It’s that time again! Time to shine some light on the progress we’ve made with Pocket Heroes since the last gameplay video. I know we’ve been a little more quiet lately but don’t take that to mean we haven’t been working. There has been a lot of progress made on the game, it just hasn’t been highly visible work. Even though we don’t have much new to show right now I wanted to go ahead and let you all know what changes have been made and get your feedback on some of our design choices.
Gameplay and Rules
In our last video we displayed some of our gameplay by having our characters take turns moving and attacking a group of skeletons and their undead master. While that highlighted the direction we are heading with Pocket Heroes, and displayed the awesome turn-based gameplay, there wasn’t really any rules governing what was taking place. Every time a character attacks they deal the same amount of damage, there is no opportunity to miss or dodge an attack, and there was no secondary resource to govern how often a character could use a special ability. In short, what we had was a solid technology framework, but it wasn’t really an RPG.
For anyone that has followed the forum discussion on TouchArcade you may remember that after we showed that video the subject of gameplay rules was brought up. We had a lot of great suggestions and ideas from the community about how we should approach a rule system for Pocket Heroes, and I really appreciated all the input. After those discussions I hit the books, reading everything I could find about D&D rules, rules from other computer RPGs, and tabletop games to try and decide what was the best way forward.
To the possible dismay of some, we aren’t strictly following any one ruleset. What we’ve done is try to take aspects of a few different types of games and bring them together into something that works well for different kinds of players. We don’t have 30 attributes for your character to level up in, but we do have about a dozen different attributes that affect your character as they attack, defend, move, and use special abilities. We’re also looking at having, as many people have suggested, a way to hide some of the extra detail if you don’t want it so that we don’t overwhelm new players. After several weeks of design we were able to start implementing all the new systems, everything from character leveling, to combat resolution, loot generation, and difficulty scaling. There is still a lot of work to do, but we’re quickly getting to a place where there is a real RPG system working together with the multiplayer technology. Like I said, a lot of that isn’t easy to show off, but I do have some examples for you.
Character Stats
This first screenshot is of the character stats screen. Obviously this is almost all still programmer art, but it gives you an idea of the kinds of stats we’re tracking for each character. We have 4 base stats for every character ( Strength, Agility, Body, and Mind) and the values of those starts are governed by the character’s class, so Knights have higher strength than a Priestess but less Mind. The base stats will increase as your level up your character and it is those stats (along with your equipment) that determines the values of all the other stats for your character. You can see those secondary stats in the bottom half of the screenshot, Attack, Defense, Accuracy, Evasion, Magic Power, Magic Defense, Critical Hit Chance, and Block Chance. Every character and enemy in the game will have those same stats, and it is with those stats that we calculate the outcome of your battles and adventures. In addition to the stats each character will also have a secondary resource of some kind that governs the frequency and effectiveness of their special abilities. Currently the Knight has Rage as his resource. As the Knight battles his enemies his rage meter will fill up and increase the power of his attacks; but if his Rage gets too high he can lose control and begin attacking his own party members. While this is a very basic example, and we’ll probably refine the Knight’s Rage later on, it is the kind of system that we are creating for each character class. They will all have a special resource that they must keep in check, or balance out, to be at their most effective.
Equipment
The second screenshot is of our current inventory and equipment screen. The design is pretty standard for Roguelike and RPG games, we have the player’s inventory on the right and their equipment on the left. Currently we have equipment slots for the head, each arm, body, and two charm or accessory slots. Below that we have the selection area that details the specifics of each item or piece of equipment. In this case we have selected the player’s Ax and can see its name, the damage it deals, and any special perks that it provides when equipped. We’ve taken a naming system similar to Diablo in that each weapon has a type ( in this case Battle Ax), a class (Crude), and it can have a prefix or suffix ( of Bashing ). Right now we only have a few items in the game but this week I’m working on creating them as loot when enemies are killed.
There is still a lot of play-testing to do, and decisions to make, before all of this is finalized. One topic of discussion has been how random the battle outcomes should be. I’m a big fan of a large random element, where if you attack you could miss, or the enemy could dodge, or you could hit the enemy and do damage anywhere in a range of values. This goes against some other RPG design where you can be pretty confident in the amount of damage each attack will do, but I think it adds more excitement to the gameplay. We’ve gone back and forth internally about how to handle that random element but I think in the end it will all come down to how players react to it in testing.
It’s amazing how many little, and big, decisions go into a game of this type. Over the last few weeks we have done a lot of work to try and create the best gameplay experience we can. It’s our plan to have a new video ready in the next couple weeks that will show off some of this work so we can get your feedback as we move forward. Thanks for reading, and for staying interested, please let me know if you have any questions or comments either here or on the TA forums.
