Combat System and Skills | Project Porcupine | Forum

Well, in terms of maximizing strategy and fun, I'm for making sure characters are able to choose and learn a large variety of passive and active abilities. It means more choices in leveling (strategy) and more options in combat (tactics). Having to choose the optimal ability from your array is a form of strategy, especially if the choice is more nuanced and less obvious.

If, from your arsenal of skills, you are forced to select only a few to be on your action bar at any given time (and say, have to be out of combat to swap out powers), that does add an element of strategy of a different sort, and we can certainly debate the merits of it.

However, for the sake of argument, when your fire-specialized guy runs into an opponent who turns out to be heavily fire resistant, upon realizing that fact, should you have to switch tactics on the fly ("I'll have to use some of my less optimal, non-fire powers on this guy"), or should you have somehow known in advance that the guy was fire resistant and swapped out more of your abilities before the fight ("Crap, I wasn't paying attention. I don't think I can beat him if he's resisting three of my four current powers").

Since we are looking at a hardcore (permadeath) game, I have to say, I would much rather players die thinking "Crap, I should have noticed and switched tactics sooner", rather than "Crap, I was spec'd way wrong for that fight, I didn't have a chance".

I just thought I'd share my vision of what I think we should aim for in terms of character-building, skills and leveling-up.

As seen in my skill-tree mockup (a few posts up, the huge red graphic – can't miss it), it shows that a player would choose three 'traits', which are equivalent to class/race selections. Each trait has its own skill tree on its own tab, and you start with the middle 5 skills of each (the '0' skills, inside the grey pentagon). Each trait thus starts with either 2 passives and 3 active abilities, or vice versa, so each character already starts with 6-9 attacks or other abilities. These 5 skills are each at the base of a separate (named) branch of the skill tree, so each trait has 5 branches (as illustrated by the one branch that is numbered in the diagram), and these branches interconnect. Most of the skills are a simple bonus to abilities, but there are (in my example, which is obviously just one possible configuration) 11 'real' abilities in each branch, which are either active abilities or passives which do a lot more than simple stat bonuses. There are also a number of 'sweet spots' among the stat bonuses, like #16 in the diagram, which give more bang for your buck and might themselves be worth aiming for in a build.

Gaining a level would give you a lot of options, because you gain 1 skill point in EACH trait (so you have 3 points to place when you level, but can't put all three in the same place to go deeper into a tree). You use that point to buy any skill that is connected to one you already have; you can keep going down a branch you have been working on, or throw it in a completely different branch (since you start with all 5 branches opened up by your initial skills). It is intentionally set up so that just 3 points in any one branch is enough to unlock a new active or passive ability (always the opposite 'type' from the '0' ability in that branch), so there is some incentive to diversify.

And with all this put together, I think we can (and should) make leveling a relatively frequent thing. Frequent level-ups are fun, as players love making choices of permanent improvements for their character – that's why I'm emphasizing a design where you get 3 choices every level, to make it more interesting even in levels when you aren't getting a new ability.

So how often should you gain a level? Here's how I would express it. Say we were to establish a "standard encounter difficulty" (meaning a standard of how hard one same-level encounter is for a character) and call it's experience value 'X'. I would set the amount of experience required to gain a level at (2+0.1[current-lvl])X. This means, you gain your first level after defeating 2 encounters (I would actually rig the formula to guarantee that first gain after 2 fights). After that, you'd gain a level every 3 fights (for 10 levels), then every 4 fights (for 10 levels), then every 5 fights and so on. Higher level fights would be worth somewhat more XP, and lower level encounters would be worth slightly less. Yes, I'm aware that defining a standard encounter difficulty (over each level-range) is actually the hard part of this equation.

That's a lot of leveling up… how do we make enough skills that you don't run out? The mockup above has five branches per 'trait' (class/race/thingy), each branch has 34 skills. 5x34=170, meaning even at level 75 you have chosen less than half the available skills (in each of three traits), and remember this is a permadeath game. Now, 2/3 of those skills are simple stat bonuses, which don't take a lot of time to develop or test. That leaves 11 "interesting" skills, the actives and passives, per branch, that need to be programmed, tested, etc. So 55 per trait, and we plan to have lots of traits. In order to keep this manageable, I would re-use a lot of the branches. I figure each trait would have one branch unique to that trait, then a mix of other branches which we re-use in different combinations. This allows us to multiply our efforts to developing a large number of traits from which to choose. I would also make one of those 5 branches in each trait be a non-combat skill (your gathering skills, crafting, etc), though those would also give stats that are useful in combat, and possibly even combat-oriented passive and active skills. We might have to work on this aspect though, the one thing I'm not certain about this approach is having your non-combat skill tied to your trait selection (if you're wondering, Vampire's non-combat branch might be 'Charm', which would give diplomatic bonuses and may help avoid combat in some situations, in favor of other rewards).

AT_god_elite said:

More or less, they suggest that at least some of the mobs could have "secondary health bar" lets call it "conviction" for example. And that certain classes which arent as combat oriented as others, could instead of fighting the mob, try and talk or bribe their way out of the confrontation. You know, lower the "conviction" of said person that they are the enemy and should die.

I have to say that is a phenomenal idea. It's borderline brilliant, and kudos to both the Extra Credits crew and to your succinct summary of it.

That said, I'm not sure if that is this game. I'm not saying that it can't be… we are obviously at the right stage of development to think about such innovative ideas. And there is a LOT of potential awesomeness that we could capture there. No question.

The tricky part is getting from here to there. While part of what is great about the idea is its simplicity of implementation, it simultaneously creates a mountain of difficult (and up till now mostly unexplored) design decisions. Without generating another wall of text (yet), lets just say the main problem is integrating the non-combat gameplay into a game which (I assume) will also feature a full roguelike combat experience. There's this problem that a great many of the enemies that make for cool combat (robots, aliens, alien robots, mutants, animals, mutant animals, mutant robots, etc…) are not known for their bribability or their susceptibility to a well-constructed argument. Certainly, the mechanics for the non-combat gameplay could mirror the combat ones, but visually it would have to be represented differently (which is doable), and setting-wise it would almost necessitate a complete change of venue and of antagonists. Otherwise, when the Artist tries putting flowers in the gun-barrels of ED-209, it's either going to fail spectacularly (fun = 0) or succeed somehow (logic = 0).

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on it though.