Dev log5 A little about combat (Patreon)

So while patron build 3 in the works we can cover some combat, which is promised a while ago but we have to keep pushing it back.

For starters lets cover how its planned:

Combat resources. We have 5 main resources for each player character: Bleed, Limb HP, Armor, Stamina and Action Points.

 Bleed is our most crucial statistic, it starts at 0 and when it reaches full scale character dies of blood loss. Blood loss is going to be the primary and often only way to kill somebody. Bleed scale can be reduced by bandages and other abilities or consumables. 

Limb hp works very alike to conventional HP meter, when HP is damaged character receives % of damage as bleed depending on limb, ability and other factors. When limb HP reaches 0 character gets that body part maimed, which gives a significant debuff and often ruptures a vein which gives bleed damage per turn until bandaged. Maim persists during combat until removed by special consumables or ability. Each limb has its own hp (limbs for humanoids are: head, torso, arms, legs).

Armor works identically to HP except it does not cause bleed damage and has no additional drawback when depleted. Armor always damaged first, then HP when limb has no armor left. Just as hp each limb has own armor.

Stamina is our mid-term resource for using strong abilities. By default character recovers 1 stamina point per turn and can gain 3 points max.

Action points is our short-term resource for traveling on the arena and using attacks. By default player gets 2 AP per turn. Majority of offensive abilities end turn despite of amount of leftover AP, and they DO NOT carry over on next turn.

Enemies follow similar ruleset, except instead of stamina and AP they use AI deck. This deck has a set amount of random cards selected from card pool depending on enemy class, cards are divided into 4 classes (A,B,C,D). A class is common strength card, B card is more rare but has more impact and C card being most dangerous card but are least common. D cards are special cards which never start in the AI deck but can be generated by other cards. 

Each turn enemy draws 1 card by default and does text written on it. After a card is played, it goes into the exhaust pile. When all cards are put into the exhaust pile, the enemy shuffles the deck randomly and put all cards back into AI deck. 

Player will have abilities to interact with enemy AI deck: peek into top AI cards, remove cards completely from AI deck or exhaust them prematurely to get rid of dangerous cards posing most threat. If enemy will run out of all cards somehow, they will perform basic action once per turn.

 

Additional information on smaller mechanics will come later as we progress, but that's the basics of our combat. We hope this system provides potential for interesting gameplay and depth.

So where is our combat now? Well base ground work existed since first tech-demo launch, we had AI deck system, ability system and whole bleed\hp\armor system. We just didn't have time to polish animation UI, abilities and minor mechanics. Which led to very big confusion for players.

Currently we cleaning up UI to make it much more user friendly: we increased arena sides, so player can scroll a bit more so UI doesn't visually block field hexes, divided enemy and player HUD to make things cleaner.

And importantly we added tooltips, which was requested right away by everyone https://i.gyazo.com/dc247c83d6592059194c50508e184432.mp4

After we are done with cleaning up UI we are going to work on abilities and enemies fleshing out. So more info to come!