Discussing some recent game logic decisions

Many old-timers here may know that I'm a gamer at heart, I've shared gameplay videos on @threespeak and in the Hive Gaming community at times and a few years ago when I was in a better position I also streamed quite a bit on Hive using @vimm and the shall not be named dlive platform.

While gaming may seem odd for someone in their mid-thirties to actively do, or at least would have seemed a lot more odd a decade ago, we've been seeing that shift change quite a bit lately and it becoming the norm in many people's lives. It being a way to pass time, relax or just enjoy yourself while making that brain and hand-to-eye coordination get some work done. I remember it wasn't too long ago when e-sports were the butt of the joke in many discussions yet here we are now with some of the big ones like DOTA, League of Legends, CS2 and many more having millions of viewers and respectively having billions of revenue being generated. Times sure have changed but one thing that hasn't changed is where the value keeps going. Anyway, not going to get into that now as this post won't be about "web3" tokenomics, just wanted to give you an insight of my experience as a gamer. Growing up with gameboy color, super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, game boy advanced, PlayStation 2, PC, PC, PC, laptop, PC, laptop, PC - there's been quite a lot of games going through my brain over time.

While the idea for holozing is quite old, I'm happy I was managed to get it started when I did as best time to launch it is always yesterday! Had I for instance waited for Hive to do better and be in a "safer" zone the project would be way further behind now and who knows we may not have gotten as lucky with the artists and gamedev's at "pumpier" times as their demand goes up over time and they all have limited time throughout the day. Thus I'm quite happy with the way things are standing at this time.

One thing that needs to be mentioned though, as the founder and game designer, I'm just a gamer, some of the algo's and charts portraying the game that @luckyblame has created go way over my head even though I know what they do. Similarly there's some aspects of the game that I wasn't 100% sure yet as the dynamic between healer and creature is quite unique in turn based games.

This meant that we had to contact a professional to take a look at the whole thing and make sure the foundation will be solid, both to stand out enough from other games - both web2 and web3 - and to make sure the game doesn't get dull/boring while making sure the heals are useful in battles.

I spoke to a couple of them, one thing many pointed out was that in other similar games they have stats for certain things that give the balancing more leeway, some of you may know these other games and the stats I'm about to mention as "special attack" and "special defense". I.e. there's physical attacks/normal type attacks and then special type attacks that don't care much about the Attack and Defense stats but mainly look at the Special ones to determine the outcome of the creature move.

We decided to go another way here instead and rather give moves unique properties. This means that we will keep the Attack, Defense, Agility and HP as the main 4 stats as is and rather tweak creature moves to be partial. Before I get further into this, here's some examples of how the game logic is laid out at this time, though be aware that this may be adjusted and change as we balance the game in closed alpha soon.

There'll be more "effective" moves based on creature types, then there'll be "neutral" effectiveness moves and then "less effective" moves. This basically means that different creature types counter each other, a fire type creature is stronger vs a grass type creature, a water type creature counters fire instead, etc. These are all quite common logics used in many games. However in many of those games when a stronger type creature does a "special" attack like let's say "Fire Blast" on a grass-type creature, it will most of the time at high-end pvp battles one-hit-KO the other creature and do twice as much damage as it would do on neutral effectiveness types. This wasn't the way we wanted to go as it'd make healers quite pointless if everyone constantly focused on stacking their team with 1-hit-KO'ers.

Our effectiveness scale goes from 0.75x-1.5x instead at this time and creatures usually have a lot more HP compared to other games leaving room for multiple effective attacks before a weaker type'd creature gets KO'd. Furthermore, rather than focusing on special attack and defense we will have moves that reflect on the damage output instead. For instance, if we have a "fire ball" move, it'll be 100% "special", i.e. 100% a fire-type move, but if Infurno then also learns a move called "Fire Kick", we will be adjusting the weight on how much of that move is normal/phyiscal type damage and how much is fire damage.

This means that in terms of effectiveness, hybrid moves will only give partial effectiveness against other creatures, so you can imagine Fire Kick would take a creatures 100 Attack stat in the equation, the moves base damage, then check how hybrid the move is, let's for instance say 50/50% with a base 80 damage, only 140 damage will be normal/physical while the other 40 will be "special". So for the calculation you'll have a creature do 140 physical damage that'll take into consideration our range parameter and enemy creatures defense to reduce the output while the extra 40 fire damage will take into consideration the defense while also checking type vs type counter if it should be very effective, neutral or less effective.

We believe this will be a nice way to move forward while leaving a lot of room for balancing in the game and restricting which creatures can learn which moves or can be taught which moves if they don't learn it by themselves.

As some of you who've been following @holozing for a while now know, the leveling in the PvE side of the game will alter the way your stats go up. For instance, to maximize the amount of stats you can gain upon a level up, your creature will have to battle creatures of the counter type. This means that my Infurno which is a fire-type creature will have to battle water-type or ground-type creatures to make sure it gains as high stats as possible upon level up. "Good things don't come easy". While this isn't meant to make the leveling experience hell for casual players, it won't be as punishing not to play this way but quite rewarding if you do. Thus creatures that are of a certain average rarity in stats at lower levels will find themselves gaining rarity over the levels while those who always pick the easy fights might lose an average rarity if they were at a higher rarity to begin with.

With this in mind and our level scaling - where creatures you encounter will for that battle always be of a level to match the level of creatures in your team to avoid "easy fights that award no xp" while making each encounter cost healers either some HP of the creatures or mana of healers/or potions from getting that HP back up.

Alright, so the last thing I wanted to bring up in this post which might come as a refresher to some of you reading about how the battles work, was the thing that were discussed with the professional game designer. They also left us a couple of aces to have in our sleeve in case things didn't end up the way we planned it, but I'll keep those a secret for now and go into resistances.

As you can imagine, PvE will be quite difficult for the average person attempting to maximize their stat gain on level-ups, and as we get deeper into the beta and more encounters are made available for players they'll want to level creatures faster thus play more which will start costing them resources in terms of ability moves for creatures and healers. Creature moves will for instance have their own rarity, but this rarity will only affect how many moves they can do before they need a rest/food. Let's take "Fire Kick" as the example above for instance, at green rarity this may only give you a total of 6 uses, so once you've used Fire Kick 6 times that creature will have to rely on using different moves until it gets some rest upon which the ability points of moves regenerate. The same goes for healer abilities, you may find yourself with a ton of mana after drinking potions and using elixirs, but if there are no "Aqua Pulse" ability points left then you won't be able to do much unless you rest.

Before we get into resistances, this part of the solution the consultant provided reminded me a lot of a game I used to play a lot in the past: world of warcraft. They split PvE and PvP up in a way because the items and stats in PvE would end up one-shotting creatures or "mobs" as they call it, thus when you got into the battlegrounds with the same items and same health it'd be a "first shoot wins" kind of game where players would get one-shotted from a few abilities/moves by other players so they introduced a stat specifically for PvP called Resilience (it may have changed name over time). All this did was basically reduce incoming damage based on how much resilience you had to make PvP fights last longer and depend more on tactics and strategy rather than who's faster or who has their cooldowns up to do the big damage output abilities first.

Thus his idea was that for PvE, the creature with a healer, mainly players, would also gain an extra protection layer compared to wild creatures without healers. This was a pretty cool idea as I told him we already have some synergies implemented where the Nature healer would for instance have different perks if they were healing a grass-type or bug-type creature up. All in all he was quite impressed with the way we've set up the game and how complex it already was considering it's not even out in alpha yet so that was nice to hear. So resistances or what we would call "Healer Auras" would give the creatures additional protection when it came to PvE, as most players would opt for the harder counter-type battles to gain max stats so this would be a welcomed bonus and for PvP it'd give special type moves some extra resistance without having to implement special attack and defense.

We haven't even discussed critical hit chance and damage output of moves yet and since that's definitely something we want in the game, as mentioned we have to make sure creatures that aren't tanky to begin with can't get one-shotted but have to rely more on a strategic gameplay between creature and healer in a team to defeat the opposing one. As you can imagine, doing special type moves that would be 1.5x effective and then on top of it also gaining a critical strike hit on a move would get them another 1.5x increase so we could quickly reach that one-shot-KO barrier we want to avoid. Healer Aura's would come in handy here however as aside from different synergies with heals and creatures of a certain type they could also provide resistances and different synergies so healers would have something in common with all types, thus you wouldn't always face nature healers full of grass and bug type creatures only for the healing synergy but a mix of all kinds to bring more variables to the PvP battles and surprises.

All in all I'm quite excited to get to balancing all of this and finding those sweet spots that'll make the game fun for both casual and competitive players!

While we will definitely have other "hidden stats" behind the main 4 stats, they won't necessarily be tied to them to for instance always grow linearly with them. To focus on Agility for instance, it'll give the creature a crit chance as well as determine its speed, i.e. who will go first when a turn starts while also providing a dodge chance for the creature. You may think that this'll be too many different perks for one stat but we also have a lot of other similar hidden stats in mind for the other ones.

A lot to look forward to for those who've been waiting to play and crunch some numbers once they can access their healers and creatures into battle! I think I'll call it a day for now on this post even though I could probably go for another hour. :D

Thanks for reading, banner is a new artwork created by @craizzus that we're replacing on the homepage to be displayed! Let me know what you think of it and if you notice something cool about it! ;)