Healer abilities and Creature moves

One thing I've enjoyed working on lately has been coming up with creature moves for our game!

The main rule we have here is that they can't in any way heal creatures as that's of course something reserved for our healers/trainers, but other than that we've been going quite wild in things they can do. Especially since the game is created from scratch, even the craziest ideas can be implemented and after some testing make sure that they are working as intended!

I wanted to take some time to discuss some of them here in this post to give you an idea of what you can expect!

For those of you completely new to @holozing, it'll be a turn based game where trainers have healing abilities and creatures have damage dealing abilities. Healers can also do abilities that buff their friendly creatures while creatures can do abilities that place debuffs on enemy creatures (although some times buffs as well*).

For instance, let's take one of our special healing abilities that all Ocean classes will learn early on: Healing Rain. This ability makes it rain on your side of the arena and at the start of the turn it will heal your creature for base +50 Health Points.

Let's get into some specifics with this healing ability. Base +50 HP means that the minimum amount it will heal a creature is +50 HP considering no status effects on your creature. If your healer has additional + Healing Power, this affects the base healing amount, for instance if you have +10 Healing Power from some of your items equipped on your healer, this may increase the heals per turn to +55 rather than just +50.

This is also a "area heal" ability, and it will heal for a random amount of turns with the minimum being 3 and max being 5 starting from next turn since it only heals at the beginning of a turn. So after casting this heal, nothing else happens that turn, but once the next turn starts, before creatures have made their moves (apart from some speed-boosted moves), Healing Rain will heal your creature +50 HP before creatures make their moves.

The way this healing ability is special is that it also heals your next creatures as long as it's still active, while active your current creatures in the arena will receive a "buff" icon that let's them know they'll get healed and for how many turns are left of that to make it easy for players to keep track of their own buffs as to not needlessly cast another healing rain while one is active, etc. It also gives you an advantage in the events where you want to save one creature from fainting by switching in another one, since switching will cost you 1 turn and usually also happens before enemy creature gets to do their move that turn, this means that when you take out your new creature - enemy creature will attack it but then right as the new turn begins you get a heal potentially back to full health from healing rain!

As you can see, already at the lower levels the way healing abilities will work will give players some strategies to work with and that's kind of the thought process we've been working on to make creature moves similar as well. This'll give players who have more experience with the game and learn what all abilities do and how they work exactly an edge!

Buff and debuff icons will look like this in-game:

Upon mouse-over or on mobile clicking on them, this text will appear to give players more info on what the buff or debuff does:

So for Healing Rain, this would have a different icon respectful to the ability and the number + t basically means how many turns are left of the buff or debuff being active! With the example above meaning that for another 2 turns the enemy creature will deal 15% less damage.

Ever since we've implemented our hybrid creature move logic into the game, we've also been experimenting with moves that partially do normal/physical damage and partially special type damage, as example: Fire Punch. This move will do 60% normal-type/physical damage while 40% of its damage output will be of fire-type, depending on the type of creature you're fighting, 40% of the special damage will either do less or normal or increased damage to it.

We have also been experimenting with "stacks" making things easier to understand for players using the buff and debuff icons, for instance our Grass-type creature move "Sap" will increase the level of defense it lowers of the enemy creature per turn. Starting off at -5%, then increasing 5% per turn up until turn 3 at a max -15% defense, stay there for 2 turns then gradually decrease again at 5% intervals. To make this easier to understand for players, the debuff icon on mouseover would just say "decreases creatures defense by 5%" but then inside the icon you'd see the number of stacks this debuff has gone up with, in this case at max efficiency you'd have it show the number "3" meaning that there's 3x -5% defense debuffs active on the enemy creature which is when you should use your biggest damage dealing moves for max output!

Anyway, as we're working on more special moves and playing around with what they'll do, from decreasing enemy creature's speed, defense, attack, crit chance, etc, it's been a lot of fun coming up with things that may seem quite complicated but are made possible as everything is created from scratch and we can implement them.

The fun part will be to balance them all so none of them is too unfair in comparison with which creature uses them along with a healer, their synergies and resistances in the mix, etc.

Lots of things still to do and the pace has been decent lately but we're definitely looking forward to releasing an alpha here soon as getting more opinions from testers will help speed things along and make the game even more fun for the beta release!

Thanks for reading, the screenshots above are taken directly from the game, btw. We still haven't created a Holozing specific UI for the game yet but that's definitely something we wanna do before beta release!

Banner created by @julsdraws, sending some beneficiaries that way!