itch.io

thanks for your thoughts! my opinion is that a little bit if chip damage promotes a little bit of pressure while you're figuring things out, even if you can suss out a stable defensive strategy, you can't sustain it forever. that's the principle anyway. i'm not convinced it's 100% necessary, but it'd feel wrong if it was straight zeroes. the thing that bothers me is the inconsistency. partly that's the system (i don't think i can math it out so ranged attacks deal 1 while you're in the fray), part of it's the rushed development cycle (ogre bat originally served boar spear's function before i arrived at the concept of reach weapons and revised all the damage formulas late in development, and i cant promise all the changes in the spreadsheet made it into the game), part of it is for tutorial purposes (i'd like all blocked melee attacks to deal 1, but the falchion dealing 0 to the axe guy in the first battle helps communicate that you need to be doing something besides just attacking). i'll be working on untangling this stuff in the next round of revisions..

re: randomization, that's a needle i'm still figuring out how to thread. i like randomization in general and it feels right to me that some enemies should resist it to various degrees. but any time you have a percentage chance in the middle range (i use a lot of 70s and 30s in this) you create a communication problem, and now it takes a lot of experimentation that players generally aren't that motivated to do in order to assess the effectiveness of your status ailments, etc. sometimes i like living with that ambiguity, and i don't like predictability of moves that always or never work. but when you have this many different enemies it's kind of a drag to have to restart the learning process with each one.. my ideal would be to collapse the range of fray resistances to a couple of heuristics (ranged enemies resist a little, flying enemies resist a lot). there's also the possibility of making fray/disarm ALWAYS work if not resisted, and expressing 'fray resistance' purely through enemy reactions - but the sequencing of actions in rm2k3's turn order might end up undoing that, situationally. so i might have to play around a bit to see what feels right.

so yeah, they kind of were both intentional lol! but that just means you're even more right to raise them. thanks for helping me see the realities of these decisions more clearly, it's valuable perspective. you're on your own with the controller but i'm rooting for you. good luck!