Hi everyone,
First of all, Merry Christmas! I hope it will give you a few days to relax and gather your strength. As for me, I want to deliver a wonderful game to you all, so I'll enjoy the holidays sometime later.
Today I’ll talk about the new character system in Dragon Ruins II.
The original featured only 4 stats, which worked just fine for a microgame. However, a bigger adventure demanded a deeper, more nuanced system, which had to stay true to the core of the original while providing options to players who wanted to master it.
Let’s take a quick look at it.
Character Stats
The game features 5 basic stats:
- Strength (STR), determines the character’s physical strength
- Dexterity (DEX), determines the character’s nimbleness
- Magic (MAG), determines the character’s magical aptitude and resistance
- Agility (AGI), determines the character’s speed
- Vitality (VIT), determines the character’s resilience
This provided enough space to design characters with clear strengths and weaknesses. For example, the General is good at dealing and tanking physical damage at the expense of speed and magic resistance.
These stats, as well as equipment and skills, feed into the derived stats:
- Max Health: determined by Level and VIT
- Attack Power: determined by Weapon Attack and two stats associated with said weapon (e.g. Swords use STR and AGI)
- Physical Defense: determined by armor and VIT
- Magic Defense: determined by armor and MAG
- Speed: determined by AGI and equipment weight
On each level up, 3 points are allocated between five stats depending on the character’s potential, which can sometimes lead to unexpected results. Basic stats can also be slightly adjusted with special equipment and skills.
Equipment
Characters have 4 equipment slots: Weapon, Armor, and two Accessory slots.
New equipment can be found while exploring the dungeon and can be upgraded at the Blacksmith.
Sometimes, the equipment has extra properties, like stat boosts/penalties, and the ability to inflict status effects, or status resistances. The game displays and highlights all important information when selecting which item to equip.
There are no restrictions on what items can be equipped, so you can adapt to ongoing situations if you have spare items, such as equipping blunt weapons while dealing with skeletons to dish out extra damage. At the same time, pay attention to the equipment's weight, as wearing heavy armor or weapons can slow the character down if they are not strong enough to wear said equipment.
If you just want to chill, you can focus on upgrading your stock equipment and equipping new accessories. If you want to power through the game, there are quite a few unique items that can lead to surprises if you’re willing to spend some time upgrading them.
Skills
The game features a simple skill system that allows you to shape your experience with the game. Characters start with one skill and can learn more every few levels. The initial limit was 8 skills, but after a while, it was lifted to 20 to account for NG+ and might be adjusted again before release depending on how playtesting goes.
Each skill is designed to work as a solution to a specific problem, and it’s up to you to determine which of the 5 skills offered upon level up works best for you. The game features over 50 skills ranging from simple stat boosts to modifiers to how battles, exploration, and interactions in town work.
A few simple examples:
- Enemies hit you before you get a chance to strike? Get the Quick Draw skill.
- Weak character is targeted by enemies a bit too often, even in the back? Get the Inconspicuous skill to make them less likely to get targeted by enemies.
- The shopkeeper is too greedy? Get the Haggle skill!
- Equipment weight is causing trouble? Get the Pack Mule skill.
- Want to deal extra damage with swords? Get a Sword Mastery skill.
- A fat boss is giving you trouble? Get a Paralyzer skill!
The list goes on, and even now, the game gets new skills every now and then as I test the game and find new opportunities the players might want to use and abuse.
Party
Just like in the original, the party consists of 4 characters, but here it was adjusted to allow party editing at any time. This way you can try different lineups until you find the combination that suits you best.
However, this design change means that characters are unique instead of archetypes that can be cloned to fill the entire party. To account for this, the game features more characters, which can be adjusted via equipment to suit whatever crazy idea you have for a playthrough.
Other News
Dragon Ruins II is about 80% complete at this point. The main content is mostly done, the bonus content is being developed, and the project is on schedule to come out in the first quarter of 2025.
I am testing the game on the Steam Deck and it runs flawlessly out of the box. One player said that the original Dragon Ruins was one of their favorite games for long plane rides, so I hope the sequel will not disappoint in that regard.
In the next DevLog, I’ll talk about the changes to exploration and the battle system — and there are quite a few changes that might interest you.