Sinathir
Limiting / removing RNG
This will be something a little different. Pretty much a wall of text describing my design decisions and also talking about the the future updates and future of the game in general.
Simply put, I'm not a huge fan of RNG. I think it has place its place in game development and some types of games would be worse without it, but in most cases, it is much easier to just slap a random chance into something and call it a day, instead of trying to think of a different solution.
RNG is a large part of Sinathir and most of it is in there due to lazyness or to save time. Three biggest examples are: Working / training, loot drops, combat and NPC schedules. I believe all of these can be changed to get rid of RNG and it would make the game better. I will now go through all of these and tell you how I plan to change these mechanics. Also, bear in mind that these changes are concepts. I have been thinking about them and in some cases I did some minor tests, but these are still concepts. They might sound good on paper but be unuseable in practice, so the things proposed here might be different when actualy in game.
Working / training
This is probaly the easiest thing to change and something the game would benefit from the most. In the current version of the game, you get a success percentage and the game rolls a die for every day you work or train. Obviously, this can result in some frustrating situations, where your 50% success chance gives you only one successful work day. If you save before working and you reload, you get completely diferent result. I don't think this is very fun.
The change is simple. Percentage will be changed into score, with its maximum value at 70. Every 10 points means one guaranteed successful work day. So if you have lets say 25 points, you will finish two days properly and fail the rest. This means the player will always know how much money he will get at the end of the week. It will make planning for the future easier and get rid of saving before working to get a good result.
Training will be pretty much the same. You start at max score and it will get lower the higher your stats are. Just like it works now, except you will know the exact amount of stat increases before you even start.
NPC schedules
Again, very easy to change. Instead of NPC position being randomly determined every week, it will run on a pattern. For example, week 1 will have Billy in his house, week 2 will have him stand on the beach, week 3 will have him visit suong, week 4 will have him stay at the inn, week 5 will have him stay at his house again and so on. This will make NPC positions completely predictable and easier to plan around
Combat
This will take a lot more work and to be honest, I'm nowhere near the stage to tacle this. But rest asured, I will be overhauling the combat system in the future to make most of the RNG disappear. Not all of it though. I believe this is the case where RNG can make things better to a certain degree.
Enemy drops
This took some thinking, but I believe I have this figured out.
Current version is what you would expect. You kill an enemy, game rolls random numbers and gives you items from a table. Pretty much every game does that. And to be honest, I don't like that.
I still remeber when I was playing monster hunter freedom unite on the PSP like a decade ago and I wanted one specific monster part. I was very unlucky and it took me about sixty kills to actualy get it. Killing the same thing over and over is not really entertaining, especialy when all you want is one thing.
My solution should eliminate that. Combat drops will be replaced by a "point shop" system.
Here is how its going to work: You fight a kobold and you kill it. You get 2 points. At the end of the battle, new window will pop up showing you all the items that kobold can drop. All of them will have different point price. You will be able to choose what items you get by spending those points. After that, you lose all the leftover points and you get new ones when you fight something new.
And here is where the fun begins. Kobold will give you 2 points. You can get things like arrows for 1 point, healing powder for 2 points or kobold canon for 5 points. As you can see, there is no way to get that canon, since it costs more points than what you can get from killing that kobold.
There will be two ways to get that canon. First, fight bigger groups of kobolds. Killing a group of 5 kobolds will give you 10 points total, meaning you can get multiple cheap items or few expensive ones. Second way is to get new skills. I could add skills that give you free points or increase your points for killing certain enemies, meaning you will be able to get more items from them. I can also give a loot bonus to some NPCs, so having them in your party will increase your points, making them more useful.
On top of that, I can add skills that will add new items to the enemy loot tables (current version has the hunting and butchering skills do the same thing).
This system will make hunting for specific items a non issue, since you will always be able to get what you want, but it will still allow me to limit good loot drops by putting them behind more difficult encounters or behind a skill barier.
I can see only one negative with this system and that is slowing the encounters down a bit, since you will be picking items after every fight. But this could be fixed a little by making the game remember what items you chose previously and putting them on top of the list.
Dungeon chests
Probably the biggest problem with RNG are the loot chests. Getting good loot from these can be achieved by saving in front of them and opening them again and again. Or saving in front of the entrance and rushing for the final room. Having to clear the dungeon multiple times to get the one item you want is frustrating and not fun, My solution is similiar to the enemy drops above.
Opening a dungeon chest will give you points (depending on the quality of the chest). It will also show you a screen where you can pick an item from a list, just like with monster drops. However, most of these items will be way too expensive. You can either use the point and pick something or keep the point and get nothing. whatever you choose, the chest will close and you won't be able to open it again this dungeon run.
Those points will increase with every chest you open, so if you want the best item from that dungeon, you will have to explore it fully and open every chest you find without taking anyhing. If you leave the dungeon, you will lose all points you have, so you will have to spend them eventualy. This is good on multiple levels.
It forces you to clear the dungeon completely, because you will only be able to get the best items when you find most of the chests. It also means that you will be able to get the specific item you want in only one run. On top of that, grinding for cheaper items like ammunition will be much easier, since you will know exactly how much you can get from one dungeon run.
And again, I can add skills and NPC abilities that will increase the amount of points you get or start with. I can also add a system that will give you more free points every time you clear a dungeon to make subsequent runs faster and easier.
Again, all of this is but a concept. It is possible that some of these changes won't make it in the game or will be changed drasticaly. Also, I'd like to hear what you think. Do you like those ideas or do you think this changes will make the game worse?
Comments
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I find that the RNG in combat doesn't work well with the wellness loss when your character gets hit. Despite having plenty of HP, I find myself savescumming whenever my character gets hit for even a small amount of damage... because wellness is a limited resource that I need to accumulate a large amount of. (On the other hand, Billy or Suong getting killed in combat over and over is fine, because the only consequence is them being unavailable for the rest of the fight.)
I'm aware of this and I will be fixing this after the work overhaul. I will be redoing the entire combat system in the future, but I will quickly fix this by adding simple "aggro" mechanic, where enemies will attack characters that did the most damage / have the highest taunt value instead of attacking at random.
I have 2 problems with some of the possible changes the first one being the npc schedules. I feel like having the npc's being in the random but set locations makes them feel a lot more human than the same old schedule. Secondly the dungeon chests I love the idea however giving an additional point shop screen for your points would make the game a little bit more user friendly. Otherwise I feel like these changes are amazing.
Having random schedules is a double edged sword. As you said, it feels natural when NPCs are not totaly predictable, but having too many variations will make them harder to remember. Set schedules are less natural, but I can add more of them to get the best of both worlds. I'm experimenting with the idea of separating all schedules (For example, Billy will visit the inn every eight weeks instead of every four weeks. Suong will spend more time in the forest and sometimes be without George.) so they can feel a little more natural but still be in a set pattern an thus easier to predict and remember instead of relying too heavily on status and world map screens.
As for your dungeon feedback, I don't think I get what you are saying. You open a chest and you get a small popup that tells you that you got a +1 points. And about a second later, the "point shop" shows up.
My dungeon comment was just if you have leftover points and try to exit you would have one more chance to trade in the points while leaving.
I was thinking about that at one point, but I didn't think it necessary.
The point screen shows you how many points you have and how many chest are there still to be opened:
The point of the system is to make people plan ahead and make some tough decisions on the spot. It's pretty much a risk vs reward system.
Let's say you clear half of the dungeon and you have 10 points. You get into a hard fight and you run out of healing items / ammunition or your mood gets too low. You can leave but you also get punished by wasting those points which I think is fair. Or you can gamble and try to push forward to find another chest so you can get some healing items from it so you can try to clear the dungeon.
Opening the item screen when leaving the dungeon would make them way too rewarding and penalties for not being properly prepared would be pretty much non existent.
Yes! This is a real gamechanger! To be honest, I was getting kinda tired of having to save scum over and over again when the chests only had coal or when I only got 2/7 successful work days even though I had a 65~ percent chance of success.
However, when it comes to the enemy drops, I feel like the point system should be kept for bosses instead of normal enemies. Although it'd be really cool getting the Kobold Cannon for the first time, it would be kind of redundant after you get it. I think that weak enemies like kobolds or chickens should be giving you low tier items like feathers or silver because they're just exp farms. Also, I kinda avoid fighting weak enemies because they take too much time for too little reward so adding another window to deal with just makes me want to avoid them even more. But if it was for a boss then it'd be a different story because it should be something that you deserve after beating it.
Point system for battles is still something I'm torn about.
I don't see being able to get good items like the cannon early as a problem, since I can just raise the point requirement to such a level where you would need to kill a large squad of 8 kobolds and have some point boosting skills to get it. This way I could effectively lock most of the advanced loot and make it available exactly when I want by simply making the large squads spawn later or make the required skills more expensive, both skill and money wise.
What concerns me the most is the time factor you talk about.
Trash enemies are both bad and good. Fighting enemies that pose no challenge and offer almost no rewards is bad, but the sence of progression when you kill a kobold in one hit for the first time is quite a nice thing. As you said, putting another window after every fight would only make the bad part even less bearable.
I don't have a perfect solution to that yet. One way is to make weak enemies run avoid you so they don't attack you so often. Another way is to make very, very easy fights "auto-resolve" so you just press one button, get the items and experience and you can go do something else.
If I do one or both of the things above, I could put the new loot into the game and it wouldn't slow things that much.
On top of that, I can try and add some kind of "loot priority" system, where you can arrange all the loot items you ever found in a order. After a battle, you get two options. Select loot manualy or use the priority system to automaticaly get the items on top of your list first and then go down until you run out of points. This would add just one more button press to trash battles, which isn't that bad.
For the part about the weak enemies, I think allowing the player some settings with regard to weaker foes should be added. For example, there should be an "Intimidating" stance that causes weak enemies to run away and you don't have to bother with them. However, you might want to kill them for some easy EXP or money so there should also be a "Friendly" stance that has them attack you like normal.
As for a loot priority system, that sounds great!
very interesting stuff. i think it's always nice to have some RNG elements in games, but i 100% agree that work/training should be RNG free. the only thing i wouldn't like is the NPC schedule, especially since (using Billy as an example) there is a sign telling you where they are, and they show up on the map. i think there's no point focusing on that aspect, since i think there is no frustration there for you to remove by removing RNG.
the only reason i'm iffy on the combat changes would be that you are creating a planned economy and a hardlocked meta. personally i think it should be some RNG in what items an enemy has available. for example a kobold gives you X points, but they roll on what you can spend those points on. it gives player some control over the RNG, without making it a 100% player-driven aspect. since if the player has full control, they'll know exactly what to kill and what to avoid, because they know the guaranteed drops.
either way, they're clever ideas. i'd start with the work/training changes, and perhaps that will be enough. it's always interesting to hear insight such as this. keep up the good work
NPC locations are pretty static right now, but I want to add events in the future that will shake things up. NPCs will move to a diferent place or alter their schedule outright. I agree that schedule is not a problem right now but I think it will become in the future as I add these things into the game and searching for NPCs becomes a bigger problem.
Also, I have similiar plans for the combat drops. I will be changing the way enemies spawn and give them similiar schedule to NPCs, so you can't just go to the exact same spot every week and kill the same enemy. Not to mention, I have several ideas for altering enemy population, like killing wild animals too often will make less of them spawn untill there are none. Or you can join a party trying to exterminate either kobolds or orcs, which will remove one species from certain part of the island and replace it with another. This should keep things fresh and interesting, since there will be multiple layers of patterns and triggers. It will give the illusion or things being seemingly random at first, but people playing long term will eventualy start seeing the paterns and can start taking advantage of them in future playthroughs.
Not all RNG elements will be removed though, since I also believe that having some kind of unpredictability in games is nice, but killing hundreds of enemies when you want that one specific item is not something most people enjoy I believe, especialy when you can get it on your first kill but also after a thousand.