Legacy of Suns

Welcome back to the Dev Log, today we take another look at levelling and templates for levelling.

Today I wanted to make a template for what you get for each level you gain in a class. I had a rough idea that each class has 3 active abilities, 1 passive, and 1 reaction ability. Then, a master ability that you can only gain at the class’ max level.

So I wrote out how all of that works.

Active Abilities gained the name Hero Abilities. Hero Abilities are actions you can take in combat that use 1 Action Point, which we’ll get into later. For the majority of the game, each character will have 1 Action Point per turn. Basically, if you have these abilities from a class, or if they’re equipped on the character, they are at your disposal when you are taking your turn in combat.

Passive Abilities are abilities that are always active and will serve as basically a buff or debuff to the character, or just change how something works in combat. Things like boosting health, or boosting will, can be affected by a passive ability.

Reaction Abilities are abilities that are conditional in battle based off of something effecting the character or something else. Things like protecting an ally, repositioning, or counterattacking based on enemy or ally actions on their turn are what reactions will consist of.

At certain class levels, the character will gain Proficiencies. A Proficiency allows a character to equip and use the ability whenever they want, even if the class is not currently equipped.

Is that levelling system a bit unwieldy? Probably! But I am a huge fan of games that let you play however you want, and allowing users to level up classes and equip class proficiencies while using a different class sounds awesome.

Each class will also have 2 stats that it mainly uses, a major and a minor stat. On level ups where abilities or proficiencies are gained, the major stat will gain a plus three bonus, and the minor stat will gain a plus 1 bonus. When no ability or proficiency is learned, the stats gain a +6 and +2 respectively.

These stat upgrades will be tied to the class, so if the character equips a different class, those stat upgrades go away. I felt this was a good way to balance, where you can’t just swap around to whatever class you want without the game getting a bit difficult, but also, it allows the game to not get too easy by keeping the stats with the character and allowing characters to take levels very quickly into a class and massively boosting their stats quickly.

Anyways, that all could have made very little sense. Basically, I’m very happy to get things ironed out. Each class will have 3 Hero Abilities, 1 Passive Ability, 1 Reaction Ability, and 1 Master Ability (unlocked when the class hits max level).

Now that I have this framework ironed out, I can start working on making some of the starter classes. Priest for Faith, Engineer for Melody, Warrior for The Warrior (no way!!), and Commoner for Oskar(git gud punk).

Once I get those classes built out, as well as sprites, I am going to try to get the combat built out in the game engine. That will be a big first step for me, so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes. Sorry if the post felt like a ramble today, but I’ll see y’all tomorrow in the next Dev Log!