Author Topic: Redesigning Health and Mana.  (Read 19036 times)

Offline Teal_Blue

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Re: Redesigning Health and Mana.
« Reply #30 on: November 24, 2011, 12:12:22 pm »
I am an amateur at this, so please remember that, but to simplify things, what if we have the health and mana bars as they are now, and the health and mana potions that i have collected are added to the bars with numbers that are visible above the bars. So i start at 100%, i add 42 health that i have collected, but used rarely as i have chosen to restore my health on returning to the settlement, which means that my collection of health, and mana too are used primarily for journies and battles in the field.

So i add my 42 health, which are maybe 5% each potion, so i have 42 x 5 = 210 + 100% = 310% health.

If i go several sessions and hours, perhaps even days before i go back to dungeon and building raids to raise my potion levels, then it will whittle away as i use them.

But that means the player always has a choice of potion hunting, or boss fighting, and if i have to fight 3 bosses in a row, then i can have the option to have saved enough health and mana to do that, or if i prefer, then i could fight only one boss and leave, potion hunt and then come back, so my leveling can be done either all at once in a given area, or in stages that i decide as a player are nice chunks that i prefer.

Anyway, that is my idea,
With no caps on health or mana levels, and just adding numbers to the bars representing the new levels, and having the potions 'disappear' into the bar when you pick them up in the houses and dungeons.

It may be an amateurish system, but my hope is that it is simple and workable doesn't mean ripping out systems willy nilly and replacing them with completely different working systems. 

:)

Thank you for listening,

-Teal



Offline superking

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Re: Redesigning Health and Mana.
« Reply #31 on: November 24, 2011, 02:54:22 pm »
regarding healing: I would divide healing spells into two types- complete heal, in which you must remain stationary and defenceless for ~10 secs and a much weaker combat heal. I would make the first type of heal cheap and easily procured from NPC towns, and the second type of heal useable in battle but much weaker/less cost effective.

regarding mana: I like the concept of the heat system, and a punishment when you exceed it, as a means of balancing some spells. I like the idea of mana regenerating slowly, so in eg. a boss battle the player can rapidly knock out a wave of spells before attacking much less frequently as they hit choke. I would treat mana potions etc as steriod shots- eg. mandatory to being able to fight to full capacity against bosses, but not needed often while circumventing normal monster spam. I would make them harder to aqquire and save up, so beating a boss means saving up a bunch before you whale in. that way, fighting a boss will be crazy fireworks of spells, while spell use in normal battles vs monsters will be modest and limited.

Offline KDR_11k

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Re: Redesigning Health and Mana.
« Reply #32 on: November 26, 2011, 05:31:20 am »
One thing with the mana and health pools we have now is that you can always teleport home, fill up and return, all without any risk or cost (assuming you haven't run out of warp potions, of course, which can be avoided by regularly teleporting home). Maybe making bosses project a no-warp-field (two rooms out or so) would reduce that a bit, making the approach route part of the fight and all that.

Offline Orelius

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Re: Redesigning Health and Mana.
« Reply #33 on: November 26, 2011, 12:46:45 pm »
Making the bosses produce a no-warp field is kinda besides the point.  All it does is force players to spend a minute or two running through the previous rooms to enter or exit.  It's not as if there'll be anything particularly dangerous in the previous rooms, anyway.

Offline KDR_11k

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Re: Redesigning Health and Mana.
« Reply #34 on: November 26, 2011, 03:02:15 pm »
Maybe regular enemies need to pose more of a threat then.

Offline Olreich

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Re: Redesigning Health and Mana.
« Reply #35 on: November 26, 2011, 08:33:41 pm »
I'll start with health, since that one is less complicated. The suits/tanks idea will work very well, but you'll have the crazy kids who always want to be full health. Then again, you'll always have those guys. If you want to keep the layman being too overly worried about filling up tanks, hide them. Use the color changing suggestion from one of the first pages, and have new tanks change the color of the bar (obviously the numbers would match), then make health psychedelic. You can also have the suit itself be your health indicator on the suit, with the players health-bar telling them that they still have a full bar of health after their suit is out of juice. Something along the lines of how the shield spells currently show damage maybe, but I haven't actually used those xD. But, so long as that health bar is all the way full, only the most OCD and/or cautious explorers will be fretting over it. However, that base health bar has to account for a pretty large majority of health, or else as soon as the suit's power goes down, folks will warp the heck out of there.

What seems optimal to my mind is a system wherein the suits account for around 40% of maximum health at full charge, but are about as hard to make/charge as finding 10-30 regular potions by searching houses. Health improvements would be found rarely inside bosses, (something like their spirit merging with yours), or in high-level treasure rooms. It would not be something you run into often, but would make that base health bar bigger, and be character specific (helps keep you on your toes when death is imminent). The idea of making my health better outside of leveling has a pretty big draw, especially in the current system of static health for the main character. This could make it eventually so that players hang out in levels much higher than theirs because they farmed health, but that's a danger with any system of health-improvement.

As for mana, well, that's a tougher sell. I like the conduit idea. I would say your body can handle a certain amount of spell-power every second coursing through it, and more than your system can handle would not force you to sit around and take damage and wait to cool down (while still allowing that option), but let you keep dishing, but take exponentially increasing amounts of health from you. The visualization for this would be similar to the current magic bar, but you'd start with it empty, then it would fill, once you max it out, the number would keep going up, but the bar would start turning red or bleeding into your health bar (to let you know how much damage you take for casting again, based on your primary mouse button, and allowing for customization). Bleeding into the health bar would require mana to be on the left, so as to bleed into the bottom of health (that way you can easily see how much life you have and if you will die). Your mana bar would decrease fairly quickly, and any damage you incur from burnout would ignore whatever armor you are wearing. I can see that last bit going both ways, but I can't come up with a good lore reason for burning out your armor first unless it's built to help you conduct more.

Example: You fire your mega-spells in rapid succession, burning through your full conduit capacity on the first one, the second you take 20% of your total health, on the third you lose 50% of your total health (now you're at 30%), if you fire a fourth without waiting long enough, you'll toast yourself to death.

Quick thoughts on an ammo system: Make it based on the dust or shards, and have the more complex spells use multiple types of shards. On the spells, just put the maximum number of shots you can fire of that spell. With this system, you have to give the option to always display the current levels of ammo components for the hard-core OCD kids (not on by default of course). Also, I totally like the conduit system better, it's much more, alive, and I hate ammo, everything should be infinigun, I don't use spellscrolls for that very reason.

Offline Martyn van Buren

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Re: Redesigning Health and Mana.
« Reply #36 on: November 27, 2011, 10:14:33 pm »
Hi!  Chiming in a bit late here, but I did want to add that I don't think health is nearly as broken as mana --- I don't mind the result where you basically die from making too many mistakes too quickly, and I certainly think you should be able to get yourself killed in a short time if you mess up that badly.  So I'd strongly favor a cooldown time for using tanks.

Mana, on the other hand, doesn't seem to work at all now --- even when I'm using creeping death, it seems like I can't run through a gauge of mana in the time it takes for the potion to cool down.  Could an ammo system give us more powerful spells?  As in, if creeping death and throw meteor are going to become something you really can't use more than 4 - 8 times without going to get ammo, could that justify making them (or a few other spells) kinda megapowered?

Offline Jerebaldo1

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Re: Redesigning Health and Mana.
« Reply #37 on: November 28, 2011, 03:28:58 am »
I can understand the logic behind redesigning health and mana, but as it is I truly enjoy how it's currently implemented. I enjoy the game until I get bored of the limited content. For me, that's a huge incentive for coming back to the beta releases with new content.

All I really desire for now is more across-the-board content. Having lots more spells, monsters, and status effects would do it for me. Not to mention interesting new things that happen on the strategic layer. There will be a point at which the variety encourages me to play for longer and longer stretches.

If anything, the switch from mana to ammo/reagents + conduit limitation would be an acceptable change if implemented well. But I do moderately prefer having scrolls and spells as 2 very different ways of affecting my surroundings.

Offline x4000

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Re: Redesigning Health and Mana.
« Reply #38 on: November 29, 2011, 09:48:28 pm »
Okay, I'm tackling the mana side of it first because it's more complex but at the same time in more dire need of a change.  I've described several potential designs that I'm considering, and set up a poll to get further feedback on them in a new thread: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9531.0.html
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Offline x4000

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Re: Redesigning Health and Mana.
« Reply #39 on: December 06, 2011, 10:53:00 am »
Okay, in light of the new discussion threads on health and mana, I'm going to lock this thread so that further discussion can take place in the new split threads.  Thanks to everyone for weighing in, and please feel free to weigh in on the new threads as well!

Health: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9559.0.html

Mana: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9543.0.html
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!