Quote:Original post by JasRonq
Now Konidias, what you said about your spells, you are decreasing consumption at the cost of time, but also increasing power. That seems to break your rule of 3. In any case, that is more a decision for play testing to determine how those three can be exchanged in the case of your game. I'll keep the basic idea in mind for my spells though.

Not sure how this breaks the rule. If you decrease consumption and increase power, you end up with an attack that is powerful and consumes little magic/energy/stamina but it takes more time.

Power = Strong
Consumption = Efficient
Speed = Slow

So you're getting 2 good things and one bad thing. So for example, if you had:

Fireball Spell - 5 damage - 5 magic consumed - .5 second cast

and you held down the spell key to build up power for a second then you would have:

Fireball Spell - 15 damage - 2 magic consumed - 1.5 second cast

So now you're doing 3 times the damage for under half the mana cost but it takes an extra second to cast.

Anyway, back to your post... You say you wanted to avoid armor reducing damage because it either "blocks a hit or it doesn't" but that's far from the case. Sure maybe with only sword attacks, but what about harder impacts? If you get hit in the chest with a sledgehammer while wearing armor, I'm sure you're going to take damage, but not nearly as much as if you weren't wearing armor. So armor can indeed reduce damage taken. Just look at the bruises people get when they are shot while wearing a bullet proof vest. =p

For the speed of combat you're wanting to achieve, I'm really not even sure how magic could be worked into the situation. Hand to hand combat can be furiously fast, and casting magic would have to be just as fast to be of any use.

It seems to me that you're trying to place down rules and some of these rules are causing you more trouble than good. For example, your problem with armor is that you don't want armor to always block. Well that's easily solved by having armor have durability. So many powerful attacks would easily break armor and leave someone vulnerable. Consider it your "health bar".

If you're using humans in your game... well, they are squishy bags of meat. One stab from a sword and it's usually game over. There's no reason why you couldn't have a fast paced combat system where you have to beat someone until their armor gives out and then deliver 1 or 2 blows to finish them off.

This avoids the problem of having a character taking ill effects from a few initial attacks, since the armor would be taking the majority of the damage.

Having to work around the armor seems a little tedious in my opinion, but maybe I'm just not envisioning your idea very well. I'd just much rather prefer to beat someone until their armor shatters and then a few sword swings to finish the job.

If you want to avoid bars, simply make the game more realistic. In real life, armor can protect you but it will eventually break. Durability of armor can be displayed simply by having your armor look more beat up and broken with the more hits it takes. Having the armor make different noise when hit, depending on the condition of the armor would be a nice audible indicator. Shiny new armor would make a nice "clang" noise when hit, while beaten up armor would make more of a "clunk", as if it's about to give way.

This could build up tension because the player would know they are about to be done for unless they make some last second desperation moves. All of this without having a single bar on the screen.

The whole "chipping away until the boring end" scenario really depends on how strong the armor is or how many hits a player can take. Armor could only take a couple of well placed hits to break it, so dodging would still be important and you wouldn't end up with two characters standing there whacking at eachother until the guy with the higher stats wins.

Your current system sounds like it makes armor pretty much indestructable.. which doesn't really work well if you ever plan to have armor with different levels of defense. Right now it seems like your armor either protects you or it doesn't.

In any regard... What you described sounds almost like a FPS but with melee instead of guns. The problem with that is your combat is going to last all of 2 seconds because one quick stab to an opening in the armor and the player is dead. (like a headshot in a FPS) Because in a FPS, you're either dodging the bullets, or you're hit and pretty much dead.