September 10, 2018: Progress Report

Hello everyone! Time for a progress report before I forget what I've accomplished!

This week I worked mainly on two systems: Skill trees and Debuffs. In this game, there will be three types of Debuffs: Damaging Debuffs, Status Debuffs, and Special Debuffs. Special Debuffs are, well, a little special and unique so I'll talk about that in the future. Damaging Debuffs are simple, they cause you to take a certain type of damage every turn. For example; bleed, poison or burn damage. Having bleed resistance will make you less likely to get the Bleed debuff, and when you do get it you take less damage.

Status Debuffs, like Special Debuffs, work a bit uniquely for this game. Let's use one of the debuffs that will be in the game as an example, "Weaken." With no resistance to the Weaken debuff, your character will 33% lower Strength and Dexterity while Weaken. But if your character has a 50% resistance to Weaken, they will instead have only 17% lower Strength and Dexterity. However, if your character has a 50% weakness to Weaken, they will have 44%~ish lower Strength and Dexterity. It took yesterday and today to implement this dynamic Status Debuff system. 

As for the rest of days before yesterday, I've been working on the game's Skill Tree system. If you're familiar with RPGs, you would've seen a similar system in other games called Skill Tree or Talent Tree, and it's basically that. Pina, being the protagonist, will have 7 trees for the player to go down on, and the other characters in the game will probably have 3 trees.

So far I've implemented the first two trees for Pina, the Basic Offense and Basic Defense tree. As you can see in the screenshot below, the basic offense tree is very simple, featuring only two paths, left representing STR and right representing DEX. Pina will have 3 trees for Offense, and 3 trees for Defense, and the seventh tree will be for something special. This will allow the player to mix and match between five paths for Pina to go down towards: STR<->DEX, CON<->AGI, and 'Special.' 

I personally really like games that allow the ability for the player to theorycraft. In normal RPGs it would be something like thinking about how to build a character such as in Dark Souls, Path of Exile or MMORPGs. This type of joy is something that is rarely found in eroge, only really present in Dual Tail's Venus Blood series, and Alicesoft's Sengoku Rance and Rance X. Hopefully through lots of balancing, playtesting and feedback, I'll be able to add Pina and the Hero's Amazing Tale to that list. And of course, this game will have an easy mode for anyone who don't want to deal with planning out character builds and all that stuff and just want to see the good stuff ASAP. 

And that's it for this week's report! There will be a follow up $5+ Patron post to show off the Basic Defense tree (It pretty much has the same shape as the Basic Offense tree) and also some tiny details on the STR<->DEX and CON<->AGI path that Pina can choose.