Wild Again

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Hello everyone!

What a week. Every week lately seems to be real interesting. I got a lot done though, touched up the Game Design Document quite a bit. I can almost leave it alone. Though, next big step is to start plotting out potential formulas and values, now that we have focused down the stats and styles we want to go with.

One of the biggest debates we’ve had about mechanics so far was if a hit percentage stat was necessary. Two of my biggest inspirations are Legend of Zelda and Secret of Mana, which handle both quite differently. LoZ was hitbox only. if you connected you connected. SoM, however, had a built in hit percentage statistic. You could out-level or out-gear this annoyance, but it was still a part of the game. As I recall, spells would NEVER miss though. Just weapon attacks.

Anyhow, we decided to go full action with this. The game is fully 3D, so hitboxes should be quite accurate, as well as direction and controls. Your gear will help you in a multitude of other ways. Although we may have to implement such a feature if we incorporate blindness as a status effect.

The other thing I’m thinking about right now is stat caps — For those of you not in the know, many role playing games either have a finite limit of a statistic (Like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, ETC). We call those “Hard Caps” — because there is a visible ceiling on how high you can raise a stat. Other games though, such as Diablo 3, Path of Exile, or World of Warcraft have what’s called a “Soft Cap” — Which means there’s no real limit you can have on a statistic, but after certain amounts, buffing a stat past a certain number starts giving diminishing returns.

Now in my game currently, I’d like people to be able to push the end game/after game activities, and I don’t know about you, but I find some pleasure in being able to break things, or make crazy powerful characters. So right now I’m leaning towards a soft cap. Let people pump stats, but after a certain point you’ll start to see less of an effect.  I kind of would like to put in a few “Secret” high powered bosses or encounters to push the limits of what a player can do. Think of things like the Ancient Slime from Lufia 2, Black Rabite from Seiken Densetsu 3, or the like.

So this weekend I did my first 3 mile hike, with at least 1 mile all in switchbacks. It was pretty brutal, and I was just about dead when I reached the “Peak” — but I’m still here! Progress is being made. This week’s hike took place in the Red Town Trail public land. There’s quite a few areas the trails split off to, so I took the long way around and headed up to Coal Creek Falls, then back down and looped to the parking lot from another direction. It was pretty incredible, even if the falls were next to dry. This next weekend, I think I’m going to do something a little less crazy for me, and explore the Denney Creek trail area off of I-90.

So a final note, a lot of game developers I adore shared a tweet:

https://twitter.com/APompliano/status/1005784785954967552

While I feel that I already have a few of these traits down pretty well, I’m going to keep using it for inspiration. Laser-focus especially is a tough one for me.. I don’t know what my deal is, if it’s just anxiety, or some kind of attention deficit issues — but my head is always all over the damn place, and it’s a source of constant annoyance, and stops me from being the best Spoony Panda I can be. Since I started working on my health it’s been BETTER, but I still have a long way to go.

Hope everyone has a great week! I guess I’ve been updating more on Sundays lately, so I’ll keep that date from now on.

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