Hey everyone, it's time again for another WIP post. I haven't been as active with day to day development but been brainstorming, taking notes, and figuring out my next moves for the direction to take the game. I also decided to slow down on trying to push updates each month as my work schedule and school schedule are interfering a bit too much preventing me from being able to work on the game.
However, here's what I have figured out.
One of the biggest issues I've come across is how to make the gameplay more enjoyable. Right now it's a fairly simple gameplay loop you start out with nothing, kill monsters, get gear, upgrade gear, and try to beat the game. There isn't anything wrong with this but there's room for improvement. I took a week long break to play World of Warcraft Classic and there were 2 systems within it that really got me thinking and that is the talent system and trinkets.
Talents are a pretty cool way to personalize your character and class to your play style. Each level you get points and those points go into 3 talent trees, you obviously won't have enough points to max everything out so that's where your choices as a player come into effect.
Talents do pretty much 2 things, one is boost stats or damage output of specific spells or types of spells. The other is give you some sort of passive ability or buff. For example, having a boosted mana regeneration after killing an enemy, or increasing melee damage by 5%. The reason why I like this system is that you can become quite overpowered if you do your build right, are the correct class, and have weapons and gear that go along with this talent.
Trinkets on the other hand have active passive bonuses and some act like spells, where you use them, they go on a timer and you get some short lived bonus, buff, or other interesting utility. So overall this can end up having synergy with your class, weapons, and talents, creating a really overpowered build.
What does all of this mean for Project Dagger though? The answer to that is I am working on removing the attribute leveling system currently in the game, and replacing it with talent trees and talent points. I am also working on extending the equipment system to allow for Trinkets to be equipped. You will only have 2 Trinket slots, and Trinkets will be found at the end of a level, currently there are stat bonuses that you find at the end of a level but these will be replaced with Trinkets. My goal is that with how balanced the game is to where everything is pretty much scaling 1:1, that talents and trinkets will come in handy to really boost that where, with the right build and trinkets you may scale 3:1 and absolutely dominate every enemy thrown at you, bosses and all.
Moving on from Trinkets and talents though I have added in 2 new classes, the Shaman and the Berserker. Shamans spawn a Totem that does a projectile based attack in a ring outwards from itself at 50% of the players currently equipped weapon damage or just 3 damage if the player has no weapon equipped.
The Berserker has a buff that decreases defense but boosts attack at equal rates. So you become a glass cannon of sorts, primarily useful if you have full health or are in a pinch.
Some of the other things I'm working on are Achievements, and new weapons, as well as introducing some enemies that haven't been seen in the game since the pre-release beta.
So yeah, pretty cool stuff, 0.5.0 may release still by the end of the month or if not by first week of October. An early version of the talent system and trinket system may be included in 0.5.0 or pushed out to 0.6.0.
But yeah, that's going to be it for this WIP, consider joining the Discord server to stay up to date on everything Project Dagger.