Dev Log 10 - A Dramatic Stance

We’ve been cooking up a new way for players to play around with their kits.

Previously we made some design decisions for player abilities that led to quite a few unfortunate circumstances. We wanted players to master their abilities, and one way we thought of doing that was to have a variety of ways to alter how they used their abilities.

Ah, here’s a great way to make sure that happens. We’ll force every ability to have “Hold” functionality. So anytime the player holds down the button for the ability it should change the way you use the ability.

For a while this was more or less okay. We could think of some alternate ways to use abilities that encouraged tapping the button versus holding it down. One example was for Fia. Her Fireshard ability would launch a small fireball, while holding the button down would launch a bigger fireball, and continuing to hold it would charge it further, increasing it’s size and damage.

Hold: Fireball

Tap: FireShard

Which was great until we started running into issues with other abilities.

Taking Fia as an example again. Her Flame Sword ability, she can summon a sword, but what exactly would the hold do?

This came up pretty often, we wanted “transform/shapeshifter” abilities that would alter what weapon you had or what “mode” you were in, which in testing was a lot of fun, but didn’t have a clear answer for how we’d tackle that Tap Vs Hold functionality.

On top of that, the player could add mods to each ability to change them even further.

Old Customization Menu

Each ability had to have at least 4 mods. This would let players customize their playstyle with each character. It also meant that we were in a very weird spot for abilities like the FlameSword. Most of the mods for those types of abilities would wind up being passive components. Things like increased damage, add fire damage, regain additional focus on each hit.

The passives in those cases ended up feeling more of a forced decision rather than a new way to interact with the ability. Together with the tap and hold requirement, player abilities were in an odd spot design-wise and in terms of player customization. On top of that there were other issues of progression were players would could gather ability points in a very short amount of time and get all the ability mods.

Back to the drawing board, Anthony and Jensen spearheaded a new design to combat most of these issues.

The stance concept assumes from the very start that characters will have at bare minimum two “modes or stances”. This right away takes care of the issue that swapping weapons had, and the requirement for Tap vs Hold was removed completely.

So players will start off with a “Stance Swap” ability for free that let’s you swap back and forth between the two modes.

Please ignore my impeccable UI design. 😅

The system still allows abilities to be customized, without the need for specifically 4 mods per ability. It also lets you pump points into different mods so you can focus more power into a specific playstyle.

There’s been a ton of changes since we introduced the system, and we can get into it some more in a future dev log. But that’s all for this week.

See you in the next one.