ENDGAME

In our first prototype of The Wanderer a few months ago, we implemented a combat system that was vaguely similar to that in Diablo or FTL - actions that could be fired in real-time, but had cooldowns associated with them. Unlike Diablo or FTL, however, there wasn’t anything else going on (like running around putting out fires on your ship), and our efforts to spice it up by adding buffs and debuffs made the whole thing a bit abstract.

Then we decided to make the radical move to a combat system that was more arcade based, and it was pretty fun pretty quickly. Over the course of a few weeks we improved and tweaked it, and were feeling good about the direction it was heading in. However, it always suffered from what became a fatal flaw - the arcade gameplay meant that players who were good at the combat minigame could largely ignore the roguelike adventure game around the combat. And conversely, those players that struggled with the combat minigame would always be struggling with the overall game. In short, we had two fun games that when placed together broke the overall experience.

The fundamental issue in a game that combines the user’s twitch ability with their character’s statistics is that it can be difficult to grasp where the player’s twitch ability stops and the character’s own statistics take over - in other words, the player often finds themselves asking to what extent their in-game failure is a result of their inadequacy to respond to the physical demands of the game versus a failure in sufficiently leveling up their character.

We revisited what the core of The Wanderer is - a roguelike that is driven by cards containing story snippets. A game that is reasonably text heavy. Even though Nick and I enjoy both arcade games and text heavy story based games, we wondered whether arcade is really a good match. A turn-based combat system like Fallout seemed to be a better fit, and after all, Fallout is one of the main inspirations for The Wanderer.

Thus, for the last few weeks we’ve been building a Fallout style combat system, except in 3D rather than pre-rendered sprites. It’s too early to tell whether this will be the final combat system for the game, but soon we’ll be able to make a call on whether it’s working or not.

(Posted by GrantTheAnt)