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Planet Stronghold: How Psionic Powers work

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Today I’ve experimented with the Psionic Powers balancing. I raised one of my chars to level 25 (the highest currently attainable in the game) and checked how powerful the stats would be. This way once I know the maximum power of that power, I can simply scale down the effects level by level until level 1 (of course the power need still to be somehow effective even at lower level otherwise would be useless).

Psionic Powers in my game are the equivalent of the Spells in a classic fantasy RPG game. Since I wanted to keep the interface simple, I don’t have 50 “different” spells like in most games. Instead each Power has a value that represent the character knowledge of that specific power, going from 0 to 99 (even if at start of game each Power has a random value from 5-10).

Each Power also requires Psionic Points (which from now I’ll abbreviate into PP) to be used – sort of the Mana points in fantasy game. The difference though, is that rather than having “Heal Light Wounds” and then “Heal Medium Wounds”, “Heal Severe Wounds”, “Heal Critical Wounds”, in my game there is a different (more casual) approach: each Power has a basic “casting” value, but you can spend more Psionic Points to increase its effectiveness. The base effectiveness is influenced by the character level and the knowledge of that specific power.

A few examples with some non-definitive value:

Level 1 Psionic character wants to use the Harm Power. He can use it spending the base PP value of 5 and deal 5 damage.
Level 10 Psionic character wants to use the Harm Power. He can use it spending the base PP value of 5 and deal 25 damage (the bigger damage is because the character is higher level and has more knowledge of that specific Power).
Level 1 Psionic character wants to use the Harm Power. He can use it spending a PP value of 15 (base + 10 PP) and deal 5×3=15 damage.

So as you can see, a level 1 character can deal almost the same amount as the level 10 if he spends x 3 of PP. Of course, at level 1, if you use 15 PP you’re left with almost no PP, while at level 10 you still have a good reserve of them 🙂

I think this system will still allow a good flexivity, but without filling the character “grimoire” with 50 powers that basically does the same thing, just in different proportions!

Forums gone and Autoleveling enemies

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First a quick news: after thinking about it for several weeks, I finally decided to shut down my forums. As you can see, the blog now takes the place of the forums. So the correct URL for the blog is: http://www.winterwolves.net.
I’ve decided to replace the forums with my blog because:

  • the forums were almost empty anyway
  • the amount of spamming, despite I had tried every possible measure was insane (people spamming manually the forums – nothing you can do about that)
  • I’ve decided that I have better things to do with my time, like making new games 😀
  • people can comment and have direct contact with me with the blog anyway


update: I reinstalled my forums. Too many sites where linking to specific threads, like the walkthrough ones. So I decided to keep them, but will make them invite only. For direct discussion, better use the blog 🙂

Ok, now about the interesting stuff: I’ve been thinking to use autoleveling enemies in my upcoming RPG game Planet Stronghold. But what are exactly autoleveling enemies?
You know in RPGs, you usually start at level 1. You encounter the first enemies, and they’re usually challenging. But once you raise your level, once you’re level 10, if you get back to those level 1 enemies, they should be a piece of cake.

In my game, I’m planning to do like this: the enemies will mantain their original challenge rating even if your character/party levels up. An enemy that was tough at level 1, would still be a good challenge at level 10 (not as tough, but not totally harmless either).
Why I am thinking to adopt this system? Easy, because this way I can provide a constant challenge to the player. There’s nothing worse than having a random encounter and say “oh no, again those stupid easy enemies that will be killed with 1 hit.”
I am still thinking if to allow the player to choose between auto-leveling on/off in options for example, and I plan to use a global difficulty level for the game, so those who don’t like challenging fights don’t need to worry.

Moving forward with Flower Shop and Planet Stronghold

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The Flower Shop game is near completion. The farming sim is 100% done, and the game is being tested. Fixed some minor typos, and adjusted some gameplay elements, but in practice we’re waiting for 3 missing backgrounds and the beautiful (even if I haven’t yet seen it) main menu from Deji.

Also, I’m finally moving forward with my other game Planet Stronghold. I got a new artist that’s going to do all the enemies in the game. Below you see a sketch of one of the first enemies, a robot-terrorist that we could call “RoboAnt-06”. (this because it vaguely resembles an ant!)

Then she created small variations of the base model, each one with a different weapon. In Planet Stronghold the combat will be focused on damage type, there are 5 in total: energy,explosive,armor penetrating, acid, psionic. Below, a screenshot of the in-game battle showing the new robot that replaced my ugly 3d renders of the first WIP screenshots 🙂

Note how the left arm of the robot has a different weapon. The one on the left has a gatling cannon firing armor piercing ammo, while the one on the right has a powerful laser cannon! I also got 10 new shiny backgrounds for the game that will show in future screenshots (yes I gave up on the idea of using pre-rendered 3d backgrounds).

success and failure

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I think it’s important to set goals in life. You can be successful, or fail. But you have to set a goal, it’s too easy to just live by, without anything to aim for.

As in life, even in games is important to give the player some clear goals: in the Flower Shop farming sim, your first task is to clean the plot of land from the weeds. Initially I tested it, and was OK, but a bit pointless without a clear goal. So now I added one: clean at least 6 “slots” of terrain from weeds. The plot of lands indeed is divided into 5×5 slots, on each slot you can plant a seedling and grow something. But first you need to clean the weeds from each slot, and then you can plant the seedling.

Just adding the goal was enough to change the game, adding a strategic element. Indeed, each slot has a different “weed density”, so while some only needs 1 click to clean, others need even 3. Each click is an action, worth 1 turn (or 1 hour of game time). So, even if in the first day you’ll work 10 hours (latter only in the morning 6 hours), you still need to check for the slot that need less click to clean.

Because if you just randomly click, you’re very likely to see this screen:

with bad consequences like Uncle Sam forbidding you to call back Jill, not letting you use his truck to reach the town, and so on! 😀 Instead if you do it right, you’ll be rewarded with:

That’s enough work for today for me. Happy New Year to everyone, and may the 2010 bring fame, fortune, happiness and… flowers! They never hurt 🙂

How was 2009, how I hope will be 2010

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2009 is almost finished. How it was for me? Quite good I’d say. Considering the global crisis, is already enough that I managed to “survive” as indie another year. And in europe even, where you have also to face with insane taxation and the always poor usd value versus euro!
This year I released four games: College Romance (which I didn’t write but only produce), Spirited Heart, Bionic Heart and Heileen 2: The Hands Of Fate. Four games of that quality in a year is a very good achievement for any indie working mainly alone (with the help of external people that produce assets).
Other important things that happened, both good and bad:

GOOD
– I’ve made my first fully voiced game (Bionic Heart). Was very cool, even if a bit painful to put all the voices inside the game and manage all the voice actors. Heileen 2 should have been fully voiced too…
– I’ve learned to manage lots of people and projects at once. Even right now, I have 5 projects started!
– I’ve worked with wonderful people like Ayu Sakata, Deji, Rebecca Gunter, PyTom, Steven Mane, Daniel Conlin, Lucien Dodge and more (sorry if I don’t list you all!). This is very good since I’m building a list of RELIABLE people that I will surely use again on future projects.

BAD
– I’ve learned that writing the game in italian first and having it translated in english is a really bad idea
– I’ve also learned that putting sexy girls in a game doesn’t mean it will automatically sell 😀 you need also to make a good game!
– I’ve finally accepted the fact that none of my games will ever appear on a big portal
– I’ve been disappointed by some people that disappeared or delayed some of my projects for too long

Overall though, was a good year. In 2010 I hope to finish some of the 5 projects I’ve started! The first one probably (crosses fingers) will be the Flower Shop, since in practice once Ayu finishes to put the new character in the game and sends the code back to me, I will finish the farming sim and then… we will only need the voices!

Here’s hoping that this time there won’t be any problems with the voice actors 🙂

Then, I want to finish Planet Stronghold and Card Sweethearts, a interesting VN-Poker game that is waiting for too long. And I am producing the art now for a new kind of game style that I hope will be a great success, since I like a lot writing the stories and the storyboards for it. For now I can only say that involves detectives, mystery, and a beautiful blonde girl with a French accent…