Dev Journal: Fixing Unintuitive Mechanics

    There are a few mechanics in the current game that are bothering me, whether that's through player feedback or just feeling that they're annoying when I play the game myself. I have a few plans for how to fix them, so hopefully these will be some good changes coming in the near future.

Digestion Countdown:

    The way the countdown works right now is very simple, the first prey takes 3 turns to digest, the second prey takes 2 turns, and every prey afterwards takes 1 turn. It's set up in this way so that units have a chance to eat multiple prey, but also so full stomachs don't take forever to digest.

    I think this actually works well, I haven't seen anyone complain about it or even mention that they noticed it, which is a sign of a good mechanic. What I have gotten complaints about, though, is HP not correlating to digestion time. I don't think this is so much an issue of game mechanics as it is of setting expectations. You would expect HP to be associated with a character's constitution, and since digestion decreases HP it feels off that characters are digested by a countdown instead of by hitting 0 HP.

    Now, I can't make HP associated with digestion time. It would affect the balance of the game too much, and if you think about it punching someone really wouldn't decrease the time they take to digest. So instead, I'm going to be giving every character a "Mass" and a "Digestion Strength" stat. In order to digest prey, a characters Digestion Strength must exceed the total Mass in their stomach. Digestion Strength will rise by an increasing multiplicate each turn, in a way that nothing is changed mechanically and the digestion countdown remains the same.

    This also serves to give me some wiggle room for giving characters different digestion strengths. It's very hard to deal with changes in digestion strength that aren't dramatic when every character takes 3 turns or less to digest, but like this I could give high capacity characters like the Lamias a small boost that lets them skip a turn or two on a full stomach. It's possible this could also be used to make smaller units like Goblins take less space in the stomach, but I'll have to see how that looks visually.

Hunger:

    Hunger currently works by draining 10 EN from a character every time they take certain actions with an empty stomach. It's kind of annoying and doesn't really contribute much to the game, but I want hunger to still remain as a mechanic somehow.

    To that, I'm replacing it with a Hunger/Satiation gauge. The gauge has 8 pips, from -4 to +4, and can be expended at any time to soup up moves. For every unit that is digested, the predator will gain 1 pip to expend, but regardless of the amount they can be used at any time a character is not in a hunger state. Using a pip while at 0 will push Hunger into the negatives and force them to make a hunger action on their next turn, making hunger into a proper risk/reward mechanic. Because hunger is more intentional here, it will probably also be buffed to be more dangerous for the player.

    Once a unit has prey in their belly, their gauge will remain at -1, but they will no longer be hungry and will be able to expend their gauge once again. If the gauge is lower than the number of prey in the stomach or is at -4, the unit will be forced into a hunger state again until that has been remedied.

In-battle Leveling: 

    Currently, at the start of each battle each unit comes in at level 1 and must increase their level by digesting others. However, each unit also has a true level that is completely removed from the battle system. The reason things are set up this way is so the penalty for losing units isn't as harsh, but to still reward the player for digesting units.

    The problem with this is it's really confusing and doesn't feel good. It's not so noticeable now while most things are in a vacuum anyway, but down the line I can see this being pretty unsatisfying.

    To fix that, I'll be giving each unit their own persistent level they may gain by digesting other units, alongside their class level they gain by the commander feeding any member of their class. The amount of stat gain per level will likely be decreased and the majority of a unit's stats will still come from their class level, but coupled with the new hunger system this shouldn't be too much of an issue.

    This will also replace the current fixed stat gain from digesting units, with prey now giving EXP based on their and the predator's level in a much more traditional way, meaning battles will be the best source of EXP while passive vore will remain a good way of raising your bottom line.