Game Projects

Basic Stuff

Text-based

Heavily combat oriented. Combat and the systems around it are the entire game.

Combat stats

You have four stats to keep track of during combat:

Health -- seems pretty obvious. You lose all your health and you die. The death mechanic isn't great in this game. Doesn't recover outside of combat.

Mana -- your ability to use magic. Unless you have some special arrangement of equipment, this goes down without recovery until you win, lose or exit combat.

AP -- basically how many actions you can take during your turn. Actions (including moving) all consume some amount of AP. Resets every turn.

Stamina -- allows you to do special physical attacks and moves in general. Recovers 50% during turns you don't use it.

Skills System

Sunborn uses a skills system separated into three broad categories:

Sun -- governs physical combat and Stamina.

Moon -- governs magic of all forms and Mana.

Earth -- governs your storage/health/AP/etc. The most grounded of the three.

Shards

Besting an enemy in combat earns you Shards according to what you actually did. These are initially classed exactly, for example "Healshards" are earned when you use healing magic. They can however break down into more general forms:

4 Healshards --> 2 Moonshards --> 1 Shard

Shards are used in the Melding system to create items and upgrade them.

Melding System

The Melding system is a Lab, Crafting and Item Upgrade system all rolled into one.

Each of the three broad categories above is subdivided into "schools". These can be unlocked individually with their broad shard (such as Moonshards) or general shards. Unlocking a school will give you additional things you can unlock, a means of creating/salvaging items, and upgrading them, which can be quite convoluted.

For example, the Swordsun school unlocks the ability to make swords. For more swordshards, sunshards or shards you can do things like:

Upgrade swords in various ways

Meld swords you've made together.

Gain special stamina-consuming abilities.

Make it easier to create new swords -- this kind of thing is a Decoration.

Each of these targets also need swordshards/etc to unlock, and the process itself consumes some.

For sanity, the various processes here are Fixtures that you can place wherever you want in your Base. Your Base doesn't have limits other than fixture count (for UX purposes), and storage containers can be made for free and have infinite storage.

All item processing happens *in* your Base.

Sun Schools

Sun Schools are geared towards Weapon types:

Axe -- axes offer a lot of power at close range and nothing whatsoever elsewhere.

Swords -- swords are also close-range but allow you to hit multiple enemies at once.

Spears -- spears can reach Far enemies and can also be Thrown for the airborne (though granted you lose the spear until combat ends, you have special perks, or you get Close and retrieve it.

Bows -- bows can reach enemies at all ranges. The downside here is that they're the weakest, and also consume Arrows (these have to be made at a Fletcher).

Staffs -- Staffs don't do damage but can stun or otherwise inflict status effects easily. They're also close range. Can hit multiple enemies at once as well.

Earth Schools

Heart -- controls your health. Upgrading your health, Max health and maybe some kind of regeneration is a pretty intricate process.

Helms -- Helms control the amount you see. With earlier stages you can see enemy health and later on you can do things like predict moves. Better helms also improve the amount of time you have to Dodge.

Boots -- boots control your *ability* to dodge, how much AP moving costs, and max AP and AP costs in general.

Armor -- Armor defends against incoming damage, or can even absorb it as a stat or deflect it offensively. It's based around classes of attacks though.

Shields -- shields give you another means of blocking damage, provided you have an arm free for one. Blocks aren't automatic but you can choose whether to use one without time pressure after a failed (or missed) dodge window. Shields lose durability over time and have to be repaired.

Backpacks -- the backpacks school upgrades the amount of items you can carry in various ways, as well as how hard it is to re-equip things during battle.

Equipment stuff

You have the following equipment slots:

Heart -- your equipped Heart boosts or alters your starting health, regeneration, Max health, etc. Hearts that *only* increase max health are useful when paired with white magic.

Left arm, right arm -- your weapons of choice. More powerful weapons are two-handed but you can double or mix and match. You can also have a Shield in an offhand.

Helm

Armor

Boots

Grimoire -- you have a limited amount of spells you can equip at a time. Granted the limit is reasonably high -- maybe 7.

Jewelbelt -- store summons as part of yellow magic. Limited capacity.

Backpack -- manages inventory and equip time. Unique in the sense that unlike other equipment you can only carry one at a time.

Changing Equipment

You can change equipment outside of battle with no downsides. Inside battle, though, it depends on the quality of your Backpack. It does always consume AP however.

When entering an Arena, you can only bring *some* of the items you own with you -- dictated here by your Backpack.

Combat

As mentioned, combat is the entire game (outside of the support systems). The engine here is a flavor of XCS that has support for "ranges", stuff in the environment, and multiple enemies on both sides.

Enemies are a combination of handcrafted and procedural (which is at least curated in ways that make sense). I'd like to build out some fully handcrafted Bosses in the engine in a similar vein to the Caverlasting v1 ones.

There's also an Evolution mechanic -- enemies do learn from you just as you learn from them, and while there's limits depending on their Intelligence and what kind of alterations they have access to, this can make fights with them harder over time. You can manipulate this mechanic with advanced Pink magic so they learn the wrong things -- again though you're playing with their limitations. Summons, meanwhile, don't Evolve.

Enemy Properties

Initiative -- 0 means you attack first, 1 means they do. It can go higher via Evolution as well if you're one-shotting them since various items will give you initiative.

Aggression -- makes it harder to flee from them if a battle isn't going your way. If there's multiple enemies your roll covers all of them, so 10% and 90% will keep you from fleeing if you roll 85. Can be nasty if they call in an enemy you can't flee from.

Intelligence -- determines how likely they are to Evolve. It's a number here, 0-100%.

(( Evolution paths ))

Element -- Shatterloop Six. Can also be nonelemental, absorb various things, multiple elements or resistant to elements altogether. Elements affect movesets.

Health -- seems obvious.

Armor -- also obvious. Only Humanoids have Armor. Identical to the way armor works for you, so it can resist certain types of attacks better. Armor can have durability, can be pierced or broken in various ways, etc.

Boots -- also only applies to Humanoids. Boots allow an enemy to dodge certain attacks with some chance. Can be quite annoying.

Resistances -- typically only applies to Beasts, though there are some exceptions. Resistances block damage or effects of a certain Sun or Moon school altogether. Can be even nastier -- Ghouls can block physical attacks altogether and Bubbled magic. Ghouls can't be Bubbled at least.

Status Effects -- enemies can *start* with status effects.

Environment -- same deal here. The properties here describe what's in an environment with them from the outset.

Blue magic -- same deal here.

Traits -- a variety of traits that weapons, magic, the environment, etc can hook into.

Moveset -- the list of all of their moves and why they choose various ones. They can be pretty smart, or just pick randomly. Enemies with healing magic can be damn near impossible without targeting their ability to use it in some way. More on this in a bit, since the set of moves is wide. Movesets can potentially Evolve.

Combat Mechanics

There's a "range" attribute -- enemies can be Close, Far or Airborne. This affects which physical attacks can hit them and tends to tie into their movesets as well (Swooping for example obviously requires an Airborne state). You can close or widen the gap between Close and Far and use AP in the process. It doesn't really match euclidean space here -- it's just a combat mechanic.

Enemies have to actually be Close to hit you with physical attacks as well usually, though there's exceptions -- giant Beasts can reach you wherever you are.

Turn order

The initiative stat between both you and your quarry impact initial turn order.

Usually the way it goes is everyone on your side takes their turns, then everyone on the enemy side takes theirs. Straightforward. Haste/slow effects can make an entity take an extra or skip a turn from time to time. They cancel levels of one another out. Pixies can raise their haste more and more over time, which can be quite bad despite (usually) low damage. The Petrify effect is *extra* bad here.

Environment

The environment can have things in it that do various things:

Work as cover against attacks (prevents your own as well).

Deal explosive damage when hit at range by something.

Increase the chances of getting bad status effects (for example a Wildfire can cause Burning with some chance).

Do various things to catalyze attacks. A Grindstone for example might improve your damage briefly when you interact with it.

Magnify/split/etc magical attacks. A ruby for example might redirect your damage to multiple enemy targets, hitting them for close to the same amount as a single attack would.

Environmental fixtures run on their own systems -- they can maintain, remove themselves when used, dwindle or grow, change, create or delete additional fixtures, etc. They're probably heavily procedural.

Movesets

First of all, movesets work in a meta sense. They aren't just a list of possible moves, they're also attached to various conditions. Swooping when you're airborne is obvious, but Healing when your health drops below 30% is less obvious. Beyond that, they can also be weighted when priorities are equal.

Summon movesets match that of the enemy they're copying. With pink magic you can manipulate them further.

Moves

Each actual move is a set of one or more events. Damage isn't assumed, and an "attack type" is attached herein that armor/etc can influence. Moves can change their range, alter (or interact) with the environment, heal, put status effects somewhere, call in extra enemies (either from nowhere or pull in those on the same floor of the POI, which can be quite bad), create blue enchantments, disenchant existing ones, etc.

Enemies don't have anything like Mana -- a fire-breathing dragon can create fire breath spells as much as it wants to.

Move priorities, weights, conditions, etc can all Evolve along set paths. Evolution is at least handcrafted in whatever way makes sense, but the actual paths available might be procedural instead.