Hi!
The topic last week was units, and units are nothing without interesting abilities!
The two core aspects of combat in our maps are unit skills, and the enemy AI. Since the AI relies on the skills to be able to do anything, I’ll first dive into our skill design and implementation.
The player party is comprised of up to 3 units belonging to any of the 3 classes. Each class represents a specific role and has a set of skills exclusive to the role/class. All skills are categorized as either Offense, Defense or Mobility. Every unit starts with default Run and Attack skills, the first one to be able to move at all, and the second as the default method of dealing damage.
I wasn’t really satisfied with units starting out with almost no interesting skills, so I decided to give each class an extra starting role-specific skill. This would have the units start with a Run, Attack and a Special skill, which is still not the final count. Each unit will be given a number of opportunities to learn new skills in order to expand their options in combat. During these opportunities, the player is presented with one random skill from each category and picks which one the unit will learn.
In our current implementation, each unit gets to learn two additional skills, putting the final count at 3 Special skills (I’m not counting Run and Attack here). Our current internal build has 2 skills per category, per class, but the plan is to expand this further. We’re still figuring out how many skills to make in total to have enough replayability. The task fell to me to make all of the skills in the current build (from a list of skill ideas - I’m not very creative T_T) and I’ve given each some mechanic to make them interesting.
Since I did such a great job with the skills and the distribution of opportunities to learn new ones, our overlords we have decided to hire a game designer full-time.
Jokes aside, it's mostly because none of us have the time for it. Everybody on the team has their hands full with their primary role (and secondary for some of us), so we need a person dedicated to making new abilities, general playtesting and balancing, tweaking the AI, creating templates for encounters so our writers can make cool stories from them, etc. That means our team will count 8 full time working members: 5 artists (Ivan, Lucija, Mateja, Toni, Kaz), 2 programmers (Marko and Marko - yes, it’s hilarious when we both introduce ourselves as Marko the programmer), and a game designer.
I guess I can introduce myself this time around? As you probably figured out, my name is Marko. I’m a programmer on the team, I write the blog posts and do community interactions, do ad-hoc design, draw shitty programmer art, and a bunch of other things because indie teams have people with many hats on. I’ve been programming for over a decade now and was rewarded with the title of lead programmer after two years being on the project, which is so totally meaningful with two programmers on the team. I’m also one of the first people hired, which gives me some seniority on the team and is the reason why I’m doing way too many things, and doing too many things is the reason why I’m behind on my coding task, so I’m getting back to that now.
Thanks for reading! Give it a thumbs up, like, subscribe, follow, comment, share, etc. I monitor the Discord and my Twitter on a daily basis, so let me know what you think of everything I’ve shown so far. Feel free to ask questions about anything and I’ll try to answer them all. Except cooking, I suck at that.
MarkoP