Andor's Trail

I have some ideas for expanding the basic mechanics of the game to provide a solid and expandable system for future upgrades. I've tried to build on the current system as much as I could, to keep it doable to implement.


1. inventory and equiping items

Make the sword and the shield slot in the inventory so that you can equip anything in any hand. This enables the use of different combat styles (two-handed weapons, dual-wielding, open hand combat, spells,...). This brings with it some rebalancing issues (2H weapons should do more damage and have more extra's because you loose a slot if you use them to give but one example), but would enable a much bigger range of combat options.

Another thing that could be done is the possibility for a weapon or skill to "consume" things from your inventory, like a poison dagger that consumes a poison gland if it hits, or for use with crafting.


2. Active and passive Skills:

Passive skills are the skills that allready exist. You could add passive skills for different combat systems (like a skill that adds damage or attack chance when dual wielding).

You could add active skills, either with skill points or by installing trainers in the game world that teach skills for money/items/quests. Skills would cost the normal AP cost of the weapon wielded +x or -x depending on the skill itself. Something like heavy slash and quick slash for swords, with heavy slash doing 120% damage for ap+1, and quick slash doing 80% damage for ap-1. Skills could also give bonusses to stats, do healing,...

This gives more options on how to spend your AP in combat.

Ideas for skill trees are:

weapon skills: (like 5 skills per weapon type)

unarmed combat skills: (kicks, throws, punches, leg sweeps, head butt). Some of these can be done with weapons (like headbutt), some of these only unarmed.
shield skills: guard (adds extra block for next round), shield smash (attack with shield),...
magic skills: They would work the same as weapon skills, but the weapon you need to equip is a wand or a book or something. Normal attack would be a standard magic missile doing book/wand damage.
crafting skills: work kind of like weapon skills, you need to equip a crafting weapon to use them and attack a "crafting enemy", then your different skills would add different loot while consuming different ingredients, normal attack would "kill" the "crafting enemy" and deliver the crafted stuff as loot. Example: equip the cooking knife, attack the stove, use skill "cook meat" (which hits for 1 damage and consumes 1 meat from inventory), automatically killing the stove in the progress and delivering the cooked meat as loot. You could use AP for how hard a craft is (crafting weapons can give bonusses to AP, so a fine cooking knife can do more recepies).


3. the combat screen needs an extra button

For all those skills to work together nicely, you'll need an extra button "skills" which opens a menu with the skills you can use at that moment (this is depending on the weapon(s) you've got equiped).



By expanding the game as explained, you've got a good base that can grow with the game. It's quite a broad system as you can see from my example of using combat for crafting.

Let me know what you think,

Kardinaal

edited: typo
and an other time to add some extra explanation.
third time to fix typo in 2nd edit and underline stuff.

Another idea for expanding the game mechanics:

Allignment system

You've got quite a few quests that force you to make choices ingame, and loads of extra dialog to represent it, but no system to measure the allignment of characters. As far as I can tell there are two "sides" in the game, order and chaos, represented by various entities in the quests. That means you can have 3 allignments: order, neutral an chaos.

Imagine you store an extra number with each character, ranging from 0 (chaos) over 500 (neutral) to 1000 (order). You start out neutral at the start of the game, and the key quests (and maybe even the type of dialogue you choose?) add or substract from that number. That way the game can react to that number in different ways (like feyguard guards are rude to you if your allignment value is > 650pts for example), shopkeepers could adjust their prices cause they "like you",...

Obviously chaotic has advantages in dealing with shadow members, and order in dealing with feyguard soldiers and the like. So neutral should have some advantage too, and I believe the thieves do their best to remain neutral, so maybe some advantage there for neutral players?

Sounds good, but makes me worry about 1)the size of the code needed for all this, and 2)whether it would induce lag like that now caused by the quick slots.
Also, where would you find all the stoves? Do stoves respawn every 6 seconds? I don't believe an inn is going to let you use their stove to cook your own meat, especially if you kill it and they don't have a stove any more! I have a very funny mental picture of stoves dotted about the landscape like wolves or anklebiters. Do they run when you approach, meat in hand? Sorry, I just reread this before posting and it seems like ridicule, which it was not meant to be. I think it is a valid point that killing inanimate objects that are normally found in very specific locations which are not open to access by our characters will raise problems. It would be great to have a way to cook our meat, but I have never had to kill a stove to cook on it.

it's a way of reusing an existing gameplay mechanic. You wouldn't get to see the stove die, it's actually a way of using existing code in new ways.

Which made me realise a better approach is to make the stove a character that doesn't move, and just talk to it *facepalms himself* .

As for these things causing lag, I'd doubt it honestly. The extra stuff this asks are mainly extra calculations when you (un)equip an item, level up or add a skillpoint. It's mostly a different way to calculate your total damage, block,... Once that calculation is done, the rest of the game just uses those numbers, so nothing changes there.

A list of usable skills can also be assembled when (un)equiping, so same story there...

Oh, OK.
Then as I said in the beginning of my last post, it sounds good to me. I like talking to the stove a lot better than killing it, too. Definitely in favor of a way to cook meat we already have.

Nobody expected the quick slots to cause a lag, either. Especially since they did not do so in the previous version (6.9), and do in this version (6.10). IDK whether the devs have figured out how that is happening, or whether they can fix it, but it seems to demonstrate that the strangest things can interact somehow to cause problems. Murphy's Law, I guess.

These are all very interesting ideas. Great post! +1

Maybe I'm going crazy, but I thought there already was a way to cook meat. Maybe I just sold raw meat and bought cooked meat.

You must have bought at least 1 cooked meat during the game, because it is required in one of the quests. That is the only cooked meat I have bought because the cost/hp ratio is so bad; and I believe most other players are in the same state. You may have bought more cooked meat and eaten it yourself, of course. I hope it was as good as it looks.

lady black wrote:You must have bought at least 1 cooked meat during the game, because it is required in one of the quests. That is the only cooked meat I have bought because the cost/hp ratio is so bad; and I believe most other players are in the same state. You may have bought more cooked meat and eaten it yourself, of course. I hope it was as good as it looks.

I have 35 cooked meats in my inventory that i don't use, i bought them a while ago when i felt like wasting some money and i bought out all the stores inventory.

But you are right, the cost for them do not make them worth using at all.

Pyrizzle wrote:

lady black wrote:You must have bought at least 1 cooked meat during the game, because it is required in one of the quests. That is the only cooked meat I have bought because the cost/hp ratio is so bad; and I believe most other players are in the same state. You may have bought more cooked meat and eaten it yourself, of course. I hope it was as good as it looks.

I have 35 cooked meats in my inventory that i don't use, i bought them a while ago when i felt like wasting some money and i bought out all the stores inventory.

But you are right, the cost for them do not make them worth using at all.

While new my character is low in lvls I use bread as my cheap HP boost. Costing only 6 gold it gives you 5 HP. I will swap to bmp when I get enough gold. I never use meats, always sell them off.