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Dev Journal: Fixing Unintuitive Mechanics
🕑 Added 2025-02-17 20:10:28 +0000 UTCThere are a few mechanics in the current game that are bothering me, whether that's through player feedback or just feeling that they're annoying when I play the game myself. I have a few plans for how to fix them, so hopefully these will be some good changes coming in the near future.
Digestion Countdown:
The way the countdown works right now is very simple, the first prey takes 3 turns to digest, the second prey takes 2 turns, and every prey afterwards takes 1 turn. It's set up in this way so that units have a chance to eat multiple prey, but also so full stomachs don't take forever to digest.
I think this actually works well, I haven't seen anyone complain about it or even mention that they noticed it, which is a sign of a good mechanic. What I have gotten complaints about, though, is HP not correlating to digestion time. I don't think this is so much an issue of game mechanics as it is of setting expectations. You would expect HP to be associated with a character's constitution, and since digestion decreases HP it feels off that characters are digested by a countdown instead of by hitting 0 HP.
Now, I can't make HP associated with digestion time. It would affect the balance of the game too much, and if you think about it punching someone really wouldn't decrease the time they take to digest. So instead, I'm going to be giving every character a "Mass" and a "Digestion Strength" stat. In order to digest prey, a characters Digestion Strength must exceed the total Mass in their stomach. Digestion Strength will rise by an increasing multiplicate each turn, in a way that nothing is changed mechanically and the digestion countdown remains the same.
This also serves to give me some wiggle room for giving characters different digestion strengths. It's very hard to deal with changes in digestion strength that aren't dramatic when every character takes 3 turns or less to digest, but like this I could give high capacity characters like the Lamias a small boost that lets them skip a turn or two on a full stomach. It's possible this could also be used to make smaller units like Goblins take less space in the stomach, but I'll have to see how that looks visually.
Hunger:
Hunger currently works by draining 10 EN from a character every time they take certain actions with an empty stomach. It's kind of annoying and doesn't really contribute much to the game, but I want hunger to still remain as a mechanic somehow.
To that, I'm replacing it with a Hunger/Satiation gauge. The gauge has 8 pips, from -4 to +4, and can be expended at any time to soup up moves. For every unit that is digested, the predator will gain 1 pip to expend, but regardless of the amount they can be used at any time a character is not in a hunger state. Using a pip while at 0 will push Hunger into the negatives and force them to make a hunger action on their next turn, making hunger into a proper risk/reward mechanic. Because hunger is more intentional here, it will probably also be buffed to be more dangerous for the player.
Once a unit has prey in their belly, their gauge will remain at -1, but they will no longer be hungry and will be able to expend their gauge once again. If the gauge is lower than the number of prey in the stomach or is at -4, the unit will be forced into a hunger state again until that has been remedied.
In-battle Leveling:
Currently, at the start of each battle each unit comes in at level 1 and must increase their level by digesting others. However, each unit also has a true level that is completely removed from the battle system. The reason things are set up this way is so the penalty for losing units isn't as harsh, but to still reward the player for digesting units.
The problem with this is it's really confusing and doesn't feel good. It's not so noticeable now while most things are in a vacuum anyway, but down the line I can see this being pretty unsatisfying.
To fix that, I'll be giving each unit their own persistent level they may gain by digesting other units, alongside their class level they gain by the commander feeding any member of their class. The amount of stat gain per level will likely be decreased and the majority of a unit's stats will still come from their class level, but coupled with the new hunger system this shouldn't be too much of an issue.
This will also replace the current fixed stat gain from digesting units, with prey now giving EXP based on their and the predator's level in a much more traditional way, meaning battles will be the best source of EXP while passive vore will remain a good way of raising your bottom line.
Comments
Base Delta Zero
Permanent individual levels? Sounds pretty good to me. Not sure about the digestion change, it seems like it's generally... fine, as is. There's a bit of unintuitiveness in that it's not clear what it *does* to HP, but the new UI has improved that a lot. Though perhaps there's a mismatch in the level of damage 0 HP represents. Oh well, it'll potentially add some options, I guess. Hunger: Hmm. A consequence of this is that front-loading hunger moves is a potentially bad idea. Will all moves have a hunger and non-hunger version? Because if we completely lose access to say, Dragon Kick or Snipe, that could be an issue. Also on that subject, not all characters interact with Hunger in the same way. Theano being an obvious example, powerful attacks limited by low EN (and the possiblity of getting it back efficiently via Neutralize). Changing things so all characters have the same EN will interfere with that. Also how much do characters start with? Zero?
Cyrk Petrovich
Yep, Octopath Traveler was exactly what I was thinking of when I came up with it haha. No worries, it will take into account the size of the prey, too! For sure, balancing the leveling systems will definitely be a challenge. It will probably take some trial and error to figure out what the best way to go about it is
Cyrk Petrovich
Yep, it could end up opening the door for new mechanics like that
wrathofclaw
if you want you could just have 2 bars , a way to implement where certain units like heavy hitting ones use more hunger in there action like waitress always want indulge ,priest , sniper, goblin leader and sleep liamia would make sense.(raise 20-30 for them)for most smaller units keep at 10 but limit them all 50-70 bar. lower the energy the lower pip bar goes to maximin of 3,more damage the more pip goes down(to maximin of 3 and lastly the higher level they are ,the quicker pip goes down
Lucas You
Hmm…so the time needed to digest the same prey will change depending on the predator's digestion strength? Sounds more reasonable than a fixed number of turns. Does that mean we will be able to create BOSS predator that digests preys with 1 turn? Or maybe a prey with very high mass that protects other units by feeding herself to enemies? That would be fun :D
Virgile Lefranc
I like those ideas but I can't really project my self. I'll give a proper oppinion when it will be live. But still glad that you try to improve the gameplay and fix bug befor feature. It's important that the game still fun and not frustrating. We'll keep listening and share ideas. Keep the goo work buddy ; D .
Kiwegg
Over all, it sounds good! As for the digestion cooldown: I guess mass will be a more detailed version/replacement of the "size" value, that we have now. A new stat that affects digestion speed also makes perfect sense. Me like. As for the hunger system: I believe that the hunger system should take size/mass into account. A Lamia should logically satiate a unit more than a goblin, for example. Other than that, letting you use hunger as a resource that you can use, simmilar to the energy points in Octopath Traveller, i imagine, would deffo be a good thing. Burnout/Overusing the hunger points and going into minus is also a cool idea. As for the in-battle Levels: Losing all the progress on your units after each battle of feeding units lots of enemies did feel off, so i am glad that you are tackling it. I do heavily suggest a level cap or at least a stat cap, to avoid being able to just power level one unit and break the game.
