I’m Albert A. from the design crew. Last time around, Brendan gave us some insight on the lore surrounding vestiges, but we haven’t talked about our actual process for making interesting mechanics for vestiges.
The simplest way to describe vestiges are equipment that grant you passive effects. Most games have this in some form, usually they grant stat bonuses to your character, or if they have a unique effect, it’s usually because they’re a rare item.
In Inkbound, we want vestiges to give you power, but our primary goal is to have different combinations of vestiges that feel and play a lot different from each other. We also want vestiges to alter how you interact with certain mechanics during combat, not just because it’s interesting, but having more mechanical interactions means more opportunities for potential synergies.That’s why for the most part, we don’t just plop a stat on a vestige and call it a day (although there are a few vestiges that only grant stats).
Internally we call the idea of distinct playstyles ‘narrowness’, where the more ‘narrow’ a vestige is, the more specific the build or playstyle that vestige can be good for. You don’t want a vestige to be too narrow, even if it’s strong, because if it’s something you rarely pick that requires very specific circumstances to be good, then it’s generally not interesting. You also don’t want a vestige to not be narrow enough, if a vestige is just too universally good, then it trivializes any other choices you have against it, which is also not interesting.
Generally, the more narrow a vestige is, the more powerful it can be, and vice versa. So the higher the rarity, the more niche vestiges can be, while giving a lot of power. ‘Epic’ is the tier with the most ‘narrow’ but strong vestiges. ‘Legendary’ vestiges also tend to be strong with a particular build, but we want to make sure that when you’re always excited to see a ‘Legendary’, which can be hard if legendaries are too narrow.
Forged Lightning Bolts is really narrow, probably our most narrow vestige in the game. There are 11 other total vestiges that allow you to Smite enemies, making this vestige only good if you have one of those.
Cultivated Harmonies is the opposite, pretty much every build can get use out of a Will discount. But unlike something that gives you Smite, or allows you to inflict Burn, this vestige doesn’t have as much potential to be improved by another vestige/stat upgrade.
Right now, there’s 200+ vestiges in the game, which is a lot!
There’s a bunch of other considerations at play for what makes a ‘good’ vestige in terms of our design goals, so I’ll just list them out.
- Should try making it not be too strong on its own, but being able to imagine how strong it could be with other combinations of vestiges.
- Should try to work with a mechanic that is underutilized or we would like to see more of (I’m looking at you Bleed).
- Should try to tie in the mechanic with the vestige theme/lore, or vice-versa.
We’ve narrowed down the kinds of effects we want vestiges to do, now we need to narrow it down further based on what we can do.
For example, right now we don’t have the capability to add in a vestige effect like, “On turn start, charm a random Enemy for a turn. That Enemy will attack other enemies this turn.” Not only do we just not have the tools for Enemies to switch teams, we also wouldn’t want to open that can of worms, since it would have a drastic amount of design and technical repercussions:
- Enemies and players are designed to have different stat blocks. Enemies can deal single digit number attacks, but have multi-digit number HPs. Players are the opposite. We’d need to scale charmed enemy stats somehow.
- The AI system wasn’t built to work with the expectation that units could switch sides mid-combat. There can be several instances in code where the AI makes use of the guarantee that its targets are players, and this would break those.
- It should be clear in just a single glance which enemies are or are not on your team. A status effect icon over their head wouldn’t be enough, so we would need to figure out a way to communicate that UI-wise.
It’s not that charming enemies couldn’t be fun, I think it would be pretty neat. But there’s definitely some more mechanics we can think of that would probably be more interesting and involve a lot less investment.
So what tools do we have to make vestiges? Well vestiges are essentially status effects, which have 3 big components.
- Stats (Ability Power, Physical Power, etc)
- Procs (On turn start, On hitting, etc)
- Actions (Deal damage, restore health, etc).
Whenever making interesting effects, it’s usually with Procs and Actions. And when we’re talking about creating new mechanics, we’re usually talking about adding Procs or adding functionality to Actions. Procs are ‘when something happens’, and actions are ‘what happens’.
List of procs
Given these tools, and an outline of the design goals for vestiges, the process of actually making a new vestige usually falls in line to one of these processes
- You have a broad mechanical idea like “deal more damage when you’re low health”.
- You have a theme idea for an item, like a “magic pen” or a “possessed book”, and try to find a mechanical way to express that.
- You’re playing proc + action ‘mad-libs’ for any interesting combinations that haven’t been covered yet, or for any mechanics that are underutilized.
And then you put it in the game!
So, that’s all about vestiges. I hope y’all enjoyed this deep dive, see you in the Atheneum!