Category: Game Design Rants

No Moshing lectures about various aspects of video game design, because he’s totes a legit expert yo.

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Character Revamps

Conash here to once again ramble on about mechanical design stuff as I understand it. For those of you who haven’t been keeping a close eye in the BKG discord, the 0.42 release includes a revamp to a lot of Gargan’s skills, and I’m hoping to give Yamamaya a revamp for 0.43, so I thought that I’d take the time to try to dissect the mindset that’s gone into all of this, maybe it’ll be useful for some of you!

So let’s start with Gargan, the intention behind Gargan’s moveset is to mimic that of the Arkham games, aim for trying to manage and switching between enemies but getting in big damage in-between. If you examine Gargan’s original move set you can really see this in play, cape-stun to setup an enemy for a lot of damage, the ability to counter incoming physical attacks, and an ability that has a chance to stun two enemies at once. The problem with these skills however comes down to cost vs pay-off, consider for a moment using cape-stun followed by Stun-break which should be Gargan’s bread and butter at lower levels, originally you had to spend 5 momentum to use cape-stun and then 10 momentum to use stun-break which removes the stun status and does about twice as much damage as a regular attack. This means that you first have to build up 15 momentum with 3 attacks first, then you spend 2 turns to do the same damage as two attacks? From a damage point of view it’s not worth it, now stunning the enemy could be worth it on it’s own but then you have to consider that stun-break ends it at least one turn, if not two, earlier than it would otherwise be so if you just want to stun the enemy you’re better off just using cape-stun. Later on though Gargan gets ‘Throw’ which has a smaller chance of stun but hits two enemies and does 2 attacks worth of damage in one action, even if you don’t get the stuns you it’s worth it to use two attacks instead of one, the 20 momentum cost makes it not that great but as long as you don’t use momentum for 4 cape-stuns you’ll get there. Coup De Grace on the other hand cost 30 momentum, did about as much damage as 2 attacks if the target was knocked over, oh and it also removed stun, when you compare these skills side by side and consider how players can typically rely on 5 momentum per turn and you win battles by doing damage, it’s no wonder that Throw was Gargan’s only offensive move that got used consistently. Cape-stun was nice for stuns but when players could bring Raina to use her knockdowns instead while still doing good damage even if a lower chance of knockdown it’s easy to see why Gargan wasn’t considered as stun king/queen in parties. Counter wasn’t a ton better, as it cost 15 momentum (so 3 turns work to build up to it) and only lasted until Gargan’s next action, which meant that if you didn’t have a good way to guarantee an attack by Gargan’s next action you could easily feel you wasted that momentum, and in many cases you may only get 1 free counter attack from Gargan meaning you spent 15 momentum to negate damage from 1 attack. Back to Back, the unity force skill, was very useful with it’s 5 momentum cost and 3 turn duration on top of hitting both Gargan and Hero, but it required Unity Force so it’s not something players could rely on in battle. You may have noticed that I was trying to compare things to using a regular attack, and that’s important because that’s your bread and butter, if the skills aren’t more valuable than a regular attack or aren’t worth the time it takes to get enough momentum to use them, then there’s no reason for players to think about the skill rather than use an attack, whether players actively think about it or not they notice how these numbers turn out and it impacts their decision making.

So then the question becomes how do you fix these issues if most of Gargan’s skills aren’t worth the time it takes to attack? Well, since it’s important to make sure that you stay creatively in line with what’s intended you want to take your time and examine how to approach things. For Cape Stun, the problem is largely that it’s the first move in one of Gargan’s two combos but it makes the total combo more expensive while not doing damage, not to mention it runs the traditional risks of hit rage, evasion chance, or even enemy counters. To combat the problem of it making combos more expensive I took some inspiration from Raina, players who use her a lot never have a problem with using Phalanx because even though it doesn’t do damage and only lasts one turn, it gives Raina momentum just like if she used guard allowing players to feel comfortable using it as a bread and butter instead of regular attacks, as the utility it brings (not to mention increases damage on some of her skills) outweighs the marginal damage you’d get from a regular attack, so if Cape-stun was set to generate more momentum than it required it would help further set players up for a combo by making it easier to continue the combo afterwards instead of having to work have the entire combo ready up front. On top of that, I remembered that common enemies were basically unable to do anything about your cape stun in the Arkham games, so in addition I gave it some utility that would allow it to be competitive with ‘Throw’ by making it so that enemy evasion, taunts, counters, or reduced player accuracy wouldn’t impact it by turning it instead into a certain hit instead of a physical hit, allowing it to always have a place in the player’s arsenal even if they are able to inflict stun through other means. Stun-break got some changes to the damage formula to make it more rewarding, but the biggest problem it had was that it removed stun, making it so that a lot of times players would rather not use it to keep the enemy stunned, this however was fixed by giving it a base 100% knockdown chance if the enemy you hit was stunned, now you’re just trading Stun for Knockdown while doing better than 2 attacks worth of damage, it still has the 10 momentum cost to it but when combined with Cape Stun giving you more momentum this combo is very easy to pull off, making it worth the net loss of momentum (which prevents you from using other skills). For Coup De Grace I could have done the same thing as Stun Break, but I instead thought to handle one thing that felt kinda funny with Gargan, see Gargan is based largely on inflicting stuns then doing big damage off of stunned enemy, but every other character with similar abilities use knockdown, and well it just feels odd that Gargan can benefit from stunned enemies but not enemies on the ground, this left Gargan feeling like Gargan’s core loop existed on another planet and couldn’t synergize with other party members, so for this I took more inspiration from DnD and Pathfinder, instead making Coup De Grace be based off of ‘helpless’ enemies in the sense that they had the ‘knockdown’ status and gave it a 60% crit chance on top of Gargan’s base crit chance, along with some tweaking of the numbers here and there and now Gargan has a fantastic 1-2-3 combo, it’s hard to maintain the full combo but if you wanted to jump around from enemy to enemy with a 1-2 combo or just cape-stun everyone, well, that bit is very easy. Counter was also retouched to last 2 actions instead of 1, so it’s still not as good as ‘Back to Back’ but many players are reporting that it still lasts long enough to more than justify it especially as it allows Gargan to do some pseudo-tanking.

Well, I probably got a bit ahead of myself there going into the specifics, but general point is that when you want to give players abilities you should try to keep in mind first what is their bread and butter, what does it give them, how does it contribute to the ‘win’ condition, and then any special ability needs to be able to have a reason to use it instead of that bread and butter. If an enemy is knocked down and Gargan has 60 momentum, sure you could use a regular attack, but Coup De Grace will probably do 6-10x the damage so unless you’re saving up momentum to use throw 4 times in a row when some more enemies show up, there’s no reason not to. Sure players could just leave an enemy stunned and go for a regular attack that gives them 5 more momentum, but Stun-break will probably do 2-4x as much damage and set them up for Coup De Grace, that 5 momentum won’t help me win the battle unless I use it to do more damage but that’s exactly what Stun-break is for. Players may not be aware of the the details or heck they may even come to wrong conclusions, but when they’re looking at 400 damage for a regular attack and 800 damage for stun-break, they know which one will win the fight faster.

Yamamaya’s issues however are a bit different, see many players already know how to get damage out of Yamamaya to keep her competitive, and while some of her skills also need to be made worth the cost (like Shockwave) I strongly believe that her biggest problem is that her skills are competing with each other to be the ‘best’ skill instead of working together to give her a good ‘arsenal’. Now, not everyone should be based around setting up a 1-2-3 combo or anything, but with Yamamaya you’re looking at using Strong Attack, Mountain Lion Rage, or Polar Bear rage, not all three. The nature of the rages are going to make them be competing with one another as she won’t ever be able to use more than one at a time just like Diadira with her songs, but well, we’ve got some plans to help her Techniques stand out as a lot more valuable than they currently are so that they don’t need to be better than Yamamaya’s best rage. We’ve also talked with fans some and liked some of the ideas that we got, so do expect to see Yamamaya’s rages changing up once her revamp is done. I can’t promise that Mountain Lion rage is going to be as good as it currently is, but my main intention is to try to make her other rages feel a lot more useful and like there is the right place and time for them, even if it doesn’t come up too often. It may get a bit tricky at times since ‘Mountain Lion Rage’ makes Yama do a lot more damage which contributes directly to winning a fight so other rages like ‘Polar Bear Rage’ may struggle to find as much usage, but we’ve got idea and I trust in the tester’s we have to give me effective feedback on how well we hit things like this! So you have that to look forward to!

I hope that my talk this time was useful to some of you! My intention here was to try to explain the process of how you figure out what to do, identify problems and try to solve them, though looking back I think that’s going to be a bit hard for me since my process is largely finding new ideas and connecting them together, but you never know when talking about your own problems and solutions may end up giving someone else the idea they needed to solve their own! Feel free to ask any questions or share your comments wherever you find me!

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Influencing players with mechanics and you!

Hey everyone, it’s Conash again giving you another blog post so that NoMoshing doesn’t have as much on his shoulders today, and oh boy has this development cycle not been kind to us. To start off with, we had a malware issue come up on our forums today so if you have have visited the forums in the past 48 hours it’s recommended you run a scan on your computer, then afterwards change your forum password just in case. Next, I am sorry to say but the new backer release will be delayed until Friday. We will continue working on it and bring a complete backer’s release to you all ASAP, but as of right now there are significant portions of the new content unfinished- too much for us to be comfortable making a release right now.

Now onto the actual topic for today, how game designers can manipulate players by using the dreaded magic known as math! Now, you may not have noticed it, but a lot of games are designed in a way to deliver various emotional experiences and can even sorta ‘convince’ you how you should behave. Sometimes this is more obvious than other times, for example when you’re playing HC and you get your first dual-element spell you’ll basically never use anything except it, because it does twice as much damage as anything that mage has, not only that it does both status effects, so of course you’re going to use Revelation instead of Crystal Rays! Now theoretically the MP cost may be a reason to avoid using it, but by the time you get access to it getting 2 actions at once is just so much more valuable than the additional MP you lose if they’re weak to radiant but only neutral to fire, this however is pretty obvious to anyone who plays HC.

Games however can get similar results in more subtle manners. Let’s take Sengoku Rance, since the official release came out recently. I have almost never used the option to increase my battlefield preparedness before a battle, on top of that I’ve read many guides, talked with many players, and at the end of the day I’ve never seen anyone recommend you do this over the course of a normal game, and when you break it down you can generally see why. First of all, in the game you are very limited in the number of actions you can make per turn, at the start you can only do 2 per turn, but you eventually get to 3-4 actions per turn, meanwhile you have to invest roughly 3-4 actions to capture any given territory assuming every attack you make is successful and the enemy never successfully defends. Meanwhile, you have a lot of other events going on, ranging from ranking up your troops, exploring dungeons, getting new sex scenes, recruiting new units, you name it, which you also have to balance with your war path and so taking the time to get an extra +10% battlefield preparedness for [b]one[/b] fight just doesn’t feel that good, you’re looking at spending 1 action to turn your next attack to be worth 1.1 attacks. I can, conversely, choose to scout before the fight, which usually has a lower check, and get +6% battlefield preparedness without using a separate action for it, and comparatively the return on investment just isn’t worth it. This creates a situation where if I could choose one of my units to get +1 more to their scouting or the max level of construction (9), I would choose the +1 to scouting every time, and despite encountering numerous play styles that I’ve seen and talked with people about I don’t know of a lot of people who wouldn’t value scouting at least twice as much as construction, because whether we realize it or not the game is designed in a way that additional points in scouting (which is needed for a couple of story events, on top of being a barrier that a lot of the best items in the game are hidden behind) will feel rewarding to players, while smart gameplay can render the construction stat useless.

So now that I’ve talked a lot about various examples as to how game mechanics can influence gameplay, and maybe you’re not quite sure about things, so let me work to get to my point of all of this. When it comes to designing a game you should keep this idea in mind as it is what some people would refer to as the ‘tactile feel’ or the ‘game feel’, because (while it can be hard to describe) they’re basically referring to how you feel good when you make a smart play (such as choosing the spell that does two spells at the same time) and how you feel bad when you realize you made an inefficient or detrimental play (ie, the battlefield preparation action). A lot of this stuff comes down to investments and pay-offs, if you invest time into something you want the game to say “You did good!” with progress towards something, when you invest thought into your armor choices you want to see you getting hurt less or not having to worry about status effects the ruined your run. Conversely though, you can discourage players from doing those actions by going in the reverse, which is a big way of how games that let you buy a premium currency work to get you to spend money. They use various methods to increase the time to earn the free money so that even if you do earn that one item you need to proceed, you’ll look back at all that time and energy investment and come to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth it deep down. It’s not something that I like, and I do my best to try to play around with this idea a lot in HC, I try to use enemy weaknesses and strengths to encourage players to use more effective strategies, or I’ll try to adjust the difficulty to feel if the testers come back and tell me that they have to invest so much time and effort into fighting the common enemies that the quest as a whole just causes too much stress. Granted, my enemies are still known to cause stress even after this, but based on the feedback I typically get it seems that players generally never feel that it’s unfair, which is a very important part of things.

You can even do this in more creative ways. An example would be in one of the new quests we’re adding in this release, because of what’s going on with the story I decided that I wanted to add in a boss that feels like you’re leading a siege, and if I didn’t get it into this quest then that’s one possible boss idea that I don’t think I’d be able to fit anywhere else into HC, so I sat down and tried to think what does a siege feel like. To me, I’d imagine that a siege is slow as they can take days, it’s also huge as the between the armies, the weaponry, and the target you’re looking at big attacks or lots of small attacks. Throwing in stuff like ladders to get up the wall, arrows, boiling oil, and battering rams would help add a lot in really setting the scene and help bring the scene to life! I spent a lot of time thinking how to work in elements like this, and eventually game to the conclusion that to do it perfectly I’d have to basically invent a second combat system (something akin to the various giant battles they eventually added in the Mario and Luigi saga) just for a single fight.

Now, we might get a bit bloated in scope and features, but even I have my limits on how off the rails I’ll get with development, so I decided to scale back and create a boss where it’d feel like you’re sorta breaking down the walls of a castle while it defends itself, so that means a very slow fight where the boss occasionally attacks but can do a lot of damage. Then after realizing that didn’t feel quite like a ‘boss’ in design, I managed to work in a few other things to be able to help make sure that the quest wouldn’t finish off with one giant slog of a fight that doesn’t feel rewarding at the end, including a way to get some support, like getting a battering ram that does good damage! I’m pretty happy with the results as I do think that boss will feel very unique, but conversely I’ve also given players the tools so that if they don’t want to deal with something that’s basically antithetical to engagement like that then they’ve got some options to undercut it while still feeling thematically appropriate. It’s kinda hard to really quantify how any given aspect of things ‘feel’, a lot of it just sorta comes down to figuring out how would things feel relative to you. One example from ‘Hell to Pay’, “So I want to make a boss that players actively want to avoid hurting what would I do? Well firstly they should be immune to traditional death, otherwise players with ‘enough’ damage will just kill them off. Next players need to be punished, so I’ll have they inflict increase as they take damage, and I’ll hide high-powered skills behind high momentum costs so if you hurt them a lot they’ll be able to hurt you a lot for a limited time period. Players aren’t psychic however, so we’ll need to make sure that they get the idea to use alternative methods on this boss somewhere… and well, I imagine most of you who have completed that quest can see a lot of what all went into that enemy. Now a lot of this stuff typically requires a firm understanding of how the combat works, what is effective and what’s not, so my time as a fan who used to min-max HC has helped me a lot in understanding how various systems fit together, but it’s been quite awhile since I’ve done that so I’m very reliant on both tester and player feedback in general to refine things. So yeah…

Haha, I guess that was a pretty big ramble. Hope that was at least semi-coherent to some of you, and useful in exploring the idea of what ‘game feel’ is, and how it influences player behavior. I’m probably not the best person to be able to explain it, but I know that when I see big numbers I’m happy, and even more so when I win. I know that when put a lot of time thinking up a complicated strategy, getting to pull it off and having it be successful makes me feel smart, and if when I go to face a boss that I’m left feeling like the game thought I was having too much fun and makes all enemies immune to my strategy two bosses later. Balance can be a hard thing to maintain, but sometimes it’s not about making something ‘balanced’ and more about making it feeling ‘rewarding’.

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How I became a Unicorn

Hello there! Conash here, and today I thought I’d talk about my experience with Monster Hunter games, and why it is that I enjoy them and keep referencing it in various discussions, and I promise you that my click-bait title will be explained beyond me finding it amusing.

So, my history with Monster Hunter began with Tri, I had heard good things about the series so when hunting for a new game I decided to pick it up. My older brother loved it, he made some long-time friends playing it and really got into the series, I on the other hand appreciated it for being a well made game but just hated the controls. It felt sluggish, and the only weapon that I was comfortable with took a long time to kill the monsters, and I just could never really understand it. Now, I did have some experience with action RPG games before like Kingdom Hearts, Tales of games, and a few of the Final Fantasy spin-offs, but Monster Hunter Tri while I enjoyed sitting down and figuring out what armor or weapons to get in order to prepare for the monsters, actually fighting them felt a bit like a chore to me so I wrote off the series as not for me at that point.

Then Monster Hunter 4U came out, and one of my closest friends was going on about it and was looking forward to it, my older brother was also talking about how he was planning on getting it and how I would enjoy it. I was a bit doubtful at first, but when I looked into it I saw that they were bringing back some weapons that were cut from Tri, so I thought that I’d pick it up and give ‘Dual Blades’ a go because I was convinced it’d fix my issues, and it definitely did. See, in Monster Hunter every weapon is very different, they’ve got unique strengths and weaknesses and feels to them, a ‘Sword and Shield’ feels very different from ‘Dual Blades’, and well without having a good weapon that really clicked with me trying to get familiar with Monster Hunter’s unique systems just wasn’t fun, but that little slide when you’re in demon mode? Perfection. It was quick, effective, responsive, and allowed me to work on learning the monsters, as if I messed up and went in for an attack at the wrong time I had a way to quickly escape. Eventually though, I started to get bored with them as the core loop became pretty repetitive, so I tried out Hunting Horn and it opened up a whole new world to me. My movement options did become more limited without the slide, but I still had good base movement and the ability to constantly have a ‘puzzle’ in figuring out what songs to queue up, paying attention to their duration, preparing horns with different setups to cover different situations? It brought a whole new depth to the game that I still enjoy, to the point that I don’t ever want to play another weapon. I’ll still pull out DBs against some monsters that HH is a really bad matchup against, but well, being basically one of the 5ish people playing Hunting Horn I’ve come to embrace my inner unicorn (you can find run into people who use it in the right circles, but good luck running into them randomly online).

Now, that’s my experience with Monster Hunter more or less, but probably the more important question here is why do I enjoy it? Well, I do enjoy these sorts of Action RPG games like TWEWY, Crystal Chronicles, Tales of, or Kingdom Hearts, so Monster Hunter does fit right nicely alongside those games, but you don’t see me trying to push NM to dress up an HC character in say a Sheena costume or something, so I should probably explain what it is that Monster Hunter offers over many of those other games. One of the big things I did sorta get into while talking about my history with Monster Hunter is the vast variety of options, see in Kingdom Hearts you may be able to change your keyblade and skills to get some different combos, but you will always have the same basic options available to you, you will typically have similar timing to your attacks and defense, and you’re always ultimately playing the same character. In Monster Hunter however each of the weapons are so unique that their play styles greatly differ from one another, the philosophy behind the weapon changes entirely, the difference between a ‘charge blade’ (a giant sword and shield that lets you put the shield onto the sword to become an even bigger axe) and ‘sword and shield’ isn’t as simple as one is bigger and stronger while the other is faster and can use items all the time, when it comes to sword and shield you are paying attention to when to get in mounting damage, KO damage, what element sword you want to use, when to throw a flash pod, when your teammates need a life powder, what have you, while with a Charge Blade you’re paying attention to charging up your vials, you’re paying attention to how long your shield buff is active, you need to be aware of when to guard vs when to dodge, not to mention when to throw out your ultimate attacks or assess if you will have a big enough opening for your next attack, it’s a fundamentally different mindset and while the enemies and a lot of the core systems are still the same it’s feels more like comparing a rogue to a magus rather than a warrior with a sword to a warrior with a bigger sword, and because of this variety you’ll almost always be able to find a weapon that matches your play-style, and all of them are good weapons, even the ‘worst’ weapon generally will really only see any significant difference if you’re competing for world records (and even then the biggest difference comes not from the weapon but how people who compete for that stuff will gravitate to the weapon with ~5% higher DPS in optimal circumstances). Giving players a nice variety of choices that all feel so vastly different while still being competitive makes a huge difference in just keeping the game accessible in general to people like me who get tired of say just following the same pattern, to me the Hunting Horn offers a constant barrage of mini-puzzles where I have to pay attention to the team’s buffs, the duration on the buffs, what we need for this enemy and what we don’t, and what would be the best way to work in those songs given the enemy we have to fight and I just love having to constantly juggle all of these ever changing variables in my head, while other weapons are far more straight forward. Each weapon is incredibly distinct from one another and there aren’t any ‘bad’ weapons, just ‘bad for you’ weapons.

That said, variety alone isn’t the only thing that sets Monster Hunter apart, after all I use Hunting Horn as much as I can, so that doesn’t explain why I will gravitate towards pulling out Monster Hunter for some fun fights instead of Kingdom Hearts or some other game that I’m comfortable with, and to that end I’d honestly say that probably the biggest difference is the interactions between the players and the monsters. See, in the Tales of series one of the key things that you need to pay attention to (on the harder difficulties) is knowing when you can safely attack and when you can’t, knowing not only how but when to stagger an enemy to stop their attacks, and in some rare cases knowing the attacks in question to respond in kind, but a big problem is that with how fast the attacks are rarely ample to respond to specific attacks and have to just drill into yourself reflexes on how to respond when ‘this’ enemy guards, when ‘that’ enemy is staggered, and it just makes the challenge of the fights generally boil down to muscle memory rather than any real thoughtful exchange between you an the enemies. Kingdom Hearts goes a bit above this by having a lot of the enemies telegraph their actions more, or visually display when they’re immune to attacks from the front or when they’re weak to the fire element, but even then it absolutely pales in comparison to the level of detail that you find in the interactions in Monster Hunter. See, Capcom has just put so much detail into the monsters AI, their movements, their movesets, all of it, that in some cases when you see them shifting their weight to their back legs you know they’re going in for a pounce, so if you’re a Lance user you might need to guard to avoid taking the hit, or maybe you need to dodge out of the way. Did Teostra just suddenly jump into the air and you hear that sound effect for him gathering in power? Well then you need to decide right then and there if you’re going to run, block, or throw a flash pod to not only interupt his super-nova but also knock him out of the sky so that everyone can get some free hits on him. See, Monster Hunter telegraphs the enemies movements well in advance that you can respond with the options that you have, but you need to pay attention to how they shift their weight, the sound effects around you, the attacks they did recently, the distance between you and them, and then it comes down to your ability to respond quickly. In Tales of Symphonia, it’s incredibly frustrating when I made a guess to back-step from an enemy to dodge their attack but they were quicker than me so I should have guarded instead because I had no way of knowing which attack the enemy would use in advance, in Monster Hunter when I get hit it is always my fault, maybe I got overeager and I dodged too soon, maybe I got greedy and was attacking the monster when it wasn’t safe, maybe I thought that I was out of reach of it’s attack but I was in reach (though Lunastra’s tail swipe should get it’s hitbox checked). Heck, I’m looking forward to the Iceborne expansion coming up where they’re going to bring back a monster who was infamous for having an attack that hit roughly 80% of the screen you were on for massive damage, because even if that one attack could easily fail you the mission if 3 of your teammates didn’t know how to survive it, learning how to deal with that massive attack (which had a big wind-up to it) was a lot of fun in of itself, and when you managed to learn how to dodge it? It felt amazing to walk up to this monster and know you would be walking out with some new boots that boost your handicraft (assuming RNG provided), because winning is never about RNG, it’s never about ‘guessing’ if you’re safe or not, you know when you are safe once you learn to read the monster. Sometimes hitboxes are a little wonky, sometimes damage is bullshit, but the game always tells you what to expect, and whether your response is to have the Insect Glaive user get onto the monster or your SnS player to drop a pitfall trap in the middle of battle, there are always tools at your disposal to respond, and that level of telegraphing goes a huge way in making sure the game always feels fair. This plays a big part into why I try to make sure that players are always given information to respond with, why I try to make sure if a huge attack is incoming that the enemy is ‘focused’ first, or why when I got the go-ahead to put in a Monster Hunter based enemy I went out of my way to make sure they only ever got 1 attack but the end of the turn you’d get a message telling you what they did so that you could respond to it in kind (granted I need to add in more ways for players to respond to these telegraphed attacks), because that’s the biggest advantage Monster Hunter has over it’s competition if you ask me.

Well I also really enjoy sitting down and planning out new armor sets, figuring out how to get really good skills that take advantage of what I want, that sort of puzzle solving is a really big draw of Monster Hunter to me, but the core gameplay loop focuses on ‘Hunting’ the monster more than anything else! Hope all of you were able to get something out of this ramble, whether it was maybe getting an idea if you want to try out Monster Hunter sometime (I’d suggest getting Iceborne if you’re interested, World is a lot friendlier to new players but the lack of monsters can really hurt it after awhile) or if you might be able to take a few of the things that I talked about and bring them to projects you may work on!

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How to encourage 5-minute adventures.

Man, I really never know how to start off these blog posts… Well, first let me start by saying that the v0.42 mini-release is on it’s way, and should be out to Patreon supporters in a matter of minutes! Anyways, today I wanted to talk about a little viewpoint that I think is very important to remember when it comes to designing enemies and encounters in any sort of game, the sort of idea about how the enemy you face never ‘dies’ but rather ‘transforms’ and how it encourages players to play ‘optimally’ whether they realize it or not.

So to start out with, let me explain for anyone unaware what the ‘5 minute adventuring day’ refers to, see in DnD and several tabletop games characters will typically have various resources or abilities that have limited uses per day, but are otherwise infinite and depending on the encounters they face, how they play, how their characters are setup, and the luck of the dice players may decide they want to end the day a lot sooner then perhaps they should, in the worst cases wanting to end each ‘day’ after every single encounter. This is obviously frowned on for the most part as if your characters setup camp, have dinner, put up a watch, and sleep, after every set of goblins then it’s going to stretch immersion a lot as well as make it hard to balance against as the players are effectively treating every encounter like it’s a ‘boss’ by being willing to throw all their resources at it, but since the rules typically don’t really have any rules directly stopping you from doing this it’s hard to argue against how effective it is.

This little habit that players might form can be curtailed to an extent by putting them on a time-limit, letting the enemies replenish their forces so it doesn’t really reduce their abilities, making those 8+ hours of sleep be more dangerous than the 2~ish hours of being awake clearing out this dungeon would take, whatever, but one thing that I’ve seen sometimes go unnoticed is that whether you realize it or not, there is always an enemy ‘party’ on any given adventuring day that’s competing with resources. If you would, let’s say that your party of a thief, warrior, wizard, and cleric go up against some bandits that mirror your party but are one level below you on all fronts, and you will have 3 more similar encounters before you get to the boss fight who’s equal to your level, in this situation it might look like you’re up against 20 different enemies, but as long as you can only encounter each group separately you actually only have 4 enemies and this enemy party will be fought on 5 separate occasions, the main difference is that the enemy party has exactly X amount of resources that they must either use or lose in any given encounter, sure the lower level enemy wizards might only have 1 fireball to your 2, but there’s a total of 4 wizards before the boss so that means that there’s 4 fireballs on the enemies team to your 2, the difference is that the enemy ‘knows’ that they only have to worry about this encounter while you’ve got to worry about the next encounter. This puts players in a bad position, as they are less familiar with the terrain than the enemies, they don’t know what’s coming next much less what resources they can safely spend on this fight, but their bad luck is persistent while their good luck is instanced (if you crit an enemy at 1 HP, you do 1 damage, the next iteration of that enemy doesn’t take the excess damage, meanwhile if the enemy crits against you, you DO take that damage into the next encounter).

Good strategy and luck can overcome this, but the only real advantage the players have is that as long as they can win this encounter, if they go and sleep they can regain resources they spent, meanwhile the enemy can’t because the iteration of the enemy you fought in the first encounter is gone permanently, while the second instance hasn’t lost any resources. Taking on 2 enemies with 75% of your health one after another is no different than taking on 1 enemy with 150% of your health unless you can use the time between enemy 1 and 2 to recover resources (like health or abilities) that you otherwise couldn’t. That said, designing encounters in a way that encourages mass-resting is very often advised against, where you’re supposed to design things in a way that the drain from several encounters eventually match up to what you want to drain from the player, which is good as that’s how you help make sure that players never feel like they need to rest unless they made mistakes in managing their resources or are really unlucky (in the former case a single rest will usually solve it as they learn to better manage their resources which isn’t a huge problem usually, while with the latter it’s more understandable and a GM is probably more likely to take pity on you if the dice want the campaign to be done with while no one at a table does).

This little ‘instance vs persistent’ issue can also run in the other direction, and you can also begin to understand where having a 100% even playing field begins to fall apart. One time I saw someone propose a magical item that could give players the regenerative abilities of a troll, but would have some drawbacks if it kept you from dying, which was said to be designed with the idea of ‘if the enemy has it then it’s fine for the player’ in mind, but the problem with that line of thinking is that typically you won’t be fighting a troll in every battle, so having one instance of the warrior from my hypothetical example serve to have regeneration isn’t anywhere near as potent as giving the player warrior this regeneration, because now instead of having 5 regeneration for let’s say 3 rounds of combat (potentially up to +15 HP), it’s now 5 regeneration for 12 rounds of combat and the boss battle (potentially up to +60 HP not including the boss fight or time between fights). This isn’t to say that such an item can’t be given, after all that kind of a safety net to help prevent player deaths could be very useful in helping to adjust the difficulty by adding in several states of failure rather than just living/dead, but it’s important to keep in mind that how potent an effect is on an enemy can vastly differ from how potent it is on a player due to how the two live inherently different lives. Enemies can spend expensive resources far more readily than players can, but persistent effects on them effectively end once players finish off this ‘instance’ of the enemy while persistent effects on players can go on indefinitely.

All that said, I’m not always the best at tailoring the enemies of HC in a way to be balanced around this idea, as I don’t always have a firm understanding on the number of encounters in a dungeon or their placement when I’m designing the enemies, which means that I have to rely largely on tester input on how my enemies turned out effectively, but I do at least try to remember this principle when I get their feedback, no matter how unique I might think this idea is for an enemy, no matter how much I may want that boss to stand out from others, at the end of the day if my design is asking for the players to invest a lot of resources then the quest as a whole will suffer if I leave it be.

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Importance of Feedback

Hey everyone, Conash here! First on the table, backers, the new release is available now, and we managed to get on top of a lot of things this release, way more than we thought we’d accomplish, which is nice! With that said, I’d like to discuss a bit about feedback.

So, I’ve been a bit open about how I’ve changed my mind on the AoE change that I mentioned in my last blog post, so it won’t be coming in anytime soon, but I’d like to mention it and what went into that whole process here for a bit. So, for a long time we’ve had a few of our long-time fans complain about any enemies who have the spell ‘Force Barrage’ as they point out that it’s broken. This has been a complaint that I’ve tried to handle in various ways over the years that I’ve been here, ranging from reducing how often it was used, to making it a lot harder for both players and enemies to utilize permanent stunlock strategies (old fans may remember how the mimics in ‘Research Materials used to be very frustrating back when sleep would target your entire team). These changes seemed to have at least reduced the complaints but anytime that I specifically ask about those enemies it’s made clear that they’re still a very big issue, but I was at a point that I didn’t really know how to better deal with it so I put it on hold until the grand re-balancing we have planned. Then more recently when working on ‘Crystal Clarity as I was designing the boss I had come to the conclusion that it wouldn’t fit the situation unless I made it so that they would use an AoE force attack a lot, ‘Force Barrage’ made more sense as throwing out the control version would only serve to exaggerate the issue, so I couldn’t put it on hold much longer, and that is when I realized that I could potentially kill two birds with one stone by focusing on giving players a good counter.

Another complaint that I had gotten for awhile is that AoE moves basically rendered tanks useless, this was very easy to see as AoE completely ignored the mechanic that we used for tanks, but I’ve gone into that quite a bit in another blog post. The plan then came to be that putting in the blocking mechanic alongside ‘Crystal Clarity’ would help give players a way to properly deal with ‘Force Barrage’, and heck since if you guard you become immune to the knockdown status, for that turn, it’d further help the guard option be a lot more effective (I find guarding in a lot of games to usually be a waste of an action, as you spend an action that could reduce the time of the battle to take 50% damage, meanwhile now your enemy will live 1 turn longer meaning that overall you took 50% more damage, so unless you know for a fact that a super attack is coming it’s usually not worth it), so I put forward the blocking mechanic, worked with testers some to get some feedback and thought that everything was good.

Once the release came out though, the feedback I got ran contrary to my expectations. While I knew that tanks could get overwhelmed by the amount of incoming damage and end up getting killed if players weren’t careful, the feedback I was getting had left me of the belief that it was basically impossible to keep tanks alive if you went in with roughly the same power as enemies, but the blocking mechanic itself I still found to be important as AoEs are going to be becoming a bit more frequent, just as players use better skills when they level up so too should enemies as it continues the sort of balance. This is were I made a bit of a mistake, as the blocking mechanic was less than a month old so I should have given it some more time than put in effort to collect more direct feedback to make sure this wasn’t just some ‘growing pains’ if you would, instead I did my usual thing of viewing this immediate feedback as indicative of a problem and ultimately resigned myself to the simple fact that AoEs just flat out break the action economy, which is true as they’re effectively a 400% damage multiplier on top of their ability to stack secondary effect rates. This lead to me coming to the conclusion that a nerf to AoEs as a whole needed to be rolled out ASAP in order to fix this entire broken situation rather than hold onto it. I had worked out a lot of details with NM and well, it ultimately lead to me briefly mentioning it in my last blog post since I didn’t want it to be completely out of nowhere even though it was still largely in conceptual stages. The feedback I had gotten from that blog post was generally mild discontent, no one particularly seemed happy about my proposed changes but I’ve certainly gotten much bigger blow back for some of my ideas before, which lead to me thinking that maybe players understood where I was coming from.

Now, I had been spending a lot of time refining the math in my head, working out all the details of this stuff, but there was always this nagging voice in the back of my head that it wasn’t right. I’m sure several of you may have noticed that some of the quests in the game can start to become a large time investment between the quantity and quality of enemies lately, and while we have gotten complaints about it, it’s usually pretty minor and I like to try to resolve these issues by giving players savepoints during the quest so that they can tackle the dungeons in increments rather than all at once, but savepoints can only do so much. The prospect of reducing your AoEs by half their effectiveness would cause these dungeons to become all the worse as you have to spend probably double or more time in each of them just didn’t sit right with me, so when this nagging feeling got to it’s worst I decided that I should talk with backers about the issue, they’ve been putting their money and time into this game so if I’m going to make a change like this they should get a voice in it. So I went to the backers and talked about my concerns, the issues with keeping tanks alive, the issues with AoEs being too powerful, and the feedback I got surprised me. As it turned out, we had several players who were able to effectively use the blocking mechanic to help deal with the boss of ‘Crystal Clarity’, to the point they were using single target buff items to make their tanks able to tank which definitely stood out to me as that kind of a shift in the meta is something that I hadn’t anticipated and is something that I do want to encourage typically. Honestly my biggest take-away was that I needed to put in more items and equipment to allow tanks to tank, not to reduce damage across the board (though we did get a few backers who expressed they were looking forward to the AoE nerf, so between that and the raw math of how much more effective they are then alternative options one will be added in eventually, but it’s been slated for a general ‘in the future’ time-frame). Guess that’s what I get for trying to rush to fix a problem based on the people who spoke up rather than actively seeking out comprehensive feedback.

Man this turned out to be a lot more of a rambling mess than I had expected, but well the ultimate takeaway is that feedback is important but you need to make sure that you’re getting a full perspective of the feedback, when you put in something new make sure to give people time to try it out, and make sure that the people who enjoy it aren’t left out of the discussion just because they don’t think the ship is sinking. I’ve got a bad habit of looking for problems to solve where there are none myself, so feel free to let me know your thoughts about anything that sticks out to you whether it’s big or minor, whether it’s a problem or you like it, because who knows maybe you’ll be the voice that stops me from jumping the gun in the future!

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A Different Kind of Key

When I was in high school, and started playing AD&D, I had a bit of a struggle with a section of the Dungeon Master’s Guide where it described the idea of “keyed” encounters- encounters that only appear in a given area of a dungeon once certain conditions are met. This was the kind of concept that was simultaneously too simple and too complex to grasp- of course I understood basic causality and was confused as to why the DMG would mention something so obvious and simple, but I struggled with the realization that, fundamentally, any interactive quest/dungeon/cyoa story/whatever could be realized in the form of a flow chart.

Or, if you prefer, as a sort of program.

While I struggled with it at the time (described a quest or a dungeon in those terms seemed to rob D&D of some of it’s magic, I suppose), it helped me realize something which you might have found I like having a little fun with in Harem Collector: A key can be anything you want it to be. Sure it could be as simple as flipping a switch, or actually having a physical key, but it doesn’t have to be. In Resident Evil, a key could be a mechanically unlikely art installation. In metroidvanias, skills like double-jumping or the ability to roll can act as keys. In RPGs, having spoken to a specific person frequently acts as a key, or having a certain party member if that particular game has field abilities.

So I try and have fun with it. The Golden Tomb “Knight of” enemies are just a mechanically interesting (I hope) way of presenting a “guess which key goes with which lock” kind of puzzle, and I really like moments like the Expanding Foam/Foam Key and the Wyld Seeds, but my personal favourite is the bench from “Hall Monitor From Hell”. Especially that meaty thunk of having the Hero slam it down. I don’t know why, but it feels very satisfying to me.

Now, I’m not just mentioning this randomly- you can look forward to a couple interesting “keys” to show up in the v0.41 update to Harem Collector, one of which I went out of my way to grab some special assets for. So, get hyped- it’s only a week away for backers!- and get ready because I think you’re really going to like this update!

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Conash uses “Wall of Text”

Hey people, now you might be thinking this blog post is late but we were actually totally planning on delaying it an extra day because… Uh… Freedom I guess? Listen, things just happen sometimes… So now that we’ve got me making yet another blog post, let’s talk about something dealing with mechanics and design!

Let’s see… Well for one thing I’m hoping to be able to fit a nice quality of life improvement into the trophy trader. People were asking to be able to trade in multiple trophies at a time and I think that’s a good idea so why not! It’s a bit of a slow process though, because while I could turn the whole trophy trader process into some script stuff to make it dynamically generate the proper text, choices, and all of that at this point that’d honestly be more work than just hard-coding it, but hey why don’t we take this opportunity to talk about what I mean by that, as a little insight into my thought process for other aspiring game designers!

So, let’s take any one trophy trader to start with and break down what goes into the interactions with them in their current incarnation, I’ll even open up RPG Maker to get this completely accurate. First up is a small introduction to the shop, and then a tutorial about what the trophy traders are if you haven’t seen it, and then the trader asking if you want to trade, this is going to have to be hard-coded either way so it probably wouldn’t be until after this point that I’d begin a script if I was designing one.

First there’s a little bit where they say hello, and if it’s your first time visiting a trophy trader they explain what they are, pretty straight forward with no real variability to it so that’d be left to the event editor no matter what.

Here’s the start of a trophy trader event so that you can follow along!

Next comes the Yes/No option, those pretty easy to add in RPG maker even in script format all you need is to create an array that has the name of the options, tell the program to throw them at the player, then the player selects something and it’s returned to you, from there you use a case/select conditional (basically you input a variable and it compares it to various predetermined results that you specified) to determine what you do. If the player chooses ‘No’ you show them a dialogue box (these are more complicated as you have to specify the image the face you’re using is found, which of the 8 faces on that image you’re using, then specify the text where you’ve got to be considerate of formatting and won’t have feedback on when it clips outside of the box, then combine it with a few other pieces of code to make sure that it’s a new separate dialogue box instead of just changing an existing one, not hard per say but there’s a lot of details that you have to double check outside of the programming area to make sure it all works) and then let the event end, simple enough. If they choose ‘Yes’ and you’re using the RPG Maker editor you drop a label so that you can immediately jump back here later so that players can keep trading trophies. So if I were to make this into a script, I’d just move the entire process from here on out into another function so that I can easily make the process loop around to this point, either way you then need to make sure the player has at least 25 silver otherwise you drop another dialogue box about them not having money and end things, conditionals like these are very easy.

Script version of a dialogue box. It’s about 5 times easier to make a dialogue box in some map players can’t access then use the map ID, event ID, and ID of where the dialogue begins to access it in other events than it is to build a dialogue box in the script editor from scratch.

If they do have the money another dialogue box about what they want to exchange, a list of Shiny Bits, Monster Fang, and Pocket Tome then come up (with an extra option if the player chooses to exit out), the player chooses one and from here on out we’ve got to keep track as to what you’ve done, so what I’d probably do is drop a variable that contains the item ID of which one you selected and go from there. We also have to make sure that you’ve actually got at least one of those items, otherwise we need to send you back to the trading screen so that you can change your selection (after a dialogue box of course), then we ask you what you want to receive and here’s where switching to a script format would start to benefit us.

Basically imagine that last portion added in 6 times, for each combination of trophy traded in and trophy received, and that’s a single event page for one city. While it’s not the hardest work in the world, NoMoshing has put in a lot of busy work into Harem Collector!

See, with our current manual system we obviously have to manually keep track as to which area we’re in (by this point there’s already so much in the event that it can be easy to forget if you’re in the ‘Pocket Tome’ or the ‘Monster Fang’ sections), while in a script as I’m generating the array of choices for the player I can basically just say, “Add Monster Fang unless variable == X” making it easy for the game to auto-generate the options needed, so if we ever added in a fourth trophy we’d definitely want to switch to scripts so that we wouldn’t have to redo 16 different choice selections (probably more due to a few story events but irrelevant to my point). This is kinda what I refer to when I talk about generating stuff dynamically, I’d code stuff in a way that I as the game designer don’t need to know if you’re in Westcastle trading in a Monster Fang as I teach the game how to do it, so if we add in a fourth trophy I spend 5 minutes adding in a few extra options where it matters and let my code handle the rest, but as I said that’s not what we’re looking at so even if the hard-coded stuff takes longer to search for bugs, typos, and all that it just makes more sense to spend my time adding in new stuff than changing existing stuff that works just fine.

Sample of a dynamic choices dialogue from the fast-travel horse. While it may seem like a lot, keep in mind that I reference this exact same code for all 5 horses and the code figures out based on where you are and what houses you’ve unlocked everything else, which would take us 8-16 different combination of conditionals per horse in the event editor. About twice as much work compares to 1 conditional option, but prevents us from doing 48 different conditionals.

So then we’ve got a dialogue box, reducing the player’s gold, decreasing the trophy they’re trading in and giving them the one they want, then yet another dialogue box but this one specifies the name of what you chose, so from a scripting perspective I’d need to have stored the trophy you want to receive in another variable then dynamically generate the text that’d go inside this dialogue box by checking that variable and adding in the name of the relevant item. After that we throw them back to the beginning of that ‘Yes/No’ option so that they can do more trading if they want to and that’s what we’ve got. It’d be annoying to turn that into scripts and we’d need to keep track of which city the player is at to make sure that we show the right faces and dialogue from the trader, but it’s just busy work there… But that’s what we’ve already got, let’s look at what I want to add in.

So what I want to add in is simple, after the player has made decided on what they want to trade in and what they want to receive we’d need to ask them how many they want to trade, so give them a number input box, store that into a variable. Since the code in the number input box is rather limited, the best thing to do here is to show the player their money while they do this and store the inputted number into a variable, after that if the player entered 0 then we just treat that as ‘cancelling’ and let them leave, if they enter 1 then we go through with the old code, if they enter 2 or more we now need to verify they’ve got enough of the chosen item and enough money for this transaction, if so we go through with it and specify how many of the new trophy they’ve received. There’s nothing too complex there, but if you recall the trader says a line as you receive the new trophies, plus since the existing code is already hard-coded this means that even if I made a script to handle just this portion I’d still need to customize the script call to specify what the player is giving, receiving, and where they are, then program into it several dialogue responses depending on the location, or what I do is I basically create all of that with events, copy and paste it, but change the conditionals and comparisons along the way… Hmm… You know when I say it like that, doing this new part all in scripts actually wouldn’t be that bad since I’d only need to store in 4 dialogue boxes that are location based, and then I have a 5th box that has it’s text dynamically generated. It’s still going to take some time to get it in either way but hey, look forward to it!

Event version of me adding this in. Only got one of these added in, and it’s in a test version so hasn’t been implemented into the main game yet

Now, since I’ve finished that rather dry talk there, what else is there…? Oh, not sure if it was mentioned in the release notes but the achievement system should have gotten an update to include a tracker as to your progress towards any achievements you’ve unlocked hints for! Now if only I could remember if that was added into the 0.40 release or the 0.41 mini-release….

Ah! So I appreciate all the feedback that I got on ‘tanking’, after some discussion with NoMoshing we decided that the core of the issue dealt with how AoEs were just too potent (effectively doing 400% damage and status effects compared to their single target versions) I had shared some of the math breakdown of say Force Barrage (Damage type AoE force spell that gets a lot of complaints) and how statistically speaking getting 1 or 2 knockdowns when it’s used against you is more likely than 0, though I had gotten some of that math wrong the point is that AoE abilities just really break the action economy, so instead of trying to make tanking better so that you can take AoE hits a lot easier we thought it’d be better to instead roll out a balance to AoEs themselves by having them scale in effectiveness based on the number of targets you’re looking at. What this would mean is that while you will always do more total damage and have a higher potential of inflicting several status effects the more targets an AoE has, the damage and chance of infliction will be decreased on any given target as there are more of them (so if there’s one boss it’ll take damage/statuses as normal, but if there’s say 4 bosses each of them will be taking 50% damage and have 50% chance of status infliction, but it’ll total up to 200% damage and a higher chance of inflicting statuses in general).

I’m still not entirely sure what numbers I want to use, and I made sure to wait until after the mini-release to add this in so that the first people who have to deal with it are testers to get their help in fine-tuning things. I understand this probably isn’t going to be the most well received choice as it’s going to make your mages in general pack less of a punch, but it should serve to greatly curtail a lot of the issues seen in say force barrage (and to clarify, if you set it up so that you have your tank take the hits in everyone’s place, each individual hit will still be reduced to 50% effectiveness on damage and status as it still had 4 targets). Evocations will not be impacted by this since their unpredictability already serves to debuff them against many targets, they have a static number of hits, and the momentum requirements of them already makes them a generally undesirable type of magic to many players. Feel free to share your questions, comments, or concerns here, on the forums, or on the discord and I’ll do my best to respond to them!

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Victory Barks and Tanking update

So now that my niece and nephew have quieted down after a day of babysitting that has carried on far longer than anyone anticipated, I have the time to sit down and ask for some feedback at definitely not the last minute! While any feedback is appreciated, be warned that I’m pretty exhausted right now so I may be a bit scattered and hard to understand until I get some rest and can go through this all again tomorrow.

There are a few changes in the recent 0.40 release that I’m sure people have already noticed, the first of which being the one dialogue box at the end of every battle. That little feature has certainly come with a few more bugs than it probably should have, but it’s in a relatively stable state, which now brings up a few issues that I’d much appreciate some feedback on. See, originally I had intended to work in something into the options menu so that you could have it display a message after every battle, as it currently does, after no battles, or go through a sort of algorithm where it checks how often you’ve ‘seen’ a quote from x character then randomly checks whether or not to skip that character, effectively making characters who you’ve seen multiple quotes from have a lesser chance of coming up, to help you experience quotes that you haven’t seen before. This ended up not making it into the 0.40 release for a few reasons, largely to help save on time with the intention of, well, getting people’s thoughts about which of these options they prefer now that they’ve had a chance to see the the victory barks feature at it’s theoretically most obnoxious.If the general consensus is that the system is fine, or just needs to be turned off when it gets annoying, it’d probably be best if I took the development time that I’d put into that third option and instead invest it into working on bugs or something else.

There is something else that I’d appreciate some feedback on with the victory barks. All canon party members (aside from Alina) have a level-up quote associated with them that will take priority over the standard barks if at least one person levels up. The original intention is that the one quote you see would come from your active party, though due to a bug, instead the quote is selected from anyone who levels up, which does stretch immersion some. I’ve elected to leave the bug as-is for now, as we’ve gotten some people requesting that the game plays all level up barks one after another when they happen. To me, that seems like it’d get rather tedious after awhile since each character only has one, after 30-40 level ups there’s going to be several that you’re tired of. To this end, any feedback that can be given on how important it is that level-up barks apply only to your active party or that you can only get one at a time would be much appreciated.

Finally, one last thing that I’d appreciate some feedback on! It’s come to my attention that the addition to tanking that I had mentioned awhile back has been causing some problems, in that it’s making player tanks take too many hits, to the point that keeping them alive has gotten very difficult. Some discussion with a few players has helped me figure out that what I plan to at some point in the game development process is make it so that anytime that any character ‘blocks’ an attack they get a damage reduction bonus, both on the player and enemy side, to help radically reduce the amount of damage that tanks accumulate by blocking AoEs for your side as well as helping to encourage more strategical play on the players end of things by having ‘cover’ and other similar skills reduce your damage if you don’t properly respond, but the problem with adding this in now is that it might result in making enemy tanks harder to kill and just drag out the game a lot more as the existing fights haven’t been balanced with this in mind but would be impacted by it, so it might be better to roll out with re-balancing as a whole. My other options to deal with this core issue is either turn off the AoE blocking that’s currently in the game or at least adjust the formulas so that it’ll be noticeably less likely to activate, this might make it harder to keep characters like Yeon alive as more AoEs would hit them, but trading deaths on squishy characters with deaths on your tank typically isn’t the best philosophy.

So yeah… Any thoughts would be appreciated!

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The Life of a Tank

It’s been awhile! Hope you all are enjoying Iron Waifu, I know I’ve had a few surprises myself, and several not so surprises, but it seems to be turning out very well. The voting numbers tell a bit of an interesting story compared to last year but perhaps it’d be better to get into that after all is said and done, needless to say we’re very happy to see the how things have been turning out this year!

Now, it’s been awhile since I’ve made a post so it’d be a good idea for me to talk about what I’ve been working on and while I probably could go into the new victory barks feature that we’ve got I’d rather talk about that after the upcoming release as there’s still a lot of odds and ends I’m ironing out there, instead let’s talk about tanks in RPGs in general.

See, I’m sure that we can easily identify a character that’s got a lot of HP, that has high defensive stats, maybe it’s a character who gets a lot of super armor, that’s not hard to find, but something that I’ve noticed in a lot of games that I’ve played throughout the years is that while you can find MANY tanks, there’s a lot fewer successful tanks, at least in the games that I play. What do I mean by that? Simple, a successful tank isn’t just about being able to take punishment but it needs to take punishment instead of the rest of the party, after all being basically unkillable rarely is the key to success (though there’s been a few fights when I found it easier to solo a boss with my unmovable rock character than waste items keeping party members alive), instead if you have a character who skipped out on other things to pursue (damage, speed, healing, buffing, debuffing, etc.) to focus on it’s own defensive abilities it needs to be able to supplement the other important roles by making sure the rest of the team can do those with very little issue, and it’s very important to keep this in mind because if a tank cannot prevent damage going to other allies in one way or another then you’re not apart of the team you exist next to the team. I’ve seen a number of people who try to play say tabletop games thinking that simply having high HP or defense is enough to make them a tank, when in actuality the party only lives thanks to the DM being generous and intentionally attacking the hard to kill character even when there is little or no penalty for attacking another character and a much bigger reward (like taking out the cleric or wizard), so keep that in mind if you plan to play the ‘tank’, if you don’t have a way to ensure that damage doesn’t go to your teammates then you might want to figure out a way to do that.

“But Conash,” you begin, “what does any of this have to do with what you’ve been working on?” Well to get to the point, I have not been happy with how tanks behave in HC for quite awhile now, on either end but for two different problems. Let’s start with the player side since you the player obviously will be playing from that end, in HC NoMoshing did a great job setting up equipment, skills, and classes to take advantage of the innate ‘Threat’ system in RPG Maker VX Ace, if you ever decide to join me and RomeoPapa in our pursuit of more difficult challenges in HC you’ll learn very quickly just how important threat management is to taking on quests above your weight class, I really like the threat system in HC, and have even made use of it for some hidden little details (Try checking out Yamamaya or Bronwyn’s status page during ‘Elf Half Empty’ sometime), but the threat system has a very big flaw in it that’s become more and more of an issue as the game progresses. See, threat impacts who an enemy targets when they choose someone on your team, but when they throw out an AoE attack, one which hits ‘everyone’? Well that ignores threat entirely, leaving characters like Yeon completely at the mercy of how often enemies spam this, as your tanks have no way to keep her safe. This issue has been a growing complaint for quite awhile, so with the help of ShadowCluster, I managed to put together a brand new feature into the game, player blocking! I’m sure that you’re all familiar with times that enemies will block your attacks no matter what (and I’ll get to all the problems there in a second) but never saw it happen on your end (because it was happening a step before where they flat out didn’t target the low threat characters to begin with), well in this upcoming update you’ll finally be able to see that! The game will now include a system where a character with a ‘Taunt’ status (like Martyrdom, Font of Life, Phalanx, Attract, or similar skills) will have a chance to ‘block’ the hit a character would receive from AoE attacks, the formula to determine this is based off of threat chance but the basics are that if the tank has high threat and the targeted character has low threat you’ll have a better chance of blocking the hit. This little effect requires a taunt skill since some characters can get threat ratings so low (Elaiya) that they’d never take an AoE hit otherwise, and while it’s important that a tank can do their job it’s also important that if they’re dieing that you don’t have to worry about them taking all 4 hits from an AoE every round while you try to heal them up. Though if you plan to bring multiple tanks keep in mind that it rolls the ‘block’ chance based for whoever is in the first party slot, followed by the second, third, etc. until someone successfully blocks, so if you plan to use Yamamaya to block the occasional attack and Therese to pick up the rest put Yamamaya in first otherwise she probably won’t even get a chance unless Therese misses (also if a character does have a taunt skill up, no one else can ‘block’ for them, this one’s hard-coded). The formula may need some tweaking if it turns out to be too eager to activate, but I am still very happy with the general outline of the system as it puts a high amount of the control of the mechanic in the player’s hands, allowing you all to adjust it to your liking! Also little pro-tip: If you’re having trouble with say Force Barrage, if you can try to get someone to activate a taunt skill then guard like crazy, since you can’t be knocked down while you’re guarding so this would help let you protect your lower threat party members from the occasional status effect.

Now, this all probably sounds great right? I certainly think so, but some of you might be wondering why I had to create my own formula (or ask ShadowCluster to make one more precisely), rules, and basically create a new mechanic like this when enemies are already able to do this sorta thing, that brings us to my issues with enemy tanks. See, threat doesn’t work on enemies because surprisingly having a 100% invisible parameter on the enemies that has no actual gameplay impact isn’t very effective at convincing players to not kill that very deadly mage instead of going after the tank in front of them who isn’t a big threat on their own, and because of this we have to rely on the substitute mechanic in RPG Maker for enemy tanks. I absolutely loathe the substitute mechanic, and while I’m usually very quick to blame Enterbrain for any and all issues I have with RPG Maker, this mechanic I’ve found as common practice even in Final Fantasy games so it’d be unfair to single out Enterbrain. See, substitute works in that a character who gets marked with the substitute flag will 100% of the time block any hits targeting characters with low enough HP (usually below 25% or 10% max HP), unless the person with the flag has some kind of status effect or something else that stops them. The problem with this is that it’s inherently useless for roughly 75%-90% of the battle, and then after that? Nothing gets through, making it so that players who have no hard-counters can’t do anything except work their way through the tank. On top of that because these flags are rarely, if ever, permanent you need to spend one of your very limited actions hoping that one of your characters will be at a low enough threshold for you to defend them, without dying before you go, and that your defense of them will matter (if they don’t get targeted it was a wasted action). No matter how you run the math, 9 times out of 10 you’re just better off healing the person instead of bothering to deal with this terrible mechanic to keep people from dying. This isn’t even getting into the issues of the 100% chance issue can easily put the tank in a position where they’re taking way too much damage to keep up as more and more characters fall into the threshold or how it offers players no customization of prioritizing certain characters over others… That said, as highly critical as I am of this mechanic (and I hope that you can see why I prefer my innate blocking chance system for players over this) we use it for enemy tanks in HC largely out of necessity, we have no other tools we can use to have enemies influence who you attack. I plan to down the road mess with the formula so that it scales, in a way so that as the enemy loses more HP the chance to substitute grows making substitution an all-present annoyance but never a hard road-block (if you have no counters), while still preserving the general intention behind it. Until then though, I think that I’ll experiment with a few other tank improvisations, for example since one of the two new bosses in this upcoming update fills a tank role, I figured that I’d take a page out of the ‘Warder’ book from Path of War, and give them the ability to give you a rather noticeable miss chance on all your abilities that don’t target them (for a limited time). I’ll probably have to tweak a lot of the numbers here but I think figuring out alternate tanking strategies is going to become integral for supplementing the substitution mechanic in creating tanks as a whole.

I’ve probably rambled on quite a lot about the importance for a tank to be able to control aggro, so instead of going into a big long rant about how to properly control aggro in the Tales of games, I’ll call it here. Please feel free to share any questions, comments, or concerns as you see fit!

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A word from Conash

Hey everyone, hope everyone’s been doing well! It’s been awhile since my last blog post so I’ll just talk a bit about a few things on my mind.

First of all, why don’t we talk about enemy balance a bit. I’ve noticed a few times that players have talked about how the later levels of HC are difficult, though usually I wasn’t too sure how to take that since I have seen a comparable, though fewer, comments about some of the earlier levels in the game as well, leaving me without a strong understanding on how the enemies that I had been putting together the stats and AI compared to say the ones that NM put together when you consider that the player is supposed to be having an increase in stats and resources in general as the game progresses, but during the recent testing release it became very apparent as both me and NoMoshing picked out the original stats for the enemies for the two quests that we’ll be adding, both quests share the same recommended level, and when we got initial feedback from testers, it seemed that we had both missed that recommended level mark but in opposite directions. I cut down the stats on my enemies far more than I boosted NoMoshing’s, but it did help highlight that I do need to work on rethinking my approach for calculating how to determine the stats for enemies going forward, hopefully I’ll be able to work on having enemies better keep place with a player who’s at level going forward, and I will welcome feedback in regards to the difficulty on quests since I definitely lean a lot more on the ‘difficulty’ side of things (Though when it comes to Super-bosses, once tester’s have given me the okay that it’s possible I am going to be very stubborn, Super-bosses are the one place that I can ramp up the difficulty as much as I want without worrying about breaking the game. One tip for those struggling with the newest super-boss, Wiki-tan is probably the worst match-up against him and runs a risk of making him downright impossible if she’s in your active team, she can be useful for him, but just be warned that depending on what you’ve done with her she can make the fight impossible for you).

Now let’s talk about code some shall we? NoMoshing has talked to me about adding in a new little script that would run at the end of battles, it’ll take a bit of finagling but I’m hoping to have it ready for the 0.39 release and it should help add a bit more fun to some of the general ‘crawl’ that tends to take place in dungeons, so look forward to it! I promise to do my best to not break the game… This time… Speaking of breaking the game, for those of you who’ve run into various furniture or other events teleporting around in either your Eastfort condo or your Westcastle manor, I have fixed the problems and you won’t need to mess with save files or anything. It’s an issue with the events of the game, so testers and the rest of you with access that event stuff (you know who you are) please keep in mind that completely deleting events can result in this little visual bug. Now, the final script thing that I want to talk about is in regards to AoE attacks from enemies, as I’m sure many of you know enemy tanks can take hits from your AoEs but you can’t have your tanks do the same from enemy AoEs, which can often lead to AoEs making tanks a lot less useful as the most important attacks to block you have no effective means of dealing with. Well I’ve got a few ideas (and even some formulas that I’m happy with) that I think will go a long way to help give players tools to help deal with enemy AoEs without going too far. I’ve still got a lot of stuff to test and look into in regards to this so I don’t want to be making promises that I can’t keep, but I will say that I’ve heard the complaints about how AoEs don’t have an effective counter-strategy if you would, and I am looking into ways to help expand the battle system to add in some options there.

Finally, there’s one more thing I want to talk about though it’s a bit more personal. I don’t know if any of you have noticed but I haven’t exactly been as active with the blog posts, scripting, or a few other things over the past year, and I just feel that I owe a bit of an explanation for that. Lately in my life there’s been a few more things vying for my time and energy, but more importantly a lot of that’s been piling up some anxiety issues with me. I’ve worked out various ways to help keep it a lot more manageable but I’d be lying if I said it was fully under control. It gets a bit personal and goes against a lot of what I believe in to really delve too into it, so I’ll just leave it at emotions are irrational and sorry that I wasn’t really able to bring my A game for 2018, which I am hoping to change. I do intend to stick with HC though and plan to pay back the support that NoMoshing has given me so feel free to take that as you will. If you excuse me, I’ve got more code to write.