Hello survivors! Here’s our last post about our brand-new fighting system.
Important notice: all you’ll read and see here is heavily untested work-in-progress, so submitted to major changes.
We’ve seen last time some of the parameters you’ll have to play with during fights: Front/Back Rows, AP, HP and Initiative. Let’s take a look now at the skills you’ll use to defeat your enemies!
Each playable character will have a specific Battle Class and a Passive Ability. For now, there are 5 Battle Classes, and each class has a specific purpose in battle
- Warrior: Pretty balanced fighter, works best in the front row
- Protector: Can shield their weaker allies
- Shooter: Damage dealers, in need of protection ; can also reach enemy back rows
- Mystic: Can buff and debuff
- Civilian: Disrupts the flow of the battle with their chaotic skills (row-changing, large damage range…)
(The Battle Class will determine a set of 5 activable skills the character will have in battle.)
They will also have a Passive Ability, which is independent from the Battle Class, that acts as a modifier to their behaviour. Those different combinations means each character will have its unique playstyle in battle.
Let’s take an example: 2 warriors will have the same skillset but different Passives (one will have more Initiative for each enemy damaged during the turn, and the other has a higher chance of landing critical hits); logically, you will use them differently!
In addition to all these set characteristics, some dynamic aspects of the characters (e.g. stats) are affected by their state in the camp.
So let’s dissect a battle skill.
First, each skill has a row from which they can be enabled. Either from BACK row, FRONT row or ANY row.
Then, each skill has a TARGET parameter.
A skill can be limited to target another character on a specific row (only front, or only back), or target ANY row.
Then, inside this row the skill can be set to target 1 CHARACTER, ALL CHARACTERS or 1 RANDOM CHARACTER.
“Sniper Shot” can hit any enemy in any row…
… While “Hit n Run” can hit a RANDOM enemy in the Melee row
Once you have selected a target, the game checks if you successfully hit your target and how much damage you inflict. The exact formula may change in the coming weeks, but for now it works like this:
- Each skill has an ACCURACY rank and a POWER rank.
- For each POWER rank, the system rolls a 6-sided dice (d6).
- For each die with a value under or equal the ACCURACY rank, it equals to 1 HP damage on the target.
Example: A skill with an ACCURACY rank of 3 and POWER rank of 4 would mean 4 d6 rolls dealing 1 damage each on a face value of 3 and less.
(It’s a bit tricky, because more POWER ranks also mean higher chances to hit…)
Beside attacks, we also have buffs and debuffs which can change any parameter of the character. You’ll be able to gain bonus ranks for ACCURACY and POWER rolls, but also for CRITICAL chances, AP, Initiative, …etc.
They work a bit differently than attack skills: by default a buff/debuff will hit the target, (even if the attack does 0 HP damage) but the target has a chance to RESIST the effects.
We made the choice to exclude HEALING skills from our game, for several reasons. It breaks immersion, we can’t see our characters taking time to magically heal themselves during an ambush in the woods… But more importantly, it would in the end artificially drag the length of the fights, and we most certainly don’t want that.
That’s it for now for our fighting system! Right now we are very busy writing as much content as we can for the release… You could say, we still have a few months left, but if you consider localization time and balancing time… We don’t have so much time left to produce the bulk of the content!
