As you SHOULD know, I just released my game PSCD. My new year resolution was to release one game this year! Yay I made it! 😀
Haha jokes apart it was because in 2015 I didn’t manage to release anything. But of course, I knew that PSCD was out soon, since it was basically already finished in December (I had to wait to get some voices and an update of Ren’Py to make it run correctly under Windows 10 fullscreen).
So now what I’ve finished it, what I am doing? While I have several projects in progress, I mainly resumed working on Queen Of Thieves, since it’s the game in which I’m more involved right now (because I’m coding it myself).
Queen Of Thieves gameplay update
First of all, a short summary: I had already finished the “catacombs exploration” (optional) part, the first draft of all the romances is done, and a good amount of the romance CG is done already. Clearly we’re at good points.
I decided to work on the robbery part, the infiltration into the houses/mansions to steal money. I made an interface on the right so you always have all the info you need about your current target:
The encounters level influences the enemy stats (it’s a bit randomized of course), while defenses also influence the enemy party composition (higher defense = more enemies) and how often you’ll randomly encounter guards, watch dogs, etc.
The rooms explored is a good way to know if you missed any place in the house (some are quite big, with 10 rooms). Finally the gold gives you an estimate of the maximum amount (the sisters cannot know the exact amount, only make a guess) of gold available, and how much they’ve robbed already.
I’m testing the system and seems to work well 🙂 I also made a new addition, this time to the battle itself. Behold: hit or miss ratio!
People who follow me carefully might remember some posts in forums, in which I was furious against hit percentage, and how in a certain AAA game I had 72% hit chance and I missed six times in a row, forcing me to ragequit it 😀
I still think that’s a bad system. My idea, is obviously better 😉 Read on.
The main issue with hit or miss, is that if you hit you do X damage, if you miss, you do zero. That’s a difference too big. So in my game, if you miss you’ll do HALF of the normal damage. Since the numbers in this game are much more smaller than Loren or SOTW, in the screenshot above means that instead of 8dmg, if I miss will do 4dmg. Clearly less, but not so less that makes you want to quit playing!
This way I also found an use of the characters critical hit stat. Before damage was determined by attack multiplied by critical hit divided by target defense. Now, it’s still calculated like that, but the hit percentage is influenced by the critical hit stat.
Last minute update: I am thinking to change slightly the formula, as illustrated in this forum post: http://winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=3672&p=36507#p36504
Might sound a bit confusing right now but when you’ll play the game, will make sense. I tested it already and even with enemies with high avoidance (like the vampire bat of the screenshot above) they don’t ruin the game at all, they add more strategy. For example, magic attacks (like Joanne magic bolt) never miss the target. So even if she does less damage than the other two sisters, she will always do that amount of damage.
That’s enough technical stuff for now! About the story and romance CG, I’m proud to announce that all the yuri romance CG have been finished. Below you see a sneak peek!
One of the things I always liked about Loren and SoTW is that, in combat, when you attack you HIT. There isn’t always that constant fear and disgust that your battle strategy will fall apart because a random number generator (RNG) decided that it should. If I lost it was because I didn’t plan well, I made a mistake or I wasn’t strong enough.
Adding a system where it is possible to miss, or in this case have your damage halved, is a step backwards regardless. Now the threat of the bad RNG will be there once again, making random chance a factor in what would otherwise be a system where strategy and planning would thrive.
I’ll probably play Queen of Thieves anyway, but this stings a little.
Well the RNG can also turn in your advantage, since you can also evade the attacks. Anyway I’m tweaking some skills to reduce enemy avoidance and so on. Actually there was a similar system in Loren/SOTW too: unless you always maximized the attack/power value, you remember you saw in the damage prediction numbers like 22-30 and so on? that was a random range value. Of course now seems scary because it’s halved, but this game has much smaller numbers (an enemy with 100 hit points it’s super-rare) so even halving the values won’t make such a big difference I think.
Obviously I don’t mind changing / tweaking the values during the beta testing, or making this optional for the Nightmare difficulty players only 😉
While I agree with you that random chance (AKA luck) being a big factor in a game that is of strategic type is a bad thing I don’t think that it’s the same case if it is in a small dozes, in fact most games of those type do have a factor of luck in some smaller dozes. Moving from miss being complete miss and not doing any damage to miss doing half damage was already a good move, now the question is how often is it going to happen. If you played lots of games of this type you know that it is not unusual for them to have critical hit and block/evade witch will do double damage/ half damage or no damage but they usually don’t occur more often then in 10%-20% cases with normal opponents. So if it is not overdone I think that this can be an interesting addition to the game, I also wouldn’t mind seeing opposite critical hit witch takes 50% more damage. I think miss probably shouldn’t occur more then in 33% cases. Well to put it simply I think it’s really a matter of how good you balance it, and seeing as a programmer/coder is a big boos himself who had done programming/coding for SOTW I think we are in good hands.
Yes so far doesn’t happen often, I posted some numbers in the forum. In practice since it also depends on the attacking character (the critical hit stat is subtracted to the target’s evasion to determine the %) if you always put points in critical hit stat, you should never miss targets by 10-15%. And with the chance of double damage (critical now does double damage).
I am not going to overdo this as happens in other games, but just add a bit of randomness to the game to make it more fun.
I can also probably enable/disable this feature in options screen if many people complain about it 😉
Randomness in other aspects of a game are fine. I love roguelikes and their randomly generated dungeons and loot. But randomness in an actual battle determining whether you win with criticals or lose with misses is never fun for me.
The overabundance of randomness in nearly all turn based RPGs out there means that adding this to QoT is not really an original idea.
I’d would glad if you did as you suggest and leave it as a selectable option or as an exclusive to the hardest difficulty.
Well, in my tests I never lost a battle because of the randomness. Also, this game is made of randomly generated robberies mostly, and a fixed dungeon. But for the robberies even if you lose, you just run away. There’s never a “game over”. You could lose maybe a battle, but you don’t need to restart from beginning or reload (unless you want to). So compared to some other games like Blackguards that forced you to play with hit or miss (zero damage!) and with fixed plot battles… it’s a completely different story, trust me 🙂