0.1.0 Release Design Considerations

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

I understand your concerns and don't disagree with them. I'm more concerned about making this so complex that the player is overwhelmed with information. How would we indicate the HP of various body parts? How would we show that they are "dead" or disabled? How would a player know that "killing the arm" would prevent an enemy from using their most powerful attack?

It would definitely require an overhaul out of scope with what we can do for the nearest target date, that's for sure. I think our best bet for now it to make it clear what the benefits and downsides of attacking certain body parts are.

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. Cool-down time is done on a per-ability basis. Warm-up time is also on a per ability basis. So we could have a skill that takes a long time to "charge up" but is relatively quick to recover from, or a powerful physical attack that can be executed quickly, but really tires out the character requiring a longer cool-down time.

Really? We should mention that in the abilities then...I didn't even notice that.

But I was talking more like a "Use Ability. Cool-down normally. You're free to use other abilities, but THIS ability has to wait X seconds before it can be used again."

The idea behind possibly having a vulnerability during these windows was to make it yet another piece of strategy that the player had to consider when selecting a skill. If they know that a character will have a window where they would take increased damage, they might consider not using powerful attacks while their character is in a low HP state. Again, this whole vulnerability concept is just an idea at this point and hasn't been implemented.

That makes a lot more sense if cooldowns are tied to ability usage rather than character-specific traits. Hadn't known about the ability-specific cooldown modifiers when I raised my concern there.

[Roots]

Right. I agree we need to do a better job of conveying the difference between different target areas and what their strengths or weaknesses are. Right now the only way to really tell is if you see a status effect icon pop up if you hit an enemy in a certain point. Then you know that targeting that point can cause a natural status affliction.

In general, we need to come up with a way to inform the user when an attack is super effective or not very effective (to borrow Pokemon terminology ). Not sure what the best way to do this would be, but either the damage text could be bigger/brighter/differently colored to reflect this, or we could have text pop up that says "weakness" or "ineffective", or some sound trigger or something else.

-----

Yes, we need to mention warm-up/cool-down times for different skills. That information is currently not accessible at all to the player (not for any reason other than we just hadn't added that feature yet). As far as cool down abilities not meaning a cool-down time but rather the amount of time you have to wait until you can use it again, I can see that being a viable feature. It might even be better than having the cool-down the way it is now, especially considering that the warm-up and cool-down periods on a skill are essentially the same thing (timed wait periods that only differ in whether they take effect before or after the execution of a skill).

In fact, I do think I like your cool-down idea much better. The cool-down period was kind of weird too, because it had no area on the stamina bar to indicate that an actor was in cool-down (the actor's icon just sat at the bottom of the bar until the cool-down period expired, and there was no indication to the player about when that period would be over). This is definitely an idea I want to continue to pursue.

[Roots]

Hey guys. There's a lot of really interesting ideas and discussions flowing around designs right now. I want to make sure that we stay focused on what we can improve in the short term though, particularly for next month's release. Some of the concepts we're throwing out there would require a lot of work to implement (and even more work to test and get it just right). I'd rather that we focus on what we can easily change and test to make the game better right now without having to do major feature development.

By no means is anything off the table though. But rather than taking leaps and bounds forward, I'd rather we try to do things via iterative improvement, if that makes sense.