Hello again, Survivors!
In our recent Lab posts, we've been talking about ways to create a wide variety of maps at limited cost, mainly focusing on map modularity and procedural generation.
Today, I'd like to move from maps to systems and talk about how we're reworking the Combat System, the backbone of the game.
Core Design Intention of the Current Combat System
The main intent of the Combat System is to emphasize the tactics in "Tactics RPG" within the framework of a “Medieval Creature Apocalypse" narrative theme. Every system created is our answer to the question “How can we achieve that?”
Based on the Early Access version, here are the key elements of the combat system and the design intent behind each.
- If an Ally is spotted in an Enemy's "Line of Sight," an "Alarm" will sound, and nearby enemies will immediately swarm.
- Move carefully to avoid being caught by monsters (Theme)
- How you start the battle in terms of the terrain and enemy/ally positions can make a big difference in the outcome (Tactics)
- Enemies can use “Catch” to impede movement when adjacent to an Ally.
- Create psychological pressure in facing hordes of monsters (Theme)
- Increase the importance of "battlefield maneuvering" skills such as pushing/pulling with TP (Tactics)
- Both Allies and Enemies can deal high damage, so you'll need to deal as much damage as possible to eliminate Enemies within your Turn.
- Increase the "Threat" of monsters, giving a sense of urgency to defeat them (Theme)
- Use WP/TP, resource allocation and battlefield manipulation to make it fun to find opportunities to maximize player firepower (Tactics)
There are additional elements such as "avoiding overlapping features between weapons/tools", "giving all enemies clear strengths/weaknesses in their abilities", and "creating unintentional encounters through view restrictions such as walls and doors", but these are the three most important parts of the game’s combat.
While the base system puts quite a bit of pressure and constraint on the player, we decided that the excitement of breaking out of that constraint and unleashing a lot of damage through the “Battlefield Escape/Manipulation” technique was a key element of the game's combat system’s fun factor.
However, in Early Access, we found that the "Designed Learning Curve” was too steep as we mentioned in our previous Dev Note while talking about linearity.
For example, after finishing the Tutorial, the second stage, "Monastery," already requires you to have a solid grasp of the basic systems and your character's counter skills in order to progress successfully.
While many people have commented on the fun of getting their head around this progression, and we're confident in it, we've found that most players (even those who are already familiar with similar genres) don't yet have a good grasp of the underlying systems by the Monastery stage.
As a result, we saw a lot of players abandoning the game at this stage.
So, our redesign challenge for combat content was "How do we keep the fun factor, but make it so that players feel like they're learning the system as they play?"
Redesign Principles and Challenges
Revisiting the underlying system with a view to redesigning the learning curve raised a new issue. This is that many of the foundational elements of fun are designed to call on the player to react to a punishing situation, rather than to present them with a situation they can take advantage of.
For example, in the case of the first foundation, the Sight System, there's no way for the player to use it in a way that makes it useful to them - the only thing that's immediately recognizable is the punishing situation, the fact that "if you get caught, enemies will come."
Of course, to help players "take advantage" of this, we've given them a Two-handed Axe as a default weapon, which gives a "high critical chance when attacking from out of sight," and a Pebble Pouch as the first Tool, which "allows players to lure enemies away and open up a vantage point," as the Tutorial demonstrates.
However, based on our observations of Early Access play patterns, we found that many players were unable to understand and utilize the intent of this content.
Our conclusion was that the contextual meaning of the Skill (the difference between enemies being aware and unaware, the meaning of the out-of-sight condition itself, the value of the critical hit increase, the relative value of the horizontal slash, and so on) needed to be fully understood in order to be able to use it effectively, and until all of these factors were understood, "Enemy Vision" felt more like a punishing situation than a tactical tool.
While we observed a small percentage of players utilizing “Ambush Chop” as intended once they passed the Monastery and moved onto the Tavern stage, we found that many players either didn't understand the intent of “Pebble Pouch” or found it too difficult to utilize.
While the basic intent is to create favorable terrain and have enemies come to us instead of us having to spend TP, the tactical play that comes from taking advantage of this requires a much deeper understanding of the game's overall systems and context than just “Shooting from the Hip".
Of course, we don't think it's a bad design direction to utilize these elements to add tactical depth to the game - that's the whole point of designing a game to be fun, and we want to give players as much of that "depth" as possible.
The problem is, however, that it's unrealistic to expect players to understand and utilize all of these elements from the very beginning of a game, so we need to come up with a new answer to the question of how much fun we should have in the beginning.
Because we don't think that simply making something "less difficult" while keeping the same system/content design as before automatically makes it "more fun".
How We're Improving Core Design Intent
After thinking about these issues, our new direction is to maintain the design intent of each core element but add or change new elements that players can actively utilize.
For example, in the case of the "Ambush Chop" skill in the example above, we're testing a way to make it a powerful damage bonus to your first attack against an unaware enemy in the base system, rather than tied to a specific weapon or skill.
If this is implemented on top of the base system and communicated through tutorials, I think the end result will be that the first Key Element, the “Sight System”, will be recognized as something that can be actively utilized, not just as a punishment (an alert device for swarming enemies).
By making the Two-handed Axe's "Ambush Chop" skill more "Situation Specific," either by changing it to a different effect or by making the damage of the attack more powerful compared to other weapon skills, the intent would be communicated through the underlying system and better utilized by those with a deeper understanding of the game.
Along those lines, we're also experimenting with a different direction for the second core element, "Catch/Caught" which could be more proactive, but that's another story that requires quite a bit of explanation, so I'll save that for next week's "Lab" post.
In fact, this week's plan was originally to be a follow-up to last week's Lab post, with a detailed explanation of the combat system changes we're testing and the results of our experiments.
However, as we were writing it, we realized that our intentions wouldn't be conveyed if we didn't first share some context on "why we’ve made these decisions," so for now, we're simply giving you some context on the combat system rethinking in a "Dev Note" format.
We'll be back next week with a more detailed look at our test results!
Thank you,
REMORE