Hello community! We are coming with yet another development diary, in which we are going to talk about what we changed related to player health and stats!
By doing more difficulty balance testing and looking through the feedback from the community, we decided the stats system needs an overhaul! As a result, most of the health system changes come from the things we improved with the player stats!
We started by simplifying what affects stats and what stats are affecting, meaning that there will be no more odd behavior between stats during passing time, etc. Some stats also have better names now, to make it easier to understand what their role is in the game (Fatigue is now Energy, Calories is now Hunger, Condition is now Health).
We also ditched the clumsy stats menu and the annoying on-screen bars by moving the stats to the player’s wristwatch, which we added back to the game. The wristwatch interface will appear by holding the [T] key.
Sanity is now more than a “visual” stat that does nothing! With the overhaul update, we wanted to bring our original sanity mechanic idea to life. So, in addition to the audio-only hallucinations, when going insane, the character will now experience visual hallucinations in the form of wolf packs that will attack you. Failing to defend yourself from hallucinations will result in fainting, which can be dangerous when coupled with low stats.
For all this to make sense and be manageable to the player, we also had to rethink the sanity interface. To achieve this, we moved the sanity indicator to the first person HUD, and we've added sanity notifications that show exactly how much sanity you lose or gain after doing certain actions.
The first thing we wanted to change about afflictions was their complexity. The old affliction system was hard to understand and had a lot of effects that didn't make much sense in the context of our game.
- In the overhaul update, we aim to make afflictions more straightforward and less cluttered. To do so, we started by removing some of the afflictions which we thought didn't make a lot of sense, as well as removing the "positive" afflictions (Energized, Last Resort, etc.), which are now just health effects that get triggered when the case may be.
- We've also added a new affliction named "Fever". This affliction can be triggered by other diseases and can rapidly kill you if it goes unnoticed. Thus, we decided to add a thermometer icon that will appear on HUD so that the player is aware of it as soon as possible.
- Lastly, we have re-designed the way treatments work from the ground up. No more complicated treatments in the form of loot recipes! Rather than completing complex treatment schemes, treatments now have a progress bar that can be filled by passing time and baring the effects, and/or by consuming natural medication such as herbs, mushrooms, or even resin.
We are working hard on polishing the game and adding new features for the Overhaul Update. Until the update is ready for release, we aim to publish a weekly dev diary with the new awesome stuff we add to the game to keep everyone updated. So stay tuned for more!
Feedback is important for us, especially now with all the big changes we are making to the game, so don't hesitate to let us know about your potential ideas! Also, let us know how you feel about what we're currently working on! We encourage everyone to get in touch with us over Discord or Steam Community!
And as always, thanks to everyone for the support!