In the Foreverlands prologue, experience works like this: at the end of a battle, if you won, the game calculates how difficult that battle was for you, by comparing your 'total party level' with the fight's 'challenge rating.' It then takes whatever experience value that fight was worth, and grants it in full to each of the goblins who were still conscious at the end of the fight.
The biggest piece of feedback we got about this was that it felt overly punishing to fragile breeds, like Spellsword, who are more likely to die before the end of a fight. Actually, Spellsword is an especially good example, because that breed is very powerful when used as a sort of bomb - using Breaker to jump behind enemy lines and then self-immolating with Nightmare. But doing so gives it no experience whatsoever. This system encourages really defensive play, which personally I love the more high risk, high reward style of play, and I want it to be viable.
As I've been working on the overworld and getting a sense of the broader design for Tenderfoot, I've been thinking a lot about pacing, and this is another issue with the Foreverlands system. For skillful players who play defensively, the above described system results in large numbers of your units levelling up completely in sync with each other. So after one fight you'll have no new skill points to play with, and then after another you'll suddenly have 4 level-ups to slowly shuffle through menus and attribute. It sucks!
The Foreverlands has an accelerated levelling system, too, and in the main game, where levels are further between, having all of your units synced up in exp means long periods of play where there's no change in your playstyle. It's alright, honestly, but it's obviously not ideal!
My go-to for solving design problems, stealing solutions from FFT, was a non-option this time, unfortunately. FFT's experience system, which grants exp per action successfully taken, encourages incredibly boring cheesing, spamming haste, punching yourself to heal yourself next round, etc. We talked through quite a few other games' implementations, trying to find something that felt rock solid.
My favorite discovery from these conversations was brought up by an old friend and collaborator (worked with us on Eidolon), Jacob Leach, who explained Chrono Cross's experience system. That game essentially does away with grinding entirely, instead granting level ups after boss fights. So at any point in the game, you're exactly the level they designed the content for. This seems so smart and cool and I wonder why more games don't try it. Tying narrative moments to system progression. 👌
However, that's not the direction we're heading with Tenderfoot. I like the sloppy openness that we get from having grindable fog like we do. The whole map is designed around giving paths for players who prefer to grind easy fights _and_ paths for players who prefer to rush the hard fights early. I don't want to ditch that design ethos.
So, long story aside, sorry, here's where we've ended up.
When you knock out a fog-goblin in a battle, their bones clatter to the ground, and left behind is a lingering cloud of spirit. That cloud lives on that grid space until you move a friendly unit on or through it, at which point the cloud's held experience (calculated based on the killed unit's challenge rating) is immediately granted to that unit. Spirit clouds also heal a small amount, and if the unit levels up in combat from the experience, they're healed to full. Any leftover experience clouds at the end of a battle are distributed among living goblins, with goblins nearer the clouds getting proportionally more of the experience.
I LOVE the way this plays out. Players have a lot of control over which of their units gets experience when, but there are a ton of complicating factors. The units closest to danger, most unlikely to get experience at the end of a battle (due to having been knocked out), are nearest to the clouds. And if they're actively taking damage, you're encouraged to use the clouds' healing to try to keep them alive. Aggressive play is rewarded by the healing bit especially. The clouds being tied to grid spaces, and being granted to units moving through them and not just onto them, really dramatically changes the meaning of specific move actions taken in battle.
Important to note I'm not the only combat designer (thank you Isa), but my personal ethos when it comes to Tenderfoot's combat has been to design actions that both alter and are altered by the board state, so that every system interacts with and complicates every other system, and decisions have cascading side-effects you always need to consider against their primary effect. Experience clouds obviously fit so nicely into this framework, creating new cascading side effects that make you care where enemies die, how you can control the areas of the map where clouds live, how you can safely move the right units through those clouds to either heal or distribute experience where you want it.
Feeling 💪😤