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[RyanHuggins]

Alright, so I recently posted my project here at the TIGForums and I have a design idea that I would very much like some feedback on. It's a very simple, maybe not incredibly innovative system, but I would appreciate your thoughts.

First of all, my game is based on the idea that my main character, Lily, is in the early stages of a degenerative disease. In the spirit of this, the character begins at her highest level, and as the game progresses, she can gain experience from enemies and such, but as she receives a more and more substantial amount of damage, she loses experience from her overall experience pool and will inevitably level down. The game will never blatantly state that Lily CAN level down, but when it occurs for the first time, the game will let you know pretty explicitly (with an explanation for why and everything). The idea of not blatantly telling the player some things about the game until they occur was an idea to add to the mystery surrounding the disease itself.

In relation to exploration and combat, the character Lily has a stress meter that increases in stressful situations and when she takes damage/falls from a distance. I added this to encourage player patience and to caution against some dangerous, but potentially rewarding, jumps and enemy engagements. Once the stress bar reaches a point higher than 65% of it's maximum tolerance, Lily's shield disappears, leaving her open to physical wounds without the usual buffer. Once it passes 90%, Lily will take continuous direct damage to her health (similar to being poisoned). The stress bar reduces itself slowly at all times that it isn't increasing due to another event. Additionally, the higher your stress levels are, the more damage you take from enemy encounters.

In relation to exploration and pacing, I'm planning to incorporate a system where the player can interact with objects in the environment and find items solely for the purpose of figuring out where to go next or to uncover background information about the world itself. The objects will A)Open a window where you can read about the object/hear Lily's thoughts about its purpose or B)Be added to Lily's inventory, where she can examine the objects later when their purposes have become apparent to Lily (for example, she doesn't know what something means when you get the object, but later on, it dawns on her exactly what it can mean).

I was hoping to use this item system to avoid discerning information through cutscenes only and to help the player to figure things out by themselves. It would cut down on the time required to make cutscenes as well as make the game more challenging, in a hopefully engaging sort of manner.

[stevesan]

That's a very interesting thing to explore, I think. I have no concrete feedback aside from good luck and experiment a lot And don't be afraid to reject traditional RPG mechanics that may conflict with your new ones.

I think whether or not mechanics will work totally depends on how you design your game around them. But, at first glance, I think the disease and stress things sound interesting.

[RyanHuggins]

Thank you for the response. I'm hearing right now, that my controls are a little finicky, but once I pass that point, I'll probably attempt to better incorporate the stress and de-leveling mechanics. :D

[im9today]

mario has jumpe cancer he cant jump on bowser at the end and you just has to watch bowser fire blow you. fade to black. ][\

[RyanHuggins]

That would be rather entertaining in a joke game of some sort, but I'm not sure how constructive the comment is. :X

[Dale.Luck]

Keeping exploration in mind, how would the degeneration of the main character make any sense? Are you just "degenerating" her in terms of health, or are you actually taking abilities away from her? I think it'd be pretty interesting to see a game where the loss of ability allows the player to progress - for example, having two platforms, one above the other, and the player progresses by jumping, but the jump height is fixed and the only way the player can get to the area that the lower platform leads to is when the jump height lowers after they've done so-and-so.

Of course, that's just one idea, but thinking of ways to make a backwards-leveling system work will be a massive challenge for you. Pull it off though, and I'm betting a lot of people will be interested in it.

[Lynx]

One concern I'd have with a 'stress bar' is, are you essentially rewarding the player for standing around doing nothing?  If you don't want that to happen, you should figure out how the player gets rid of stress-- maybe stress is reset at 'checkpoints' which might appear as bars lamp posts where the character stands around smoking, etc.  Then your objective becomes to get to the next checkpoint before stress maxes out.