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Weekly Update - Damage Formula, Nocturnes & Diurnes

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago2,623 words

I've mostly been doing cleanup/tweaks this week, polishing, trying to get the game to a point where I can show the early section to some alpha testers, but everything takes a long time! While tidying up some gameplay mechanics, I made a change to how the 'arousal' stat works, which I want to talk about here. Also, another music album!

Atonal Dreams Progress

∞ Last week ∞, I showed off and talked about a video of Atonal Dreams' intro since that's what I'd spent most of the week working on and was really curious to hear people's impressions of the dialogue I'd been stressing over... but people just commented about relatively insignificant things like the minimap, which made me wonder if videos like that are something that anyone's even interested in seeing. I have no idea! What kind of stuff is actually worth writing about in these posts?

I'm still working on polishing the early bits of the game so then I can release them as at least an alpha test and finally get some direct feedback on how the game feels to play (hopefully), but it's taking longer than I thought it would, annoyingly. I'm working on it consistently every day, but there are a ton of little tweaks and tasks that all add up to really eat up time. Mostly I've fixed bugs and added extremely exciting things like code to determine which slots the monsters start battle in rather than just filling them up linearly, though I suppose two things are worth remarking on:



Previously, skills looked like this. Combatants have a stat called 'arousal' which varies between 0 and 100%, represented by the hearts, and in this earlier version, it determined turn order (speed) and skill availability. The gradient on the skills showed the range of arousal for which the skill could be used.

I found from playing that I mostly ignored arousal; at most it was an uncommon minor irritation; it wasn't adding anything of value. Collie has a skill to boost it ('rouse'), though I never used it.

I first used this stat in Taming Dreams, though it was called Excitement then. In that, it was a multiplier for both incoming and outgoing damage: at low excitement, you'd take little damage but do little, and vice versa for high excitement. I think I had fairly significant multipliers, something like x20% to x200%, so at low arousal you were almost invincible but hit like an emaciated grandma.

That led to some interesting gameplay opportunities; much more than the skill restriction thing. So I revised Atonal Dreams' arousal to work similarly:



Now, you can use any of your skills without limitation. Each has several properties - now shown as icons in the space which used to have the temperature gradient (coming to this decision took several iterations and a while!) - that are used in determining damage:



The first is the base damage stat. This can be either Physical, Light, or Dark; the corresponding stat is used as a starting point.

Skills have a growth type: Life, Death, or Spirit. Life skills boost max HP by their level while equipped, Spirit ones fill the speed bar by level% on use. For Death skills, their level is added as a flat number to the damage stat in the damage formula.

Elements are a fairly simple fixed rock-paper-scissors multiplier to the damage stat. 150% if effective, 50% if ineffective, 100% otherwise. Elements can't be changed. Skills have an element, but the user's element is only used defensively (no Pokemon-like STAB).

Some - but not all - skills have a rune. The skill's rune is compared to both the user's and the target's corresponding rune, and the closer it is to both, the higher the multiplier. The multiplier range is wide: an actor with an R rune using an A skill on a target with an R rune would be 20%, while an R runed actor using an R skill on an R runed target would be 200%.

Like with runes, both the actor's and target's arousal values are used as two combined multipliers: (0.5 + actorArousal) * (0.5 + targetArousal). So that gives a multiplier from 25% to 225%.

Finally, the target's defence (or magic defence if the Light or Dark stat was used for offence) is subtracted to give the final damage value.



I'm concerned that the system might seem overly complicated, but compared to other games, this is a really simple damage formula! Compare it to, say, ∞ Pokemon's ∞ or ∞ Final Fantasy VI's ∞, which require long mathematical descriptions to reveal and which took in-depth digging to discover in the first place.

Unlike in standard JRPG damage equations where there's a bunch of complicated stats stuff going on behind the scenes, but much of it is based on factors out of your control (or only slightly modifiable, often through items equipped outside battle), here you can alter the effects of your skills massively through deliberate action.

The total potential multiplier range is huge: 5% to 675%! What that means is that if a character had a base 20 attack and used a damaging skill against a target with 0 defence, if the conditions were their absolute worst (Bliss skill on Fear target, skill has an A rune but both actor and target have R runes, both are at 0% arousal), it'd do 1 damage. But if conditions were ideal (Fear skill on Bliss target, skill has A rune and both actor and target have A runes too, both are at 100% arousal), it'd do 135 damage.

I remember reading about ∞ a way to theoretically build up a bunch of specific multipliers to cause a Pokemon to deal over a billion damage in a single attack ∞, which is amusing but ludicrously unlikely to ever actually happen in real gameplay. So this isn't quite as drastic a damage boost as in a situation like that, but it's also not nearly as unlikely. Some bosses will probably require building up big multipliers like this to take them down, which I think could lead to some more interesting gameplay than just spamming Attack or some elemental spell they're weak to.

Usually, though, the multipliers would hover around 100%, or maybe like 50% to 200% or something. The ridiculous 600+% situations would have to be deliberately set up.

Conceptually, all these multipliers are based around the idea of similarity resonance - skills are more effective the more they're like their target. I find this very interesting, though it's different to the usual STRONGER THAN relationship seen in other games.

I spent a couple of hours adding this:



This shows in battle when you hold down a certain button (I'm using the right trigger currently). It displays a breakdown of the factors involved in determining the damage for the last 10 damaging skills used. Useful if you just did something and got an unexpected effect ("why did I just do 0 damage?"). Compare the two uses of Tame, for example (0 damage vs 17 damage).

It feels overwhelming to even look at, but I've found this to be the case with a lot of games when seeing their unfamiliar nitty-gritty UIs for the first time. It's the norm for me to take a few hours to get my head around a game's technical details before they finally click, though I wonder if it's this way for other people too or if they expect everything to make sense instantly.

But making a system that can be fully understood instantly but still has enough depth to lead to interesting gameplay later just seems impossible!

You could say that games like Pokemon have mechanics easy enough for a child to understand but which can be manipulated in greater detail by skilled endgame players, but I'd like to hope this isn't too dissimilar. Most of the early game content would be passable enough just by using basic attacking skills and essentially ignoring runes and arousal. You could probably get through the whole game that way, actually. Mastering the mechanics just makes things more efficient.

I actually wrote about this ∞ in a public post on my Patreon ∞ during the week, since I wanted to get some thoughts out but wasn't sure where. I'll probably do that again if I have something game-related on my mind mid-week.

Anyway, I spent quite a bit just playtesting the game this week while recording bugs I found, and I do think the mechanics that I have are quite fun to play with! They're varied enough that each battle doesn't just feel mindless - or at least you can choose to play in a way that's not mindless - but I didn't get stuck in frustrating corners or anything either. I also used Collie's arousal boosting skill quite often now that arousal has a more directly relevant effect on gameplay; it can really make a big difference as to whether she can tame a target in one turn or two.

I'm hoping to have a playable alpha soon. I thought maybe I'd finish off the polishing this week, but that wasn't the case because these stupid little details take so much time. Hopefully over the next week I'll be able to finish off refining this starting area, but we'll see!

Music Album of the Week

Since everyone was BEGGING me for it, literally on their knees in tears telling me that they NEED this or else there's just no point in living, THERE JUST ISN'T, here's another collection of old "piano" musics I composed when I was a fresh young 18-or-so-year-old.

Link: [LINK]

I wasn't sure whether these pieces would even be worth making an album out of, though after listening back to them while adapting them to wav files, I did find myself enjoying them more than I expected to! I've been listening to the album while writing this, and it just finished, but I've restarted it because I want to listen to it again!

They're from around the same time as the Piano Rambles pieces, and about the same quality. Shorter, though. An hour and ten minutes total duration.

The album art's from around the time they were composed again this time!

I've still got over 20 albums I want to upload, though I'm enjoying working through them; I've been wanting to archive all my old music for years, and doing it on a weekly basis like this is actually motivating me to do it. I'm fairly directionless about it though; I'm going roughly earliest first, but I haven't uploaded these in the chronological order they were composed. If you have any requests for old music of mine you remember and want me to make an album of next, let me know! Otherwise I'll just choose another one at kind-of random.

Also, maybe I should make a separate blog category for these music albums. Maybe!!

Other Indie Games

I haven't played another indie game since Timelie, annoyingly. I'm still working my way through Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity! Almost done now though; I'm trying to get some final little (tediously grindy) details to reach 100%, which I didn't expect to do but I got surprisingly into it.

I have however started trying to spend at least half an hour a day on Twitter browsing through various indie dev stuff. I'm trying to make a note of at least one thing a day so I can compile them in my weekend blog post, though I only did that for 3/5 days this week. Here's what I found:


∞ Here's a postmortem of a Zelda clone called Lenna's Inception ∞. A useful read for me, though it's long. It was released in January 2020, but started life 8 (!) years earlier. The developer talks about working at an indie game publisher for a while and learning a lot from that, and how meeting other people - including one who's now his business partner - was the most valuable and important part of the whole process. He calls its release a failure because it only sold 6800 copies; this is around three times more than MARDEK (currently at 2241)... but then again I didn't work on MARDEK for 8 years, and it was a Flash game I'd released for free years ago - and as such it felt wrong to market it now - so its Steam release isn't really comparable to something released primarily on that platform. He also mentions it got 22% of its purchases on itch.io#:



So that's worth noting.


∞ Here's a Kickstarter for a game described as "A 2D pixelated fantasy RPG with immersive story-telling and battle between two distinctive worlds. Inspired by Hongkongers." ∞ I personally feel it looks... mediocre, though it seems to be the first game by a student who's working solo, so I suppose it's impressive enough for what it is. Plus most indie games probably look like that! He's asking for around £10k, and has £1.5k in around a week. I'm not sure how or why, and it'll be interesting to keep an eye on it to see where it goes, but as I've been wondering whether to do a Kickstarter myself for ages, seeing something like that is fairly promising, I suppose?

Interestingly, there's ∞ this playlist of streamers who've made videos about the game ∞, which sounds impressive enough in theory... though if you look at the videos themselves, they mostly have like 30-50 views. Interesting to me; puts things in perspective, and makes me wonder how many gaming youtubers there are out there who get similar view counts if they're lucky. Makes my own low view counts on the few videos I put on there, and on the posts on this blog, seem slightly less pathetic.


On a sadder note though, ∞ here's a Kickstarter for a game that the devs had been working on for 5 years, which only raised £3.5k of the £22k they were hoping for ∞. I've only skimmed the page so I don't understand what the game's about, but I wonder whether it just didn't stand out or whether it's just tough to draw attention to a Kickstarter in general. I wonder whether I'd do any better if I have MARDEK as a past project to show what I'm capable of, though maybe Atonal Dreams isn't similar enough to it for old fans of that to be interested. My biggest concern with Kickstarter is all the stupid extras you have to promise; I notice this one mentions some physical products they were offering to backers. Having to decide on and make things like that are the main reason I'm still hesitant about starting a Kickstarter (it's hard enough just making the game!)... though I'll keep looking into others and see if any offer minimal 'rewards' and still succeed.

Also...

I've been thinking more about Discord, since that's something I should have finished setting up ages ago. I'll probably write a separate post about that though. I keep half-writing Personal category posts on Saturdays, intending to finish them on the Sunday, but then I just don't bother... bleh.