3 days to go!
Update 11:
If we make the final (?) stretch-goal of 160.000 NOK / 18.400 USD we're adding a procedurally generated murder-dungeon to the game as optional side content! The area will be completely optional and besides the main game, and will allow you to create a party of up to 6 custom characters and take them on a doomed descent into an infinite dungeon. This will allow you to keep enjoying SKALD long after you've finished the main game!
There's a new article on the devlog: This one regarding combat and adventuring systems in the SKALD engine.
Check it out today if you want to learn more!
Imma steal some highlights:
Design pillars for combat and adventuring
Respect the players time: SKALD is developed for a modern audience and this means allowing players to pick up the game, play a short session and still have a fun experience. This includes reducing book-keeping by adding features such as a journal system and auto-mapping, avoiding grindy areas of pointless content padding, making combat fast and having a forgiving save system that allows the player to save anywhere.
Allow the player to make informed choices: The game should be mostly transparent in how the rules work and how the characters class, stats and roleplaying choices interact with the world.
Provide multiple solutions to quests: Quests should be solvable by non-combat means and players should be able to play non combat-oriented characters.
Choices matter: The world should be interactive and react to players choices.
The SKALD scripting language is quite powerful in allowing me to reference player skills, abilities and previous player choices in the dialogue and the "choose-your-own-adventure" sequences.
Specifically, this gives me a lot of leeway in creating scenes with multiple solutions beyond combat (I'm taking a big leaf from the early Fallout games here). There should be room for all the different classes, and builds, to shine.
As combat begins, the game switches from the tile-map to the tactical map. The tactical map consts of a background with the combatants animated upon it.
Combatants do not move freely around the battlefield and combat is not tile-based. Instead the combatants occupy either the front, or rear rank of their formation. The player is of course, free to reorder the party formation during combat to move characters between the front and rear rank.
In general a melee weapon (excluding spears and pole-arms) can only attack the adjacent enemy rank, whilst ranged weapons and exceptionally long weapons can attack more distant ranks.
For now I'm hoping to make combat difficult but not unfair. Party-members are very rarely killed outright in combat. Instead they are knocked out and failure only comes if the entire part is somehow incapacitated. Knocked-out party members come around after combat (albeit at reduced total HP). I'm also playing around with having a sanity score in the game and taking a lot of beatings might impact sanity in the long run. I've chosen to go with this decision because I don't want combat to prompt constant save-scumming
Finally, combat has an auto-resolve feature that can be used to resolve full rounds of combat allowing players to blow through easier encounters or finishing combats quickly once they have them "locked down".
https://emails.kickstarter.com/mps2...5IMaPv6lrsMcNDxksmGAptgn90jcJk6rhg-3D-3D/b6UT
