Howdy,

This week is going to be a bit different. I did finish the traders, so I'm going to start on the revision of the Combat system next week.

Now, Alone has had combat since quite early in development, and I was never happy with it. So this week we'll take a look at what went wrong with it, and how the new system is going to be better.

Problem 1 - Equipment stats are too discreet and too few

I couldn't find a better way to express this issue in the header. In short, equipment statistics are based on values which are too important, and this value doesn't have much leeway to play around with. For instance - a stone sword currently does 7 damage. Now there are 5 different quality levels, so how can that translate to actual damage? Well - we could add or remove 1 damage for each quality level - but that gives us swords which have a range of 5 to 9 damage. So how much damage should the next best item have? Is there going to be a time when a stone sword is better than a copper one? If not, then the copper sword should be from 10 to 15 damage - and that's a massive difference. Similarly, what's the difference between a stone sword and stone mace ? There's going to be significant overlap between them.

In short, there isn't that much leeway with what can be tweaked, and small tweaks make a lot of difference.

In the next version, there will be some more stats to play around with - I'm planning the following:

Weapons:

1. Damage Range
2. Accuracy
3. Critical Hit Range
4. Critical Hit Multiplier

Armour:

1. Protection (increase to "health")
2. Dodge (harder to hit)
3. Damage Absorption
4. Rage Generation

Shields:

1. Dodge (harder to hit)
2. Protection (increase to "health")

Additionally, there will be two handed melee weapons added as well. This means you'll need to go without a shield, but you get more damage - so it's a trade off.

Also, weapon damage will no longer be a fixed value, but a range. This gives me yet another value to tweak - and it also means that small changes won't have massive repercussions.

Problem 2 - Special Attacks are too complicated, and of limited benefit

I was very proud of the special attack system that was introduced a while ago. To summarise how it worked, you killed certain enemies, and that unlocked your knowledge of certain special attack moves. Then using the training dummy, you mix and matched moves into something custom made.

I'm still very proud of the system, but it's rather out of place for a game that's supposed to be relaxing and casual. There was too much micromanagement and optimisations for something which didn't really give that much benefit til higher levels.

In the next version, this is going to be replaced by something a bit simpler - which I'll go to in more detail later on. But suffice to say, I will be retaining the idea of defeating certain enemies to unlock abilities - but there won't be micromanagement involved in the process.

Problem 3 - Loot can be just as good as home-made

Alone is not intended to be combat centric. The idea of setting up the island and crafting and such is meant to be one of the primary focuses. So it is quite a bad situation when you can visit the crypts, kill some (relatively speaking) high level enemies, and come back up with weapons and armour which would have required lots of effort and industries to get via crafting.

So there are going to be a few changes made in this regard.

• Looted equipment will always be of AT MOST bad quality
• Crafted equipment will always be AT LEAST normal quality

This means that whilst finding a nice weapon via enemy drop is still possible, it's not going to be as good as making it yourself. Plus with the trader system in place now, you can sell the stuff you don't need and maybe buy a better weapon. Trader weapons can be of high quality.

Now this shifts a lot of effort on the crafting portion, so to balance it out...

• Special weapons can be crafted, but require resources only found from combat

So high level enemies - most probably just bosses - will drop some special items - I think I'll call them "soul fragments" or something similar. You'll need them to make the really nice weapons and armour.

There will be something available for each stratum of material - so say a special stone sword, or a special copper helmet, thereby rewarding players who defeat the strongest enemies.

Problem 4 - Skills are opaque

There are two combat skills at the moment - one which determines the chance of hitting your enemy, and another which determines the chance of not being hit. At the moment they increase independently, so you can technically (though unlikely) be really good at dodging things, but garbage at actually hitting them.

But worse than that, there's no indication of how it correlates to enemy level, and there's no clear answer as to what effect each skill has, tangibly.

In the new system, there will be one "skill" - which goes up when enemies are defeated. It will increase accuracy, damage, dodge, health - but more importantly, it will make it very clear as to what it does.

Problem 5 - Enemies and Player level up differently

And to finish it off, an entirely balance issue. Prior to the dynamically generated enemy system, enemies had fixed, calculated statistics. The player on the other hand, had statistics which depended on the skills they had, what weapons they chose &c.

This is pretty much impossible to balance.

In the new system, weapon stats will work the same for both Player, and Enemy. As will their level (player will have the "skill" instead).

So in theory, an enemy fighting a player of the same skill - with the same equipment - will win 50% of the time.

Of course, the player will have access to nicer crafted weapons, attributes, potions, protection, special attacks, and their cunning, so it's still not as simplistic as it seems.

But it can still set a reasonable baseline as to which enemies the player is expected to be able to defeat at certain stages in the game - which means the game should be more fun.

Thank you for reading all of this. Next week I'll start work on the combat system.

Til then.