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[Joccish]

In short
Necken is a tile based adventure game set in the Swedish forest. Gather resources from trees, rocks and gold veins to defeat the creatures of the forest. Each tile affect you differently, so beware!

By travelling deeper and deeper into the forest, you will get closer to Necken, the water spirit who rules the nearby waters.



About
Necken is a really mechanical tactical adventure with some rogue-ish elements. The design is focused on minimalism and tactical choices. The combat and the level itself has minimum randomness, and is supposed to be played with strategy in mind. This makes the game quite deterministic, but that's kind of the purpose.

In Necken, the player is able to activate tiles on the map, each doing something different, like gathering resources from trees and stones, attacking inhabited hollow stumps, repairing gear and eating berries to regain health.
A separate activation system is currently being built, where the player is allowed to upgrade/repair the tile itself, to really take advantage of the resources he gathered.

The combat system is a bit different than usual. The core idea of the combat is "The source you use, will get damaged" The player has three sources of damage to choose from: Body, Sword and Shield. Each damage source have a durability that also affects the damage - Full durability means full damage. Each time the player attack, the chosen source gets worn, which means that the player can choose where to direct the damage taken.

This means that if you choose to attack with your sword, you will deal damage according to the swords durability, but the damage taken from the enemy will deplete the sword durability.



Development
Currently the game is built on four pillars: Combat, Gathering, Crafting and Quests. Right now, the combat and the gathering is being focused, since that's the core mechanics of the game. The upgrade mechanic is being built, so that the repair stations can be repaired when the boars destroy them.

Youtube Devlogs

[Joccish]

Just wrote an article about how to spawn enemies based on player greed that will be implemented in the game shortly. Here'a short cut from the article plus the link to the whole thing.

What you need to know about the game

Necken is a tile based game that is very mechanically driven. The game focuses on strategy and tries to stay away from “action based skills”. Each decision you make is based on strategy.

The game has two currencies: Wood and Stone. They are gathered from any Wood tile or Stone tile. Each of these tiles have charges that recharge differently. Wood recharges each tick - each “turn”, while stone only recharges once the tile is completely depleted.
What I’m trying to build

The resource gathering is quite dull, and to make it more interesting, there will be a risk added to it.
The idea is to incorporate this: “When the player is greedy, the forest will defend itself”. This will involve spawning a new set of enemies based on each resource - a wooden maiden and a stone troll.

This means that the level will defend itself by creating enemies when the player gathers resources, without feeling unfair, unbalanced or too flat. The ideal approach is to increase the difficulty over time. If the player stays too long, the difficulty will increase, so that the player doesn’t want to stay longer than possible.



The problem to be fixed

The first one I mentioned already, the gathering is quite dull. The second reason is that the players have the possibility to gather a large sum of resources, and never have to worry about it for the rest of the level.

One obvious way to solve this is to add a maximum cap - “the player can only hold 20 wood and 20 stone”. This could however be solved in a more interesting way.
The components needed are these:

* When does a resource based enemy spawn?
* Where does it spawn?
* How do this increase over time?
* How do this tie into greed?

When to spawn #1 - Time based spawn

Each second is called a ‘tick’ in the game. A new turn. Enemies spawn and move based on ticks, resources recharges based on tick etc.
“For every x ticks, a resource enemy will spawn”.
To make this a bit more tied with the questions above, let’s evolve this.
“For every x ticks, a resource enemy will spawn have a chance to spawn, based on the resources the player is carrying”.
With this, a system could work like this: If the player is above a 'safe threshold’ (let’s say 10) of resources, there’s a slight chance an enemy will spawn. The more resources the player is gathering, the higher the chance. But, we also need something to monitor the fact that an enemy has spawned. If the player have 50 resources (“high chance”), and an enemy will spawn - what happens the next time? Equal chance for another spawn? Or, less chance, since the last enemy “used up” the already high probability?
If the chance is the same, this will spawn a lot of enemies when the chance is high enough.
If the chance is lowered each time an enemy is spawned, the player can gather a lot of resources still.
It could work something like this:

“Each x tick,
If the player have above 10 resources,
There’s a chance of 1% per resource above 10 resources, minus 5 for each spawned and alive enemy.”

Each time the player kills a resource based enemy, the offset will be lowered. The right call is to avoid killing them. This approach will be very affected by where the enemy is spawned, that will be mentioned later in this article.

...

Read the full article here
http://jocce.com/post/159635140760/designing-enemy-spawn-mechanics

[Joccish]

Devlog Update #7

Watch the video devlog here:



In this Necken update, the following features/updates has been added: A partial HUD rework, building of tiles, combat HUD updates, and the protection - an extension of normal combat.

The HUD
While not adding anything spicy to the game, it makes it a bit more clear. The plain numbers and icons has been reworked into a bar, with some smooth movement. Both the normal HUD and combat HUD has gotten some polish in terms of 'juice' - the small effects that improves the flavour of the game.

While not being final, they look much better, while not cluttering the screen. Or, at least that's what I think.

Spawn combat
The spawn tiles needs to be destroyed, and that has not changed. How you destroy them, however, has been updated. Before, the player activated the tile to deal sword damage to the tile, while not in combat.

Now, instead, the player enters combat with the spawn tile for one round (with three moves). After that, the combat is aborted. This gives the player the ability to choose which damage source to use - the body, the weapon or the shield.

Protection
As an extension to the combat system, protection was added to the enemies. This means that each enemy has strengths and weaknesses against the three damage sources, in three stages - normal, weak and strong.

Strong negates 2 damage, weak adds 2 damage and normal is, well, just normal.

In the case where the player fights a spawn tile - the spawn tile is weak to sword damage, and takes +2 damage whenever it is used. This makes for a much deeper combat system, where the tactical choice between using the 'effective' damage source or not could be important.

New enemy
While not that exciting, a new enemy was added. It spawns from a spawn tile whenever another spawn tile is destroyed, and it heads straight for the house tile. If the house tile is destroyed, the game is lost, so the player has to be ready for the attack.

Building
While not fully fleshed out yet, the player now has an ability to build stuff on empty tiles. For now the buildings are just placeholders, but will eventually help the player beat the enemies roaming the level. The first building will be a wall. Simple but effective. It will stop the enemies from roaming freely.

The player builds by holding the space button (activation button). If the activation button is pressed (not held), the player will activate a tile instead.

[Joccish]

Devlog Update #8

Watch the video devlog here:

The main features takes the game a bit towards the rogue lite realm: Random items, random levels and exploration.

[KPas]

I like this game because of its simplicity and balance.

The following is a good example, I think:

The resource gathering is quite dull, and to make it more interesting, there will be a risk added to it.
The idea is to incorporate this: “When the player is greedy, the forest will defend itself”. This will involve spawning a new set of enemies based on each resource - a wooden maiden and a stone troll.

I also like woods.

Good luck!