Dev Update - July 18th, 2018

Hey all, Vilsa here with a little deep dive on our progress on damage calculations before getting back to bug-fixing.

Damage Calculation

There's been some pretty significant changes under the hood to how damage is calculated in the new combat system. Instead of just flat attack values being dealt to HP, we're going to be going forward with a fairly simple system that pits the attacker's power against the victim's defense. Basically how this works is as follows: 

base ability dmg x (power / defense)

This means that you'll be doing more damage than base to someone if your power is higher than their defense, and you'll be doing less damage than base if their defense is higher than your power. Fairly straightforward. 

This calculation also applies to collision damage, and flanking damage. So having a higher power means you're going to be dealing a lot more damage if you're strategic about your positioning.

Lust Damage

We've been trying a bunch of different methods for how we wanted to implement lust damage, and we've come up with a fairly simple solution. Lust damage is going to affect the HP of the target just like normal physical damage. Instead of using Physical Power and Physical Defense, lust damage will be calculated with the same formula, but using Lust Power and Lust Defense in place of their physical counterparts. This means that certain enemies will have high Physical Defense, but low Lust Defense, and vice versa. You're going to want to use the right abilities to burst certain enemies down faster. 

Certain lust abilities will lower Physical Defense, while certain physical abilities will lower Lust Defense. You'll want to combo the two types together to deal even more damage.

When going back and forth trying to find something that felt right, our major problems were that we wanted to make both Physical and Lust damage be viable on their own, but also interact with each other to combo together. If you had a physical damage dealer and a lust damage dealer both attacking the same target, we want them to be working together against the same HP bar instead of them attacking either lust HP or normal HP and making their combined effort only equal whichever bar hit 0 first.

We think that a system like this will allow for a lot of cool abilities that we can cook up, like an ability called Masochist that makes physical damage have to go through PhysDmg / LustDef instead of PhysDmg / PhysDef for example. You could use that on a character with high lust defense, and become a tank against both types of damage for a certain amount of turns.

It's a little hard to visualize, but we have the system working and you can see the difference in damage amount between Jewel's weak PhysDmg versus the target's high PhysDef (even with a crit) when she uses the basic attack, and Jewel's strong LustDmg versus the target's weak LustDef when she uses a lewd ability. Both attacks have a base ability dmg of 1, and are being modified by the damage calculations.

That's all we've got for now, time to get back to work. ♥

We'll see you next week on Wednesday for another Development Update!