I have been significantly less productive than I'd have liked over the past week due to some real life issues, but this demo is still creeping closer to something I can actually release. Part of the reason for the crawl is the sheer amount of math I've needed to do in order to get the game balance to where I want it to be.
Unlike all of my other projects that largely leave RPG Maker's base math alone, I want Dawnfall to be closer to the games that inspired it - Fire Emblem and Advance Wars. That means the numbers are going to be much smaller and - hopefully - more predictable. For example, right now I'm having characters start with around 20 HP, with 10 being the average on a stat. When you level up (to a max of 20), those stats might be 40 HP with 20 being the average stat. These will all adjust up and down depending on the unit type - mages will have lower HP, Attack, and Defense, but higher Magic Attack and Magic Defense. Knights will be the opposite; higher HP, Attack, and Defense, but lower Magic Attack and Magic Defense. I also want to keep enemies more or less in line with this, because I kinda hate games that have enemy stats and player stats be vastly different from each other. This should also help with tactics; identifying which unit is what type so you know who to charge and fight and who to stand back and sling spells at.
For actual combat, I also want to simplify damage formulas so the difficulty of combat comes from the strategic skill of the player, rather than sheer numbers. Obviously, there will be some maps that will be "easy" or "hard" based on the number and/or type of enemies, but that sort of parameter will mostly come later in the game, once the characters have mostly been assembled and the story is in full swing, and that won't be at the start of the game, so it won't be in the demo. Which is just as well, because I need to figure out the more granular bits first anyway.
The trouble with the more granular bits right now is making sure gameplay is still satisfying. If the damage formula is simplified to "Attack - Defense = Damage" and both characters have 10 in all their stats, that results in zero damage. You'll have equipment to work with, so let's say the basic sword gives you 4 more attack. Well, if I want enemies to function off of the same baseline as the player characters, the enemy should get bonuses from wearing armor, and now we're right back to "14-14=0." I've mostly made up my mind about weapons having a point or two higher attack than what the equivalent armor provides (in math terms, "14-13=1" - hooray, a point of damage!), but since I can't use the built-in battle tester to test things quite the same way as I can for projects that use the default combat system, I need to do math to figure out how many times I want you to need to attack a given type of enemy. Using the baseline of 20 health as an example, you'd be attacking an enemy 20 times to down them one HP at a time. That's hardly my idea of a good time, so obviously there's still some tweaking that needs doing.
The short term solution is that early enemies will have below-baseline stats. For example, they'll be magic users focused on status effects, so they won't do damage directly to your units and they'll have lower than average HP and Defense. That makes sense, and now you're doing 4 damage and you only need to do it 3 times to deplete their 12 HP. With three starting units, that's maybe a little rough, but easily manageable. Other enemies might be built as fodder, so they'll have half of the baseline stats before applying modifiers for unit types; 10 base HP, 5 base Defense. A back-line unit like this might only have 4 Defense and 8 HP after modifiers, so they go down in one hit. Even a front-line fodder unit might only have 6 Defense and 12 HP, so you only need to hit them twice, and you might one-shot a few of them if you get a lucky critical hit. That feels like a much better starting point. Of course, that still leaves later enemies a bit unresolved, but the stat increases from levels should mostly cover that. Not to mention any learned skills or a potential weapon affinity system.
This, plus the decision to make all attacks do a minimum of one damage, took me nearly a full week to work out and test as best I could without having a battle map built in the demo yet. There's still a lot I need to figure out, like whether I want you to be able to switch weapons on the fly or have you be stuck with whatever you decide at the start of the battle (or compromise and make switching weapons a "skill" that takes up your action), and whether or not I want to include (and how to include) an affinity system, where a character can (maybe) learn skills faster and (possibly) do more damage if you have them focus on swords or lances or a certain type of magic instead of bouncing around to learn all the skills (which I still want to be possible, because I'm absolutely the sort of person that wants to bounce around and learn all the skills). I might split it up so you have "sword affinity" as well as affinity for each individual weapon (currently, individual weapon affinity is how you learn skills), but working all those variables into the damage formula and having the formula properly update based on the current character is complicated.
And all this really just scratches the surface. There's still how extra stats affect skill damage, how "hybrid skills" behave (like swinging a sword but targeting Magic Defense), how Agility factors in (if it's high enough, your character will act twice on a single attack), area of effect attacks (I don't care how big the room is, I said "I cast fireball"), damage types and resistances (nothing likes being on fire, so should everything take extra damage from fire magic, or is that imbalanced?), and how status effects should work, and how many weapon types I should make, and exactly how the skill system works, and on and on. All of this and more before I can even start to put an encounter together.
I'm really hoping what life has me going through right now will pass sooner rather than later, because I'm still genuinely excited about getting this demo put together, but I only have so much time and energy.
And hey, if you made it this far, maybe consider checking out my Patreon? I'm mostly doing lore posts for Maids & Masters while I get this demo figured out, but if you liked reading this, you'll probably like reading those. And once I have it figured out, the demo will be going up there for all tiers before it goes public a month or so later.
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