The red cat above is Miele (in italian Honey), our oldest cat (almost 9 years old!) relaxing on the bed.

Things are going pretty well with Planet Stronghold. Yesterday I made some big changes both in the Psionic Skills and in the level-up increase of HP/PP. This latest change was made because I used a cheat mode to raise my characters up to level 20 (which probably won’t even be possible to reach in the game, since I hope it does well enough so that I can do an add-on). Then I checked how they could be the characters at level 20, how many HP/PP they had, and I allocated all the Skill Points. The difference between the various classes wasn’t much noticeable! At level 20, playing at easy level, you get 20 x 5 skill points, so 100 skill points that increase each skill by 2. So in theory I could maximize any skill – a soldier could get to level 200 of Psionics for example!

While I like not to have too much restriction, I don’t want the class pick being totally useless. So I’m thinking to change the game so that some skills have a maximum cap based on your class. For example a Soldier could never get Psionics above a value of 50, and a Scout could never get Heavy Weapon skill above 50, and so on. I think it makes more sense to put some hard limits, so you can still create somehow “hybrid classes” but not change them completely!

The second big change I made is the Psionic Skills themselves. Right now, most were focused on two simple thing: Heal and Harm. Surely, doing damage, and healing HP are the basics for ANY RPG. However the gameplay would soon be repetitive, so I introduced new changes:

• PROTECT – “Increases friendly target’s armor value vs all kind of damage”. This way even if you don’t have the right armor, your psionics can protect you
• DISRUPT – “Decreases enemy target’s armor value vs all kind of damage”. This way even if you don’t have the right weapon, your psionics can disrupt enemy armors
• CURE – “Removes any negative condition (confused, shocked, etc) from friendly target.” Very useful when you encounter enemies that Shock, Fatigue or Confuse your heroes
• SHOCK – “Shocks enemy target stunning him for XX turns. Stunned enemies won’t attack.” This is also very important, preventing enemies from attacking completely. Of course, it’s not easy to be successful, especially at lower levels.
• FATIGUE – “Attempts to fatigue a single enemy target for XX turns, with a success rate of YY%%. Tired enemies won’t regenerate skill points.”. This is essential for some enemies that have very powerful Special Attacks. Note that you cannot prevent them from using it completely, but once they have used you can slow down their skill points regeneration.
• RESTORE – “Brings an hero back from his knockout state, restoring XX%% of total hp.” – You can use this even at lower level, and can make really the difference from winning/losing a fight

The changes above greatly improve the gameplay especially at HARD level. At easy level, doesn’t change much (I expect only those interested in the story to play at easy level!). But already at normal, and in particular hard level you can immediately see the difference. When before you could win a fight just by “raw force”, dealing damage and healing, now you can also win with cleverly used skills.

For example at hard level winning the training test if you are a psionic is really hard when you face Roboant-06 because of his Phasor Blast. Now with Fatigue you can slow down the amount of attack, or with Shock you can prevent him from attacking completely. The restore is also interesting because it works even at lower level (even if with high failure rate).

I also changed the concentration multiplier. Before the basic heal was 10 PP, the medium 20PP and the maximum 30PP. The problem is that already at low level you could heal for big amounts using 30PP. Now the concentration multiplier is: low 10PP, medium 30PP, high 50PP. This simple change makes possible to still use the first two at lower levels (below level 7-8) but to use the big healing you need to be able to spend 50PP (and this also prevents non Psionics classes from using strong Heal/Harm psionics).

Overall I’m quite satisfied. When before you would just use Psionics to Heal/Harm, now you can decide if to save their PP to use the new Psionic Skills that can really make hard battles easier if used correctly! 🙂

I’ve also implemented several minor changes suggested by “Iselwin” in my forums, like:

• the window color is now BLUE for your party attack/actions, and RED for enemy
• the message windows now is independent from the main action, reducing completely some delays during battles (I also added a nice fade in/out effect)
• you can easily compare two weapons/armors in the inventory, because I display in brackets the values of the currently equipped one

Overall was a pretty productive week! Next week will go on with the plot and try to have a version 0.8 live by end of the month with a lot of new stuff!