So i’m gearing up to add some mechanics for bleed (Damage over time, aka DOT’s) and figured let's this once actually share some design thoughts as I’m excited for how all these elements are going to elevate the game. This might be a bit scattered as there are a lot of elements floating around me noggin' regarding various systems from itemization to bonuses to combat balance, in the ever raging battle to “find the fun”.

And that's game design in a nutshell. How do we make this fun? How do we make this skill not too powerful, but not too weak? How do we make this live well with the other mechanics and skills we’ve added without invalidating them or mucking up our pipelines, our progression flow. In order to make your game fun and get the most out of all these years of time we bleed into the dirt, we must thing about our games in many dimensions. The better you can hold the whole of your vision while planning out each of these elements, the better your game  will be when it finally starts to come together!

If there’s one thing that drives me mad in most RPG’s, is ultimately you end up with one skill you use 99% of the time and everything else becomes worthless. Like, why did we even spend the time to make all these attacks, UI, talent trees, items, levels, etc. if they all invariably end up with you spamming the same button shooting the same damned fireball that everyone else builds for in this singular overpowered cookie cutter build?

This is the pitfalls we are trying to avoid in our design among a billion other things that will make it superior.

A common theme I'm employing is overlapping power, or as they were called in the revised Diablo 2 skill tree, “Synergies”. But I believe my setup to be a lot more robust (Does it make me an insufferable neckbeard for having confidence in these mechanics?).  Items, bonuses, skills, all can synergize in a variety of ways. The obvious way is for each item or each form ranged or melee to simply be better at their intended role. Melee can tap health, and is tankier, ranged does more damage. Shields block damage, daggers sacrifice defense for offense. This is the most basic level of synergy: Base utility where each area shines. But beyond this, we can encourage even further nuance and fun by layering interesting bonus mechanics that amplify each other in cool ways, and we can add bonuses that amplify these amplification! Who said calculus couldn't be fun!?

So the key mechanic I’ve decided to add to melee attacks to make them useful against the pure DPS of ranged attacks is "bleed". A great many items you find for bite and slash weapons will have bleed bonuses. Bites will allow for longer duration bleeds that don’t scale to as much damage per instance, and slash attacks will be able to stack higher DPS, but won’t be able to stack as high of a Duration. These 2 bleed mechanics between the 2 weapon types will use the same internal system, and crafty players will learn that if they find both the bite and slash bleeds, they will be able to use both attack types to maximize the duration AND the damage. 

Players seeking the absolute highest DPS will employ the duration, the max damage of both weapon types, and then swap to ranged for the raw damage potential of those weapons and bonuses unique to those. But throughout the game players will always be reverting back to melee to tank damage barrages and tap their health back, as well as rare occasions they find rare items and bonuses that allow for melee to edge out ranged in DPS.

So some of these weapons will have these bleed bonuses, while others will not. I like the idea of the randomness of item drops influencing the players build plan. There will always be the constant of shops where the player knows they can buy specific bonuses (modified by random sales) and then the random drops and spawns will inject a really interesting element of randomness. 

This will further be augmented by rare random enemies dropping huge gold bounties, and random seacrit rocks that you can smash open giving you random drop bonuses as well. So we have a big slew of ways players can get bonuses, they can find them randomly in secret rocks they whack open, they can find them on items from enemies and bosses, they can buy them in shops, and they can also gain them from beating them out of fish who just straight up drop bonuses.

OH I ALMOST FORGOT! Some bonuses will bestow other bonuses! So “Aftershocks” for example allows the player to gain bonus levels in “Crash” every time they kill 5 enemies with crashdash. This is permanent, so it becomes very powerful over time. I need to play with the scaling cost of the rising kill requirement so it isn’t TOO powerful. This is similar to Brotato’s mechanics where certain weapons give bonuses for kills and it’s really fun. There is nothing more fun in a game than permanent damage bonuses! (except maybe lifetap and mana tap)

Then to mix things up EVEN FURTHER we will be adding a slew of bonuses that inject tons of builds and unique gameplay scenarios. Like the THIRSTY bonus, that allows you to tap a % of your health but only against targets that are bleeding from these DOTs. Then we could have bonus like SPITFIRE that causes projectile to do more damage to bleeding targets, giving an inherent synergy between all Both weapon types of melee and ranged, to say nothing about how Ranged innate does more DPS out of the box .

So why does this work well? Because it gives Melee SUPERIOR Damage Per Second over ranged, but only for small span of time, and only if enemies are strong enough to survive an initial onslaught of burst damage. This means more reasons for the player to use other cool attacks and forms and to engage the enemies in a variety of ways which ultimately leads to more fun. I want SeaCrit to be a celbration of many forms of combat so no player feels locked into being a "warrior" or a "mage" or a "tank", though there will certainly be room for these things! 

This opens up a slew of combat scenarios. Against bosses for example you will always be swapping to melee form in order to unload all that sweet DOT (damage over time) damage. This is damage you can load onto the enemy while also enjoying the improved beefyness of the melee form, which inherently has more health and can tap back life most easily. When the player is feeling safe with lots of life they can indulge their high DPS ranged form again.

Ok, I’m sure I missed a few points I wanted to discuss here, but that’s the gist of it. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how I plan for this itemization and bonus. OH RIGHT! I forgot to talk about how certain bonuses will be bought in shops, some will be found randomly, some only on weapons, some only on rings, some VERY RARELY found on rare weapons but usually found on rings. This sort of item specific and shop specific power gain has been done before.

But yeah I’m super pumped for how everything is going. I have FINALLY gotten everything up and running, now it’s just a matter of adding the fun stuff. I say this all the time, but I never realized how much of creating a game is tuning up the core systems. Us snot nosed gamers always play a finished game and wonder why the devs don’t better balance things and make better items and skills and now I’ve learned the hard way it’s not as simple as writing cool ideas as notes on pieces of paper. THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS!

And we’ve pounded our head against the wall all these years against all odds and now FINALLY it appears we will enjoy the fruits of all that labor so long as our health holds up. Feeling pretty ok right now, I’m torn between working and taking it easy. I think i’m just gonna take it easy and not push anything. If I could finish the project in a day i’d make the jump but we really gotta just be in good health and finish this up in top form.

I realize this blog sounds crazy right now as the current demo is so SHALLOW (pun intended). But that will be changing soon. Sometimes I feel like I'm crazy, we're so many years in to this game and right now we just have this very simplistic demo where you can fight a couple very basic fish, in this dark dreary cave while the world has gone stupid, we've been working on something I like to think is pretty special. We've kept it SeaCrit, we've kept it safe.

Here's the current list of bonuses we've already got mostly done up (need to test them to make sure they work):

And here are the ones on the way:

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Gore: Causes bites to deal DOT damage Found only on teeth (longer duration, less dmg)

Cut: Causes slashes to deal DOT damage (lower duration, higher damage)

Note: Gore and cut have caps that prevent them from adding too high damage or duration, if the player utilizes both they can apply DOTS that deal high damage for a long period of time.

Shrapnel: ranged attacks cause bleed (moderate DOT)

Finisher: Damage charge bites can push bleed DOT damage 50% higher, stacks with all bleeds. 

Thirst: Bleeding enemies provide lifetap to bites, more bleed = more lifetap.

Heavy Hitter: Crashdash provides stun now up to X seconds at full (found on heavy armor, expensive in shop)

Scavenger:  Every time a player equips a new Armor Piece, they gain X healthy.

Warlord: Every time a player equips a new weapon, they gain X sharpness.

Sharp: All Melee attacks apply wounds.

Electric Field: AOE damage similar to Radiance, smaller radius, rapid hit, only occurs when waveswimming, does exponentially more damage at higher speed.

Explosivo : Deal more damage on crashdash, greatly enhances knockback

=====Chonker SHOP and bonuses==== 

Hefty shop "The prices here sure are hefty!" NPC out front (1 line of dialogue)

Sells items that make being hefty awesome, when fully upgraded almost as fast, more damage, damage reduction based on heftyness

Bottomless: Full stomach heal penalty reduced by X%

SuperChonk: You are become chonk Eater of The light. Consumer of the dark. The hunger singularity. Feed your insatiable hunger... or else. (Chonker now reduces even more damage, while giving even more bonus damage, stomach is always depleting, if it runs out, you die)

==============================CRAZY Upgrade Ideas and ideas for much later=========================

Lightbringer: Kills reduce the darkness timer, diminishing returns.

Dedication form and weapon specific? Shield reduces damage over time, ranged increases damage, bite enhances lifetap?

Blubber: Increases max stomach fill beyond 1. Damage is drawn from this "blubber value" not health. (this of this as a damage shield)

Golden Child: Hold swap down bar fills and you give birth to an NPC minion. They cost gold. based on your current class type.

Auto turrets (this isn't as hard as you'd think!) Just gotta create a turret that looks at nearest enemy and instantiate a projectile every x seconds from its facing.

===============================================================================

Whew, so much to do! The world kinda sucks, and sometimes it feels like no matter how good a game you’re making you’re f*cked if you don't brush the right elbows and kiss the right @sses. So my mentality has always been “fuck it, we’ll just make the game even better until we break through, damn the torpedoes”. 

For better or worse. 

For the longest time I’ve been saying “We’re only one person, so it’s not like we’re going to make the best game ever." But after all these years toiling and getting better in this darned cave alone, dare I say it, but I think we’re making a pretty fucking good game! And who knows how good it will be once this all starts coming online!?

Whew. Kind of a doozy of a blog post. And it’s kinda nice to go overboard on the actual game design for once and not go crazy with a bizarre, tin foil hat ridden bitch and moan about the way of the world! 

What kind of loser would muddy their blog and chances of success with that inane, divisive bull?

So anyway…

I often speak ill of "the machine". Society will always be a machine, sometimes that will be a wonderful machine of prosperity maintained by the grateful, and at times that will be a machine exploited by the entitled. Here's the question: is there a spirit of humanity haunting those cold, whirring wheels?

Our lives revolve this lifeless mechanism, where we are the broken, not the machine itself. The machine is only the construct of our will, each cog a manifestation of our blood, sweat, and tears, bled for the greater good. 

But we are programmed with faulty instructions, we are guided by those who desire compliance and who wish to influence our tastes and our habits with no thought to the ramifications of those wounds of character. 

We’re short sighted animals wanting to get that prize in the here and now. Constantly taking the shortcut to consume the seeds of prosperity before our nut is stolen. The seeds never bloom. And year after year, nut after nut, we drive one another to our absolute worst incarnations of ourselves, and the fields once full of succulent fruits now lie barren ravaged by the starving mobs. Nothing is spared, nothing is allowed to grow, all is consumed ravenously in an instant by short sighted fools.

Our troughs from which we now consume our culture, the ideals against which we measure ourselves are filled by the corporatists those who benefit most in the short term from our laziness, our allegiance, and stupidity. We must be kept head in the ground, or we will see what a horrible arrangement this all is.

It’s never been perfect, but there was a time when some creme rose to the top. People had enough gumption to stand out from the crowd and the machine of society abided the crazed individuals trying to make a positive difference against the whole of the madness. We were greateful for hard work and sacrifice, not threatened by it.

We are so connected, so ingrained to inane songs and dances, that we kick the SeaCrit sauce into the dirt. We LOATHE ethic. We despise those with enough spine to stand up to the machine that dispenses the sludge into our trough. 

We get more sludge than everyone else! We brown nose harder than anyone! We’re benefiting from all this back scratching! We enjoy a great sense of self from all the good we do eating out of our troughs! We push others harder into the spinning wheels than all! We earned this trough full of guts!

We’re all standing around waiting for the machine to fix things for us. Again, that’s the royal we, assholes. I”M TRYING MY BALLS OFF OUT HERE, YOU SONS OF BITCHES. STEP THE HELL UP AND STOP FEEDING THE BEAST!

It’s OK to like things that don’t have 500000 views, it’s ok to engage with people in less trafficked areas, it’s ok to have an opinion you don’t expect to get 5000000 upvotes.

IT IS NECESSARY FOR OUR FUTURE TO FIND OUR SACS AGAIN AND NOT CAPITULATE THIS SOFT ASS PARADE!

At some point, we need to find our spines and say enough is enough. We’re not going to jump off the bridge just because everyone else is doing it. We used to f*cking know this. But all the adults left the room, no one tells kids these days any truth any more.

Every day in every way, we are getting weaker.

How serendipitous that I decide on a whim to pick a distillers song for this blog post and "Drain the blood" ends up being the first song that pops up.