Hey there! Been a while. Carrying on from the previous devlog, I've continued adjusting stats and trying to get the game to feel as good as possible. I've also redone damage calculations again, but I'm feeling pretty good about it now so it's not going to change.

As I said in the last devlog, damage was calculated as Strength - Defence. Now, it's a little more complicated; defence is calculated as a percentage reduction, so 50 defence is a 50% damage reduction. This makes defence more valuable, but it also makes it a little overpowered - what happens if you get 100 defence? What happens if a level 1 character maxes defence and runs into a high level area?

Introducing the second element to damage calculations - level adjustment. The full damage calculation is something as follows:

((STR + (EPW * 0.34)) * (1 - ((DEF + Target Level - Attacker Level) / 100) + |(1 - ((DEF + Target Level - Attacker Level) / 100))) / 2)| + 1

So, what the hell is this doing?

First it calculates attack damage. This is STR + 1/3 of EPW, as mentioned and explained in the last devlog. Then we take the defence of the target, and add the target's level minus the attacker level. This means we're adding the level difference between the target and attacker to the target's defence, which will result in a defence increase if the attacker is a lower level or a defence decrease if the attacker is a higher level. This is then divided by 100 and subtracted from 1 to make it a damage multiplier, and finally it multiplies the damage. The second half of the equation which looks the same is getting an absolute value so that the minimum damage will always be 1.

If you didn't understand any of that, basically defence is a percentage damage decrease. If you are a higher level than the thing attacking you, you will take even less damage. If you are attacking something that is a higher level then you, you will deal less damage. If you are attacking something a lower level than you, you will do more damage. Pretty straight forward.

The same calculations are used for energy damage, except STR is replaced with EPW and there's no EPW bonus. DEF is replaced with EDF.

On top of redoing damage/defence calculations, I've been going over all the skills in the game again to try and make them more appealing to use. This involves reworking effects and reworking skill costs. I'm pretty happy with all the skills right now but there will likely be some minor adjustments still. Sophia in particular has some cool new abilities added to her kit that she previously didn't have, giving her a bit more spice as a character.

So, that leaves us with the final, most important aspect of the game - enemy encounters. I've been needing to add these for a long time but just keep putting it off for one reason or another, and now it's literally all I have left. I was going to use random encounters (and I still am using them on the world map), but for location maps I've decided to add enemies that roam randomly as the way of initiating battles. This gives me a bit more control over how, when, and where you encounter enemies, and gives you more sense of control over how and when you encounter them as well. It's a win win.

Currently encounters will not respawn, once you clear an area they will be gone for good. There's a chance I'll change this in future. You'll keep getting encounters on the world map regardless.

In other news, here's a diagram I threw up in a few minutes to try and detail how damage interactions work:

There are 5 damage types (not including physical damage) that exist within the game. Fire, Ice, and Terra are the main three - these will be the most common. Most enemies will be weak to one of these 3. If an enemy is weak to ice, hitting it with terra damage is probably a bad idea. Similarly if something is weak to fire, hitting it with ice definitely won't make sense. It's almost a rock paper scissors system, with the exception of more planty based things being weak to fire as well.

And then you have energy and dark damage. These just uh... they exist. Everything is weak to both, but energy is weak to dark and nothing can beat dark damage. Most enemies won't be resistant to energy damage unless they're heavily attuned to it in some way - we're talking they're a spirit that is made out of it, or they come from the Cael (the energy plane). If something is energy based, their only real weakness is dark damage.

While we're talking about idiosyncrasies, terra damage is a little odd. It represents two things - nature based (plants), and more terrain based (rocks). The attacks the player can use fall into the terrain category, which make it more of a physical magic option. Things that are resistant to physical damage will also resist terra, and vice versa. However, nature based creatures will be resistant to it even when they're weak to physical damage. HOWEVER, nature based terra creatures will be weak to fire (for hopefully obvious reasons).

Since there's no water damage type, this leads to an oddity where water based creatures are either going to have to be resistant or weak to ice. These won't exist on a regular playthrough anyway so I'll find a way to deal with it later, but they'll probably just be treated as ice for the sake of simplicity. Or maybe they'll be weak to it, since ice freezes water. Who knows.

Anyway, that's it for today! See you again in another 6 years when the game is finally released.