Frayed Knights: Spell-Checking

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 19, 2015

I think I have the coolest, weirdest spell system ever in Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath. Of course, I’m biased.

It’s not that I literally have an infinite number of spells. For practical purposes, for each spell class there are probably four or five dozen meaningful spell variants per level without going into the combo spells. I mean, seriously, how many different ways can you inflict blindness upon your opponents? Okay, let’s look at it:

1. There’s a single-target inflict blindness

2. One that effects both enemies within a certain “rank” (distance away),

3. One that inflicts blindness on a primary target and up to two targets behind the primary

4. One that “explodes” – which means the primary target is hit for the full effect, and everyone else in the group for half the duration (if they don’t avoid the effect)

5. A “group” spell that does full blindness to all enemies.

Okay, there’s five. And then within a spell level there’s a range of durations – figure plus or minus maybe a turn.  And some minor variations on the endurance costs and attack accuracy. They could be mildly interesting if you had to choose between two variations at some point, but ultimately they aren’t really meaningful differences.

What the mechanic really comes down to is that you’ve severely limited one or more targets in their ability to attack for a period of time. What matters is how many targets, and for how long. For how long has a pretty narrow window of interest as well.  If the average combat lasts around five turns (sort of my target for the game), anything significantly greater than five turns becomes meaningless as well. At least, it is for the players using the spell. For enemies using it against the player characters, that could be a different story, as blindness can persist into the second or third combat if left uncured.

All of this stuff is still getting balanced and tweaked, and some of that has led to some fundamental design changes.  For example, inflicting blindness is obviously far more effective at neutralizing a front-line enemy than a mere stat drain. Even if it is easier, faster, and less costly in endurance to drop an enemy’s strength than to blind them, blinding a hard-hitting enemy is still the “best” solution, so that’s only a partial way to balance it out. The other part is to make it easier to resist or cure blindness or other conditions, and to make sure the enemies have some access to these things too.

This feeds back to the central concept for the massive variety of spells (and spell-casting equipment) in Frayed Knights 2.  Does blindness not work on this enemy? Try something else. So – yay for the core design.

But all this in turn multiplies my interface woes. How do I make all this manageable for the player? Just like real life, too many options can confuse when the pressure is on.

I’ve simplified a few things. Like the idea of selectively beefing up spells to more powerful versions – that’s gone. I’m toying with a skill that will automatically do that on a more limited scale, but really – in a game with (semi-)infinite spells, why would I want the player to invest in sticking with their old, moldy spells instead of constantly finding bigger and better abilities as they progress?

The thing is – all of these factors are interrelated and as I tweak one, it changes the flow of everything else.  I don’t think perfection is attainable in this case, but it does seem like things get better with each iteration.

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