Welcome back to another Outhoused Studios devlog!

This time we're going to make another progress update since the last time we checked in. Last time we went over the steps we've taken so far in planning our MVP. We introduced the team, the tools we were using, and our basic plans for the future. Since then, a lot of things have come more into focus. Today we'll be talking about how we went about making a plan for the character stats, status effects, and abilities we plan to include in our MVP.

Character stats and status effects

We spent a lot of time designing character statuses and status effects. It might sound like an easy thing to accomplish, but we were surprised by how quickly things could become complex. We started thinking about status effects to try and inform the rest of the combat experience, but this wound up getting us thinking about lore, and we started working on that, which was good, but ultimately not the direction we wanted to take for the moment. After a week or so we huddled together and decided that we should prioritize a minimum of features in order to really flesh out the bare bones of our MVP. Finally, after about three iterations over both character statuses and general status effects, we whittled down a list of features we absolutely wanted for our MVP.

Character stats would be made up of health, speed, resistances, and critical chance. Status effects would be made up of:

negative status effects, or debuffs:

• burning; character takes fire damage over time
• cold; character moves slower on the initiative bar
• shocked; character takes lightning damage when it attacks and has a reduced chance to use its reactive ability
• exposed; character has increased % chance of taking a critical hit (can stack)

positive status effects, or buffs:

• charged; character's next attack deals double damage. The status effect is consumed on attack (does not stack)
• concealed; character cannot be targeted by target abilities and combos (can stack)
• guarded; when character is targeted by an attack, the character that applied the status effect is targeted instead (cannot stack).
• hastened; character has an increased speed on the initiative bar (can stack)
• vigilant; character has a 100% chance to trigger their reactive abilities (cannot stack)
• inspired; character has an additional 25% chance to trigger their reactive abilities (cannot stack)
• defending; character has a 50% increase of defense against all incoming damage (cannot stack)
• dodging; character has a 50% chance to take no damage from incoming attacks (cannot stack)

Please note that some of the above only became obvious to us after we started defining the characters that would be available to the player in battle, which I'll present to you soon.

Battle actions

We also established which actions a combatant would be able to perform in the context of a battle

• Move
• Use active ability
• Defend; character assumes a defensive stance until it next reaches the perform section. While defending it takes 50% less damage
• Dodge; character assumes a defensive stance until it next reaches the perform section. While dodging there is a 50% chance to entirely avoid incoming attacks.

Character stats and status effects

We also established which characters would be available to be added to the player's party. We voted on this, and we came out with the following playable character classes

• Hunter
• Rogue
• Knight
• Wizard

From there, we started thinking about which abilities specific characters could have such that the game be balanced. This led us to define important concepts like active abilities and passive abilities, as well as the effects of different abilities.

What comes next

Moving forward, we're going to be implementing these abilities into our game's code. This will be our next big milestone. In particular, given we have specific abilities that specific characters have (each character has eight abilities), we will set as our next deliverable that each character is able to initialize themselves with their expected skills.

Thanks so much for reading, please contact us at contact@outhoused.me