Potential Blog

Alpha playtesters will notice a new (rudimentary) character skill system. Skills augment your character with special actions and enhancements. As an initial test, there is but one skill: “Skin Hide”. Go to Second Town to learn this skill. Then, you can turn corpses into Hide (even Spiders for now), which can be tanned into Leather at the Tannery. Leather is needed to produce some goods, such as Leather Armor.

In the future, skills may have attribute level requirements and/or other prerequisites (including other skills). There will be some number of skill slots. To change skills, you’ll have to unlearn what you have learned.

From a game design standpoint, the purpose of the skill system is to provide more character development options for the player and diversify character capabilities (so that different characters can have more specialized roles in the world).

Alpha playtesters will find that character attributes have been slightly redesigned. In addition to some renaming, character level now defines the base value of all attributes. Players can adjust attributes in town. Increasing an attribute always decreases its opposing attribute (e.g., Strength opposes Dexterity). Character level defines how many such balances can be made (although the user interface does not yet indicate this).

From a game design standpoint, the new approach is more classic (levels), retains the property of implicit balance, and removes the previous arbitrary cap on attribute levels. Some other checks and balances will be imposed later, but this is another step in the right direction.