Today was mostly a polish and debugging day, so nothing major to report (yet). However the newest addition to the engine is damage types, which fall into the tried-and-true categories of slashing, bludgeoning, piercing, and magical.
I should probably note now that Shadowdawn games (at least, the Lexis-based Shadowdawn games like this one) do not follow the traditional elemental influences on magic that almost every RPG uses. That is not to say that you won’t have fire or ice-based attacks, but the rules are entirely different since elemental forces like these just simply do not dominate the world… at least until a certain point in time. All magic is runic based, drawn from the four great Prisms and fragments of crystal that have been irradiated with their power (such as the Rune of Life that Arashi starts with), having a “neutral” element in traditional terms. What this really means in game terms is that any change in magic’s element is almost always functional rather than an elemental-weakness type affair, and I really wish that this game was the full RPG Shadowdawn because I really love the magic system I have designed and Arashi is not quite a technomancer to really show it off.
Back to the topic at hand, by adding damage types to attacks, it allows NPCs and the player to focus their defensive equipment and attributes (Agility has a bonus to defend against piercing attacks, while Vitality helps defend against bludgeoning, for example) if they so choose. For people who don’t want to bother or get overwhelmed with stats, I don’t really want to penalize people for playing with straightforward defense so I most likely won’t be using damage-type weaknesses (it also isn’t very fair, since Arashi can only use slash attacks). Furthermore, as the screenshot above shows, there is a special shiny effect that has been added that cues visually and aurally the damage type of the attack (and the simple fact it connected). Really it’s just for flavor, but these kinds of visual cues are also important for immersion whether we realize it or not. I am not sure that my target audience is the sort that would rather see excessive blood spurts so I figured it was safer going with the fighting game effect influence.
