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Equipment discussion

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:33:27

RambOrc

Let's discuss now the equipment of the player: armor and weapons. Anybody has some special wishes or ideas for it? I was thinking of a rather simple system where the player has one piece of armor (set) and the weapons outlined in the concept document (i.e. only a staff and a wand for the mage, half a dozen weapons for the fighter). This would allow the player to concentrate on weapons and spells, not so much on the things you don't see in a first person shooter anyway. A couple of hypothetical examples: one piece of plate armor (wearable by a fighter) could offer more protection against physical attacks, another less protection against being hit with a club but quite a nice amount of resistance to fireballs, a third armor piece would offer a lower amount of protection generally but consist of a very light metal alloy and thus would increase your movement speed by 10% and so on. You could decide what type of monsters you have the most trouble with depending on your playstyle, and protect yourself against that primarily. Similarly, for a mage the robes he can wear would all have different magical abilities, one would have a magical thread that increases his efficiency, another would give him magical resistance to all fire magic, etc. A cleric could pick a leather jerkin that increases his movement and attack speed by 5% and makes him resistant to poisons, or equip a chain mail vest that reduces his movement and attack speed by 10% but reduces melee damage by quite a bit. Technical aspects: The player should only see armor and weapons/spells both in dungeons and at vendors that are usable by his class. If the code for it is not too difficult, we could just label items by chapter and type, like armor a5 would be a piece of armor in the first chapter, armor c3 one from chapter 3, etc. For weapons/spells, they should be labelled by weapon slot, e.g. weapon3 a5 would be a weapon or spell for the corresponding class for the 3rd weapon slot in the first chapter. Then we could populate all dungeons and vendors once with a set number of weapons and armor, and then only need to create and tweak a table that defines what exactly that given weapon or armor ID refers to (e.g. a golden cuirass, a battleaxe or a fireball spell).
Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:44:17

RambOrc

Another option for armor would be that you get a certain piece of armor at start (like a shining breastplate as a fighter, a smelly robe as a mage) and during the game, you only buy or find upgrades for it that enhance it, and these enhancement would either replace each other (only the last one's effect active) or they would all stack (in which case their effect should be either very small or there should be only a few upgrades in the game).
Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:15:38

Firebrand

I like the idea of a single armor piece, makes things easier to program and more similar to how they already work in Hexen (a single pickup that stacks to a complete percentage of armor), we could just manage 100 percent to 0 for armors(pretty much like in doom), but manage the damage more like Hexen does (the armor protects you against damage reducing it's class or quantity until it reaches 0). I would like to know, how many damage types have you thought of? These are the ones that come to my mind as of now: fire, poison, melee, ice... are there any more damage types for KRPG? It would be a good thing to define them now, so that we can think of different combination of armor stats.
Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:25:47

RambOrc

Going by the damage types from original Hexen visuals, I'd say "magical" or "arcane" for generic magic (like timon's axe when you have blue mana), "ethereal" for ghosts like from Wraithverge and the KMOD spell raise dead, "electric" or "lightning" for things like arc of death... there are also things like non-melee physical attacks, like crossbow bolts. Maybe we could make like 2 or 3 basic categories and add a couple of subcategories to each? I recall Stonekeep e.g. having three types of physical melee attacks: cut, crush, pierce. Somewhat similar was the three possible attack forms in Betrayal in Antara: thrust, swing, slash (or similar). Then again, this much complexity is probably not worth it for SE, maybe we should just go with 2 basic types: physical and magical damage. If you switch on the RPG attributes, there could be some subcategories appearing which define resistances/immunities.
Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:08:19

Firebrand

Hmm, how about something like the classic "paper, stone, scissors" game? If we have 3 main types of damage and 3 main types of vulnerability/resistances??
Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:29:58

RambOrc

What would they be?
Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:28:31

Firebrand

Hmm, I remember to have done a table about that, let me check it out on my old backups <!-- s;) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/orc9.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink" /><!-- s;) -->, I'll be back, heh!
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:29:38

RambOrc

Latest version of concept document has the currently final version outlined, feel free to discuss it.

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