A “Build” is our end goal in an itemization game, the culmination of all those increased hit mods, crit mods, lifetap, attack speed, etc. The more a build can draw power from many sources, the more it tends to dominate, but the more fun it is! Knowing all those little bonuses helping you in the back of your head, even if they are passive, builds the fun. Knowing we have all those crazy powerful items and progressions unlocked. It’s like the difference between monopoly and shoots and ladders… why is monopoly more fun even though in both games you just roll the dice and the only difference is in monopoly you just buy whatever you land on and hope for monopolies (I’m bypassing the trading mechanics to prove a point). These snowballing mechanics of progression form the fun.

BUT! We must be careful not to snowball too few things in such a way that only one build becomes viable. I’m sick of playing RPGs where one build is by far the strongest, there is obviously only one set of mods: damage, crit, lifetap, etc.

I’m attempting to build a game where some times you want to attempt to do things that require you to be very tanky, sometimes you want to do things where you need to be fast, and I want to attempt to build enough bells and whistles around these things such that there are interesting and nuanced builds that fall in around the random assortment of things you find and enemies you defeat. I’m not going to try to avoid the meat and potatoes that is upping damage, upping crit, and fun, tried and true things such as this, but there’s a lot of room to explore new modifiers and mechanics that create new and interesting “builds” that lead to new ways of play that can accentuate the entire experience and lead to new possibilities in the future.

A lot of times you see these alternative builds tend to be either WAY too powerful, or not nearly strong enough. Going to try to find the right balance. I want everything to always be viable at low difficulty, I also want everything to be viable dependent on luck at high difficulties, and I don’t want anyone to feel as though they’re totally gimped or totally overpowered picking any specific build (unless they got lucky with some great loot drops).

I’ve also been keen to develop the very core of fun, the fun visuals of finding new weapons, new armor, new attacks. This goes all the way back to casinos and the flashy lights when you see those slot machines spin and hope you get 4 of a kind as the bells buzz. There is something primordially fun about these visual reward, these toys of mechanics we unlock. So expect to see flashy items with lots of snazzy particles and effects and sounds in the future as I build out these rare items and mods.

Never would have started his damned game if I’d known how hard this would be or how far i’d be pushing with no backing. But SeaCrit’s further along than I ever imagined i’d push it solo, i’ve got this item system coming online, and the irate neckbeard that played diablo 3 so many years ago raving about how dog shit the ARPG genre has become due to all the money chasing backscratching finally has his own damned item system, and I think it’s going pretty well.

New build coming soon, keep getting pulled in fixing tiny things that then break other things, that then need fixing, and the break the balance of other stuff over there all while refactoring code that was total garbage when I wrote it… I should probably just put out a new playable games coming together. I also want to finish up the thirst item slot item Rings, that I think will add a lot more depth potential, they’re unique in that when you swap between melee and ranged, their bonuses persist and they’ll be able to give cool bonuses to swap times, among other things that only make sense as a universal bonus across all your item setups.

So i’ve got the weapon that bestows a bonus when wielding just that weapon, i’ve got the armor hat that gives you the bonus when you’re that fish type using any weapon, and i’ll have the ring that will give you a bonus no matter what weapon or fish type you are. I think it’s a pretty legit system with a good balance of new strategic potential while gutting out a lot of the noise and fluff of prior itemization systems. Kinda fun to just have it organically fall into place as you create the system, I think this is how teh best systems are made, rather than theory crafting what you THINK might work, you just add what you believe will work with the given organism that is your game at the moment.