B: Neo Katana in Middle-Earth

Neo Katana in Middle-Earth

So here is my entry for the comp. Well the first iteration anyway. I would have liked to expand more and try to balance, but my time ran out and I really wanted to post something tonight. I'm afraid it's a bit underwhelming at this point.

I tried to boil down fighting against mobs to a one button fight. The idea is that you have to plan before fights what type of fights will be easy and what type of fights will be hard. You do this by choosing skills between fights. You can also pick your fights by running away from a specific fight.

The controls are really simple. It's just point and click.

Any feedback is welcome and appreciated. :)

Comments

  • I think I didn't have enough information to make an informed decision about whether I would in or lose - the only piece of information I had was my "fighting power" or something - all the stuff you were mentioning about facing more challenging enemies or lots of enemies didn't really apply or make sense to me as all I knew about me was a number and all I knew about my enemy was "a horde of something(s)"... which made it feel like I was gambling - upgrade this or that, it didn't matter too much - pull the handle, win or lose.

    Winning always got me one level up, but it didn't feel like it did anything...

    It has a cool choose-your-adventure feel to it but I didn't feel like I had much choice, or that my choices meant anything. I think it's all down to a lack of information...

    If I missed the info somewhere, er, apologies :P
  • Dying was a nice surprise :P
    But ye, I'd imagine you need some form of quantitative measurement of how "difficult" the next fight will be, because at the moment "The greatest challenge you have faced so far" is a bit vague, could go either way (and it did!)

    Another thing that I think would be cool was if there were some sort of indication of future fights (even if it's just a list of text items, showing what the upcoming fights are) because if you're trying to get players to plan their fights then seeing ahead lets them choose ("I'll skip this hard fight so I can save a power potion for a really hard fight in 2 fights time, and I'll take out the week mob in between to get an extra skill point that I'll need") kinda thing. Also making that information useful also means that when you take it away ("Oh noes it's night, you cannot see upcoming mobs") then the player would probably feel less certain/more vulnerable etc.

    I also kinda assume you plan on adding extra stats? What about adding "active" skills that buff you for the next fight but then have some sort of cost attached (be it a "cooldown" period in which it cannot be used for say 3 fights, or some other monetary/resource cost)?
  • Thanks for the feedback guys,

    @Tuism, you didn't miss the info. There is a blatant lack of information provided. I usually spot these types of things soon after I post the game and can't see my debug messages anymore :P. I have thought of a way to make the pull the handle syndrome better(hopefully) that I will get up by tonight if all goes well. I want to ask about the choices and information. At the moment I'm thinking of two ways that I could do this, first one I'll call immediate information, second one I'll call hollistic information.

    So for the immediate information I was thinking I could put a number on screen that you could use to gauge how well you will do in the fight. The higher your number vs the mobs number, the better your chances of winning. The information is immediatly available and applicable to the fight at hand.

    The hollistic information is the one I would rather want to go for, but I'm not sure how well it would work. The idea is to leave clues in how the monster behave and when the player sees a certain mob with certain characteristics, they should assume certain things. So let's say I have an entry on something like vampires, and it says something along the lines of "Vampires are creatures that roam the night alone and are usually not found with others. Some cases of vampires hunting has been reported, but hopefully these are just rumours...because that would be super hard". Then I leave it up to the player to deduce that when they fight a pair of vampires, it would be considerably harder than fighting a single one.

    Do you think think that being given information in that way would create a sense of importance in some of the skills, provided that the skills do more specific things rather than the 2 generics I have in atm.

    @D3zmodos, the idea about the list of enemies seems stellar. I'll try to work it in, I especially like the part about taking the info away. I think I should really start being less nice to the player :P I have to work on active skills as well. I wasn't planning on putting in anything like that at the start, but felt that something was missing and played with the power potion thing, but after your comment I realized that I missed active type things where the player need to make decisions in THIS fight, that will affect future fights in some way.

    So yeah, I'll update the build as soon as I have tweaked some things.

  • There's a game called Tower of Fortune in the iOS store that is basically a slot machine type RPG, and I think the it works despite having really little choice because it shows you what you need to win - those 3 little tumblers are visible so you can see how your win or loss is compounded, then what you can do to influence it (later).

    You never need to know what chances you have, but instead how you can win. Also, building up confidence by giving lots of wins to start with is a good way to let people get into it.

    I thought your skills were quite specific - one is good against mobs of low level and the other is good against bosses. It's just that you wanna see how it works :)
  • Will be interested in seeing an update, the lack of information is basically my major concern at the moment too :P
  • So I have been wanting to work on this some more but there is something holding me back from picking it up again. It's something I have been researching spesifically for and from this game but haven't got an answer I'm happy with yet. It is the question of challenge.

    Challenge is a big and broad topic to discuss, so I was hoping that discussing it in terms of this prototype could lead to something that could be implemented. My problem at the moment is that I want to challenge the player without using any action based mechanics. But I'm torn between two ideas, which I will try to name deterministic and random outcomes.

    With deterministic outcome I mean that all information is available to the player and they will know the outcome of the fight before they start. They will always know whether they will win or lose a fight before they start. It's sort of like chess, just a lot less strategy.

    At the other point of the scale is random outcomes where a player will never know if they are going to win or lose and are the mercy of some dice god that will hopefully look upon them favourably. Kind of like craps or roulette.

    Both of these are obviously a terrible solution. I'm trying to find something in between. A random outcome that the player can influence in some way. Basically something like poker. You don't have all the information, but you can infer some but at the end of the day a certain bit of luck is still involved. I'm having trouble figuring out how the player should be able to influence the outcome.

    So far I thought about have a ratio between the Fighting power of the player and enemy and the better the ratio, the better the odds of you winning. But it seems like a very shallow mechanic. Shallow in that the player only has one avenue to explore on how to win...increase my Fighting power...wopeee! When you leverage it against a resource type thing like having certain boosting abilites avaible but limiting them(potions) it becomes more interesting but it's still not exactly what I'm looking for.

    So my question is this, how do you make a game challenging while using random rolls/calculations, but still allow the player to control the flow of the game? And also, how harsh should the punishment be for a player "failing" a random event?

    I'm kind of thinking out loud(as loud as text can be) but I'd appreciate any thoughts and ideas on the topic. :)
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