Monthly Archives: May 2007

TOD: attributes

tower of destiny attributes

I finally finished the attributes screen. As you can see from the screenshot above, you have default values for each race, and you can assign up to 5 attribute points as you want. This way even a Ice Elf that starts with constitution 5, can get up to 10. The values aren’t like in AD&D, but start from 5 (very low) to 15 (very high), of course through the game you’ll be able to raise the attribute values over 15 with spells, magic items, and so on.

Each race also has starting Hit Points and Mana Points values, but those can’t be changed in the creation phase.

Going to make the class selection screen in the next days 🙂

TOD: skills,deities and spells

Ok today I made my final decision about skills and spells.

It will work this way:

  1. all races can be any class. some are more inclined to be casters than fighter, but they will be able to be good fighters anyway
  2. there will be 3 main stats: hit points, mana points and fatigue.
  3. there will be 2 main classes type: fighters and casters. Plus some hybrid like druids or skirmishers that can do both.
  4. The fighting classes will use fatigue to use special attacks that learn automatically as they level up and that unlock based on skills or attributes. Example there can be a special attack called “Swing Strike” that will require slashing skill >20 and dexterity > 10.
  5. The casting classes will have the spells based on their deity. Each deity has a set of different spells based on different aspects. So you will have a wizard dwarf that will be specialized in nuking opponents and create magic item for example. Or a human that can cast protective and self-empowering spells.
  6. For the casting classes, they’ll have restrictions based on the skills of a specific school of magic. Example, White Magic (the life magic) will include most healing spells from all the deities. Obviously the class healer will have more initial skills and will have a higher skill cap than any other class for White Magic.

I think this system rulez, because each deity will have his own white/black/red magic and so on, leading to lot of variety in spells. That’s why also I made “only” 3 races in the first episode. Those 3 races generates 6 different subset of spells list, and each spell will be of one of the five schools below:

White Magic White Magic includes mainly healing and empowering spells
Black Magic Black Magic includes offensive and damage over time spells
Red Magic Red Magic includes a mix of offensive and self-empowering spells
Yellow Magic Yellow Magic includes a mix of charming and summoning spells
Green Magic Green Magic includes a mix of weakening and regenerating spells
Blue Magic Blue Magic includes enchanting items and speed control spell

This way, the classical pure fighting classes like warriors will still have special attacks, based on their race/skills, but won’t be able to cast spells. Hybrid classes like skirmisher and paladins (and probably future ones like bards/rangers) will have both special attacks based on fatigue but also some spells based on their deities.

One thing is sure, will be a mess to program, even with just 3 races! 😀

TOD: difficulty levels

Talking with my customer/testers in forums, I’ve realized that there are basically 2 groups of people:

  1. those who like hard challenges, and are willing even to replay the game several times. They prefer less battles but higher difficulty for each battle, and maybe a time limit
  2. those who like just to play RPG and yes, even build up an invincible party. They like to kill thousands of enemies with their super characters, and don’t worry about time limits.

I am actually in the 2nd group too 😀 but I can understand also the needs of the 1st group of people. So I’m going to implement just 2 difficulty levels in TOD: normal and hard. The normal will be the classic standard CRPG, no time limit, no breakable items, etc.

The hard instead… MOUHAHAHA!! 😀 Will have a time limit, breakable items, tougher monsters.

Breakable items is a very important factor: if you find at one point in the game the superbastardsword +5, and you have a character master in slashing weapons, you’re done – because the weapon will never break. Instead if weapons can be destroyed using them too often, you have to carefully manage the items – maybe saving that super sword only for the most tough battles.

I am also thinking to eliminate the need of manually moving in dungeons by putting a sort of automatic mode to go back in specific (know) points. Like if you enter dungeon and arrive at the entrance of level 2, you can just go back to entrance with one click – the party will travel to the entrance and you won’t have to do anything but observe.

That is, if you don’t met a wandering monster in your way back 😉

TOD: final races decision!

Ok I made up my mind at last! The first episode of TOD will have only 3 races: human, ice elf and dwarf.

Before you scream in horror continue to read: based on some users feedback, I decided to break away from the standard rpg archetypes, like the elf is a good ranger, the dwarf good fighter, etc. Each race will be capable to be any kind of class from warrior to healer, and will have simply different spells, based also on deities.

The deities choice will determine what kind of “prayers” (spells) your character will be able to learn. For each race there will be 2 deities so those 3 basic races will expand to already 6 different character archetypes. So as you can see isn’t that bad. Plus the already planned races (Dark elves, Orcs, Wood Elves) will be added in the future game expansions.

I’m very happy about this solution, because indeed it gives the user a wider choice. So you can have a ice elf fighter and a dwarf wizard, if you want 😀

Important Magic Stones 1.2.1 bugfix!

Some mac users reported a problem with the recent Magic Shop addition: if the current druid was the first one in the list, on some mac systems once you exited the Shop, it was disappearing (druid from 2nd spot on weren’t affected).
I recommend anyone to upgrade to 1.2.1 (just redownload from my server) to avoid this problem.

My sincere apologies for this problem, hope not many people were affected. This update is one of the biggest ever made to the game, but I should have tested the mac version more accurately!