Frayed Knights: On Weaponry and Spraying Blood
Once again, I go into my long, drawn-out diatribe on the development of the indie RPG "Frayed Knights," a comedy-based fantasy role-playing game.

What did I learn this week?

Spraying blood is good.

Lots of Squishy Goodness
Well, okay, no, it usually isn't for the person who is spraying blood. I'm sure I wouldn't appreciate it if I was the one doing it on some street corner. Not that I really contemplate such things.

But while I was trying to make combat more interesting in Frayed Knights, I found that simply providing more feedback than the rather arcane text descriptions REALLY helped the game immeasurably. Little slash marks across the player icons, or the word "Miss!" appearing when you miss (soon to be joined by the word "Blocked!"), spraying particles, little numbers appearing showing how lucky you got, and sound effects making a "clank" miss sound or a "cling-THUP!" noise on a hit... These little elements of feedback helped make combat come alive.

Other Changes
Besides that, I added some special effects like the tremendously-easy-to-do-in-Torque effect of making dead enemies fade to invisibility when they die. Oh, and fixing some silly bugs like... ummm... monsters continuing to attack the party while dead. While the monsters themselves were dead, I mean. Talk about an attack by undead! I fixed the doors so they can now be shut as well as opened, and the drama stars not activating properly.

Kevin has been working on the dungeon some more, and put in a visibility-blocking section to help out with some of the framerate issues we've been dealing with the meditation chamber (the one with the toilet-shaped fountain). James has been working on the weed goblins, which don't actually appear in this dungeon, but will appear in the section of wilderness immediately outside the dungeon. Thanks to the code I completed about three weeks ago, that actually makes a difference.

Weapon Types
While not a big change to the actual code itself, I spent some time this week re-designing how weapon damage is handled.

I have a small collection of medieval weapons in real life, and I have been spoiled by such detailed weapon system rules found in games like Twilight: 2000. And I've participated in pseudo-medieval live-action 'medievalist' combat with various weapons. And I've fenced. And I basically like having interesting choices in weaponry.

So in the interest of making the choice between a spear, a warhammer, and a broadsword a little more interesting, here is how weapon damage type is used in combat.

Edged Weapons
Edged weapons include swords, daggers, axes, halberds, etc. They concentrate their impact in a line along the edge to split resistance (resistance meaning the soft, fleshy enemies in the damage path). The advantage of edged weapons is that they tend to have a higher base damage than other weapons. They have no clear disadvantage, other than being the most vulnerable to armor.

Blunt Weapons
Blunt weapons tend to be much slower than the other weapon types, and require a higher Might to use without major endurance lost. However, most armor isn't as good at redistributing the blunt-trauma impact of these weapons. Unless the armor has a base armor rating higher than that of the weapon's total damage potential, the blunt weapon will always inflict some portion of its damage to the victim regardless of armor.

In other words, blunt weapons are really good for nickel - and - diming a heavily armored opponent.

Blunt weapons may have spikes or flanges on them to concentrate the impact force, but the key difference between edged weapons and the other types is that these impact areas aren't designed for deep penetration.

Piercing Weapons
Piercing weapons concentrate all of the impact force into a single point. The advantage of piercing weapons is that they are more 'all-or-nothing' with respect to armor. If the weapon penetrates armor at all, much more of its damage potential goes through.

This tends to cheese off the guys who have heavily invested in expensive, heavy armor.

Other Weapon Factors
There's a lot more to a weapon than just its type of damage and the amount of damage it does. Weapons have speed factors, which influence how often a character can attack with it. Then there's how much endurance it burns to attack with it, which depends upon the character's Might. And there's its reach, which how effectively the player can attack monsters closer or further away. While I haven't put it in code yet, I also want to add flexible weapon types (specifically flails) to the mix, which would have the advantage of being able to partially negate shield bonuses.

Too complicated? Maybe. But Frayed Knights, in spite of its comedic storyline, is still being built upon what I hope to be a strong rule system. I was tempted to do something really crazy and subdivide armor into different ratings for each type of weapon... but I figure what I've got is already going to be a little complicated and challenging to balance as it is. While these factors may not represent a physically "accurate" simulation, they should at least be believable and make the choices in the game interesting.

And that's it for this week. Tune in next week when I'll try to entertain you with fascinating stories of such interesting subjects as... uh... GUI stack management and memory deallocation and stuff. High Drama!


(Vaguely) related beating a dead unicorn with a +1 stick (damage class: blunt)
* Frayed Knights: Death and Arianna's Interview
* Frayed Knights: Ben Speaks, and Combat Tweaks
* Designing a Computer RPG Rule System

Want to Talk About It? Argue Weapon Systems? Here's a Forum Thread!

Labels: Frayed Knights, Roleplaying Games

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