DevLog#4 - Improving the design

So in the previous devlogs i’ve showed you what a creature has for Stats: health, speed, damage, armor and an active special ability.

Our process was that this game needs to be as simple as possible, but complex enough that it allowed lots of strategies. We played around with different stats possibilities before we came up with the final design. And when i say final, i mean that it could change anytime.

I will break our decision down for each stat in a list:

• Health, represents the amount of damage a creature can take before dying, remains same as before

• Speed, represents the amount of hexes a creature can move, remains same as before

• Armor, represents the percentage (or other formula we come up in the future) subtracted from incoming damage

• Damage, represents the amount of damage a creature deals to another creature

  • This was changed because we thought that a fixed damage value will be boring and not enough surprise factor.

  • We needed more variation to be added with minimum effort into the game, so we chose a dice to be added to base creature damage. For example a creature that has Damage: 10 will receive a Die: 1d8 which means that it will deal 11 - 18 damage instead of a fixed value.

  • This design decision is similar to how Heroes 3 plays out. High strategy with a little randomness is what makes a game more exciting. Losing a game because your creature dealt 10 damage instead of 11 is an experience you won’t forget. Like literally, you will not forget it, you will burst a vein in your brain and you will be reminded about it every time you eat soup through a straw on a hospital bed. But you had fun, which is nice!

New additions to creature stats:

• Die, represents a dice that is used to calculate creature damage, modifies fixed damage (10) to ranged damage (11 - 18)

• Initiative, represents the order in which creatures will react

  • Initially we had in mind that each player will move a creature of his choice, but this seemed overpowered in the long run.

  • We added this ability to creatures to add more strategy to the board by making the player chose carefully what creatures he will bring into the arena. If he brings slow creatures, the opponent will have the first move. We think that creature based initiative is better than activating any 1 creature and then passing the turn.

• Range, represents how many hexes can a creature attack

  • This needed to be added the first time.

• Miss, represents the chances that an opponent misses his attack

  • We added this to create situations where you can turn back an obvious lost battle and make the player fight to the end, tooth and nail.

  • This stat will not be added on all creatures, only a small few will have a miss chance, but we will try to balance miss chance between health, damage, armor, etc.

Here is an example of creature token details:

Based on this image, a creature also has an experience value. When you reach full experience on a creature you can evolve it into something else of your choice. It also has an amount of “training points”, which is the currency of the game, that represents the cost to use in the arena.

How about game mechanics you ask? Well i’ll show you now some early concept screenshots.

This is the deployment phase. As you see, the opponent already deployed a creature on the board and now it’s your turn to deploy. You select the creature and then select an available light-green hex to deploy the creature too.

This is how the deployment goes. One creature is deployed by the opponent, then one by you, and so on and so forth until there are no more creatures to deploy. When you deploy a creature it is added in the initiative ordering bar on the right where it shows you the order the creatures will be activated in.

That’s about it for today. Hope you like what you see and start imagining the possibilities of how you can crush your opponent.