After years of development, Death&Tactics has some big open design questions. Up until now I have been working on implementing skills, companions, items, equipment, the dungeon, enemies, and even the UI. After finally getting a few months of solid play testing, I've determined there are opportunities to elevate the fun parts of the game and rework the tedious parts. After much planning, there are some big changes/tweaks around the corner.
Here is a summary of the changes.
Character Building:
The current system of character building is detailed and complex. More complex than I feel is appropriate for a roguelike experience. The new overhaul aims to redistribute the strategic complexity, improve on the character build identity, and give the actions more personality.
Removing the loadout:
I'm sad to say that maybe the entire reason for the game-the backpack hero like loadout-is being scrapped. While it has some fun features, I feel it hinders the most fun parts of what the game has to offer. The constant building/rebuilding of the loadout takes a lot of attention, which is something I feel would be more at home in a longer form RPG. In a roguelike, I don't enjoy having to rebuild the character(s) every 10 minutes, for the amount of strategy it demands.
This mechanic was the 'brilliant' idea that got me excited to chug through this game's development and its going up on the shelf for now. Maybe it will find a new home somewhere else in this game or another.
In place of the loadout, our hero and every other character are getting a few item slots. Despite my efforts, I'm taking a page out of TFT. Characters will now be a class, some stats, a few actions, and a few items. Reducing the character building complexity significantly, but creating space for strategy elsewhere.
new party screen concept
- Adding many classes that have different movesets and stat lines
- Every character levels up
- Leveling up gives you a new action from your class's pool
- Characters now have specific skill slots: primary skill, secondary skill, and ultimate skill
- Characters will have chances to change their skills up during the course of a game
Class example
The Squad:
With simpler characters, I wanted to give the player more team-building options. The new squad system adds depth and complexity to the pool of party members. Depending on your squad configuration, you can appoint members to roles which give them unique attributes. Each configuration you choose has a unique thematic organization. Here are some examples of the squad configurations.
Squad interface concept
Combat Changes:
Out of the box, I made the combat system round based like any autobattler. If you win rounds, the enemy hp goes down. If you lose, your hp goes down. The rounds had a problem with active abilities (devices). They were tedious, you had to use them constantly, and I could not figure a way to balance them with those constraints. For this I looked to FTL. FTL is the grandfather of autobattlers and such a cool freaking game. During FTL combat, your weapon systems take time to charge up. Once they're online, you choose the part of the enemy's ship to target. During this redesign, I tried to see how much of the fun FTL based tactical simulated combat I could utilize. Instead of characters having active abilities themselves, I created a new class of item that would act as the active items. These are powerful weapons that take time to charge up during combat. The limiting factor is your squad configuration.
- Making combat 1 single round (with phases)
- Reworking devices to be party limited that charge up during combat
- Adding win conditions other than defeat the enemy team.
Item/Equipment Changes:
Items may be the part of the game I have spent the most time developing. They've been rebalanced and redesigned at least 3 times. In line with the loadout system, it wasn't coming together. The item mods, the rarity, the stats-which I feel are all essential to the loadout system-proved difficult to balance in multiple ways. I wanted random effects to build around but not too many option items to have to juggle mentally. This is part of why I feel the loadout system has to go. In place of the old item system, the new item system will get rid of random item attributes and effects and replace it with a structured system of crafting. Items will now have names and specific effects, like MOBA items. No more Rare Daggers or Mighty Gloves.
- Getting rid of item rarities
- Getting rid of item mods
- Creating an item crafting tech tree
- Redoing the smithing
- Removing equipment distinction and coalescing them into items
Smithing item screen concept
Skill Changes:
The final consequence of the loadout removal is the skill hierarchy. Skills originally came from recipes of runes and item types. Blade + Blade + Terra Rune would give you Slime Blade. Every combination up to 3 item types per rune were supported. That's over 56 actions per rune type x 6 rune types + rituals. There's like 350+ skills in the game. I was actually quite proud of making them all. Admittedly, it was a ton of work and there are some pretty lame skills that made the cut. While it's disappointing to abandon this system, I feel the game will be more fun for it. Now, these same skills will come from events and companion level ups.
New skill concept
- Removing skill recipes
- Resorting skills into different skill types and rarities
- Changing skills into different types. Instead of Flesh, Lunar, Illusion, Terra, Device. There will be different schools to support the different classes.
That is a summary of the upcoming changes. I'm sure there will be some more tweaks here and here but I am excited for the fresh new look and mechanics.
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