Devlog 2: Design of Skill System and Stun Mechanics

============Skill System============

1. Skill design

We have added a lot of tactical combat skills to the Tavern Guardians Banquet, such as AoE attacks, displacement skills, and crowd control abilities. These skills are casted over enemies on the board. Therefore, we have modified their features to better serve the entire game mechanics.

Here we are going to give an example to show how the skills work. It is often the case that the enemies are constantly falling down when the tiles keep getting matched in our game, which may cause the players to lose the game quickly. We designed a skill for Paladin called Holy Cross to deal with this situation. When casting the skill, a player will summon a cross of holy fire to draw enemies into the centre and deal a large amount of damage. It can also trigger multiple matches and remove some tiles of negative status effects; thus, players need to make each move wisely. We hope that by introducing the skill system, the game can become more strategic.

2. Mana system

In the early version of the game, the skills enter the cooldown time after each use. Cooldown automatically resets in every turn. And collecting Mana Potions also reduces the cooldown time. However, we found that the recovery speed of the skills is not ideal in practice regardless of the cooldown time settings. It is extremely difficult for game balancing, and the tiles of Mana Potions become dispensable and less meaningful. The worst thing about this cooldown settings is that players are able to use all the skills in a turn to instant kill a boss.

Therefore, we designed the current mana system to replace the cooldown settings. Players have a mana cap like in traditional role-playing games. Each skill has its own mana cost and players can only restore the mana by collecting Mana Potions. Performing a skill may end the player turn as well. With the new mana system, the timing of performing skills is vital and collecting Mana Potions becomes meaningful and rewarded.

*Current mana system

*Restore a large number of mana by collecting Mana Potions efficiently

3. Targeting system

Most of the skills in the game require an enemy tile as the target. Players are encouraged to focus on the enemies' positions and strategically combine different skills to eliminate the enemies.

============Stun Mechanics============

1. Summary

There is always a way to interrupt spellcasting in many games. We innovatively added this feature to our Match-3 puzzle RPG. A stunned enemy is not able to action before regaining consciousness, thus we allow our players to take more actions after using stun skills in a turn.

2. How to stun bosses

In the previous versions of our game, players can stun a boss with a single use of a stun skill, which makes the boss fights less challenging. Hence, we redesign the new stun mechanics. It now requires THREE stun points to make a boss unconscious. Players can gain ONE point using normal skills or special items, and TWO points using stun skills. This design is in line with the new mana system. Players need to plan several turns ahead before using the actual skills to stun the boss. It also limits the number of times that players could stun the boss. As a result of this change, players are now expected to figure out other ways to defend against boss attacks.

The game also features skill and item combinations. We leave them to our players to discover in the game.

Till next time! Wombo Combo Games