. The next two columns indicate the kinds of damage the weapon does.
There are currently 3 types of damage:
- BASH damage, which a hammer or club might inflict;
- SLASH damage, as caused by a sword or axe; and
- POKE damage, caused by pokey things like spears, tridents, daggers, etc.
So, for example, a Pickaxe deals either Poke or Slash damage, at a level of 1. When attacking a creature or enemy the combat system uses these values to determine if, and how much, damage you will do. All living things have natural resistances against being bashed, slashed and poked, and humanoids (like Moonman) can wear armour to provide extra resistance. Stone armour, for instance, would provide slash and poke resistance, but would crumble under strong bash attacks. The level in "SLA 3" correlates with the damage you can cause, but in a non-linear way.
The next column SPD just determines how fast an attack is. DURability is something I'll be toying with to force a finite lifetime for weapons. I've yet to explore that, but it'll hopefully be intuitive -- if you hit a rock with a sword, eventually the sword will break. Once [broken] an item becomes basically useless, with all stats dramatically reduced. [Broken] is an example of an aspect, which is the ASP column. Some weapons you'll find will already have certain aspects, and some may already be broken.
MIN1 and MIN2 determine the Mining Quality (MQ) of an item. A Digstick is good at digging, a hatchet good at chopping and so on. When you hit an object or block in the world, these values determine if, and how quickly, you can destroy or mine that thing. Sometimes these are hard constraints, and other times not. Soil, for instance, will be mined quicker with a Digstick. Lumber, however, cannot be harvested without at least a CHOP of 1 ... so you will no longer be able to mine trees with shovels. Mining quality also affects non-fixed resources, such as snails. If you hit them with something they will just go smoosh. If, however, you hit them with a NET 1 item then you'll be able to mine them.
SET indicates if an item is part of a set. Wearing a full set (helmet, armour, shield) and wielding the set item may give you an extra bonus. Oh, notice I didn't say pants? There are no more pants. Pants are now merged with armours.
ON HIT and PASSIVE are extra actions or magics that an item has. A hammer, for instance, has a knock action that is triggered when you hit an enemy. It will knock the enemy back a short distance. A passive property is always activated as long as you hold or wear the item. Here are a few of the planned magical items which will have these kinds of effects.
Resource / Crafting FlowGiven a set of mining qualities and items, the next step is to design the flow of these things throughout a game. I've come up with a number of ways to approach this, and of these, a simple flowchart is quite instructive to look at. Here's a small part of a large chart I'm working on -- as I try to spread the resources and items throughout the game:
From this we can see that in order to get a shovel (a DIG 2) item, we need a workbench, lumber, and iron. Iron, in turn, requires coal, iron ore, and a primal furnace. Coal is found in a coal mine and requires an ORE 1 item to mine it properly. And on and on. Laying this out helps me plan where and when certain resources appear, and to also take a guess at what abilities and weapons the player will have in certain areas of the game.
I imagine this is how you'd design a linear RPG-type game, but my ultimate plan for Moonman is to have many different paths through the game. One game, for instance, may have the forest burnt out completely, and in this case there needs to be resource paths that bend around the lumber requirement. I'm not entirely sure how to go about designing such a system, but I'll try to come up with a few alternative pathways and then generalise them. We'll see!
See you next time!
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