Hi! First of all, Shardpunk has nearly reached 400 reviews on Steam, and with very high positive rating! Thank you, everyone!
Now, let's talk about expanding the stress mechanism.
Note: the below changes were (well, they still are) available on a beta branch, and I managed to get some nice feedback about them (and fix a few interesting bugs). They will be added to the main game in the upcoming update, which will probably land on Thursday.
Until now, stress was a stat that - if not reduced - could make the player's life difficult. If character's stress meter was too high, the character would panic (meaning that the player would lose control over them), or gain a negative quirk.
Characters gained stress in different situations, the most common ones being getting hit, healing with stimpaks and uncovering new foes. Stress could be reduced by killing enemies or using certain combat/shelter actions. Also, there is one combat tactic that reduces stress.
All in all, more experienced players were able to easily manage stress levels during combat with clever usage of skills and combat tactics, which greatly reduced the impact I would like it to have on the game. Characters were not receiving that many stress-related quirks (if any; I was able to finish a run on Hard with no quirks) because of that.
What is more, players fairly noticed that receiving stress for simply spotting new enemies might be a little too exaggerated. In some cases, characters would receive stress for a single uncovered enemy, in others - the same amount of stress for a pack of rats.
After one of the players suggested that stress could behave similar to hit points (hit points in Shardpunk only get temporarily healed during combat - you then have to "really" heal them in shelter), I've decided to explore this design more - and that's how the dread system was born.
How the dread system works:
1) Every character has a dread bar next to the stress bar. Dread can have a max of 6 points.
2) EVERY stress point that the character gains during combat is remembered, and then is counted after a mission ends. If a character healed some stress during combat, it does NOT reduce the number of remembered gained stress.
Example: if a character gains 10 stress and heals 5 stress during combat, they end up with 5 stress points. Still, at the end of combat, the total number of cumulated stress by a character will be 10.
3) Stress still needs to be managed during combat. If a character gets to max stress, they will panic/go berserk. That being said, a character can no longer gain a quirk due to maxed stress level. Also, characters do not longer gain stress by spotting enemies.
4) At the end of combat, cumulated stress for every character is counted, and for every 5 cumulated stress, the character gains 1 dread point. All stress points are zeroed after combat.
5) Before progressing to the shelter phase, the player needs to perform a quirk roll. The % of receiving a quirk depends on the number of Dread points.
6) Dread can only be taken care of during shelters. All shelter skills have been altered so that they deal with dread, and not with stress (which is always zero during shelter phases and does not really matter there).
7) Quirks that characters receive during combat are now treatable. The "Rest" shelter action allows the player to partially treat a random quirk. After a quirk is treated 3 times, it disappears.
So there you have it! I believe that this new approach makes the stress-related stuff more fun and will make stress-reducing (well, it's dread-reducing now!) shelter skills more useful.
Introduction of dread mechanics will not affect existing saves, so if you want to try them out, start a new run.
As always, do leave me as much feedback as possible! I'd like to know whether you enjoy the new stuff. Take care!