Short Latham Update

This week I've been focusing on the high level plan. What is the basics of the story I'm trying to tell and how is the character going to advance through the game? And I discovered something interesting with the mechanics as I've got them.

My hit mechanics currently work by subtracting the enemies armour from the player's "to hit" and using the result as the percentage chance of scoring a hit. What's interesting here is lets say you have two weapons, one which hits 100 percent of the time for 8 damage and one which hits 75 percent of the time for 12 damage. In this case you would prefer the one which only hit 75 percent of the time, becasue on average it will do 9 damage.

Now, if you meet a monster that has 50 armour, suddenly things change. Doing 8 damage 50 percent of the time is 4 damage on average while 12 damage 25 percent of the time is 3 damage. In other words, which weapon I prefer depends on what I'm fighting.

This is good because it means that there is more choice in the game play. This is bad because it makes it harder to balance. I've been trying to work out how to ensure I've got a good balance to the game while maximizing player choice, but I'm not quite there yet. I've broken out the spreadsheet and slowly my eyes have begun to bleed, but it will be worth it in the end.

Latham version 0.1

It's been a month and a bit. I've been lax. I got less done in a week than I should have, then continued not posting my changes and making less change than I was happy with. But I've now gotten enough done that I feel I can start on the content creation process. It's going to take many months to get something done, but I'm going to commit to posting something every week.


Anyhow, here's the engine as it stands:

• Separated engine from level, meaning a single page for all levels, with the level being loaded in dynamically. This also means that other people will be able to create their own levels (currently without documentation) and play them without any trouble.
  
• Save states and check points, so that a game can be played over multiple sessions.
  
• Weapons and armor, so that the player can improve over multiple sessions.
  
• A front end menu system, making it so that I can let players reset their save state and play again from the beginning
  
• I also added WASD controls so that the arrow key scrolling problem went away.
  

You can see all of this in action here.