General Mechanics

This area contains the main mechanics and a simple outlines of their rules, and how they are used to compose the general game.







Party Building

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Combat

The combat mechanic is the most active part of Artiforgers. All the player does when not battling, in the end is to improve his battling capabilities, which highlights the importance of really nailing this system and the designs of this system.
The combat happens between the player party, of up to 4 characters, and a set of up to 6 enemies at the same time.

Player Actions

During combat, these are the actions the player can take:
  • Select Targets: Selected targets are highlighted. Both allies and enemies can be selected. Selected targets are used as target for character's actions and items
  • Execute Character Actions: Every character in the party has 2 actions, one normal and one super action. The normal action cool down time is tracked independently of the super action cool down time. The super action cool down time is paused when the normal action hasn't cooled down yet. When executing the super action, the normal action cool down timer is reset, meaning the player cannot execute his super, then his normal without waiting.
  • Use Active Items: Throughout his playtime the player will find items that are of Active use. Each of those items have their effect on the battle field, such as healing, dealing heavy damage, debuffing, and others.

Winning/Losing Condition

The player wins when he has defeated all the enemies in the field. The player loses when the enemies defeat all of his party members. Optionally, some challenge scenario can have a time limit to win as well.

Character Actions

Each character has two actions, the Normal action and the Super action, already explained  here⁠ . A character action is an operation by the character that applies one or many Hits to any target in the current combat scene. Check the next section for context.
About the character's Super Action, while the character is executing it, they cannot be hit by any aggressive hit. The player can use this as a strategy to prevent the character from receiving a highly damaging blow from a power foe.

Hits & Hit Tags

A hit is a change that is about to happen to a target. A Hit has information of who created, who is the target, the damage dealt, the type of the damage, if it was critical or not, if the hit should apply any status effects to the target or not, and other useful data.
A Hit can also have tags, and they are used to categorize what kind of hit it is. One example of tag is a "Heal". When a hit with a "Heal" tag is applied to a target, instead of reducing its HP, it increases. Another case would be if a target has immunity against a specific type of damage, we can check through the tags and avoid applying the damage altogether.

Enemy Actions

Similar to the character's action, an enemy's action apply HITs to their target. They can heal, damage, apply bleeding, and more. What differs from the party characters' actions, is how enemies select their targets.
The strategy for enemies to selecting their targets is random, but weighted. Each time an enemy selects a party character as their targets, they calculate a pool of Aggro for the party. The higher the aggro of a character, the higher the chance of it being selected. As an example, in a party with 4 characters, A, B, C and D, with respectively, 11, 44, 15 and 30 of Aggro each, we would have a total pool of 100 Aggro points, which means they would have a chance of being selected as 11%, 44%, 15% and 30% respectively. Players can build aggro to skew the chance to enemies attacking their characters prioritizing their tank.
Now, for the enemies attack themselves, depending on the enemy, they can either have a constant attack pattern throughout their lifespan, or have attacks that change depending on a specific life threshold. For example, a boss could have more aggressive or more damaging attacks when they are below 30% HP.



Exploration

The exploration will be subdivided into levels, that the player can walk around and interact with elements of the environment, such as chest, enemies, other characters (NPCs), destructible elements, and interactive crafting benches (artiforges).
The player can open their party menu and manage their party members, dismissing a member.
The player can also open their inventory menu, throwing away items, and reorganizing their items between party characters.

Spawning/Entering a Level

The player's party joins a level through a door/entrance, located in any edge of the level. As soon as crossed, the player cannot go back through it.

Walking/Traversing

The controls are directional, using WASD.
The player controls each character party individually, one at a time. The character being controlled currently is called "Leading Character". Because the party is composed of up to four characters, the other characters are controlled by the computer.

Enemies

Enemies will loosely wander through the level, awaiting the player to come close enough. Then, the enemy starts following the player. As soon as a party either attacks the enemy, or gets attacked by one, a new battle starts. This means that for every level, the player can fight all of the enemies or try to avoid them.
Defeating enemies will earn the player some gold coins and possibly some loot.
Whenever a player joins a map, all the enemies for that level are already spawned and not new enemies will spawn for that level's duration, with the exception of enemies that spawns minions.

Entering Combat

Combat begins when either a character or an enemy gets hit. Enemies may apply some effect to the hit character when starting combat. Characters may also apply some effect to the hit enemies when starting a combat.
When there are many enemies together, they get pulled into the same combat instance, with up to 6 enemies at a time.

Character Exploration Actions

Each character, in addition to their combat actions, have an exploration action, that can either be a passive, or active skill. This action is supposed to provide support, utility, or be an attack during the exploration.
Some example Exploration Actions are:
  • Raise fire wall for a mage character
  • Loot radar for a Rogue kind of character
  • Shield to prevent attacks for a paladin/tank
  • Healing aura for a healer

Chests

There will be areas where chests can spawn in a level. Such chests will contain different pieces of equipment and/or gold coins, which the player can use in their characters or sell to a merchant, or even reforge it at an Artiforge.
Chests can be opened only once. The player will press a designated keybind to interact with elements of their surrounding.

Other Interactive Elements

Just like with the chests, the player interacts with all elements by pressing the designated interaction keybind. For the Merchant, or the Artiforge, interacting will bring up their respective menus.
For destructible elements, interacting will destroy them. Some of the destructible elements might contain loot.

Finishing the Level

At all levels, there are up to 3 exits, each pointing to a different next level. When traversing the exit, the player closes the current level and moves on to the next.
For opening an exit, the player must complete the exit's objective. Such objectives could be finding a specific item (such as key), eliminating X type of monster, solving a puzzle, spending gold, and more.

Level Encounters

There are many different level encounters, Here is the list:
  • Merchant: Player finds the merchant level and can see new offers by the merchant and potentially sell acquired loot.
  • Artiforge: The player can use the artiforge to forge his items into stronger version of themselves, given the forging condition is met (Have two identical copies of the item at the same level) (We can think of a different forging/crafting method)
  • Corrupted Artiforge: An artiforge found on the later stages of the game, where the player unlocks the final version of their equipment by consuming accumulated corrupted energy.
  • Original Fragment Trail: The player's party finds a living trail of the original fragment. When the characters bathe in the shining trail of the original artifact fragment, their life gets replenished by 70% of the maximum value.
  • Character Encounter: The player finds a new Artiforger, and may choose to add them to their party or not. If the party is full, the player must dismiss a member before accepting a new member.

Visually speaking all the levels are premade, but devoid of every interactive element. The level designer just specifies where certain kinds of enemies, chests, destructibles, and more may spawn. before the player enters a level, these items get generated. This mechanic ensures the player always find something relatively fresh every playthrough.



Equipment

General Description

Equipment are pieces of gear used by a character in the party that provides changes to the character attributes and actions, so the player have another degree of customization to their party and each of their characters play style.
Relics VS Accessories:
Both Relics and Accessories may provide changes to the character attributes and combat-values, but only relics may also provide an additional action to be triggered together with the character's normal and super action.
Equipment have 6 qualities (Tiers), ordered from weakest to strongest, as the following:
  • Tattered
  • Usual
  • Sturdy
  • Fabled
  • Exalted
  • Magnificent
The quality does not affect anything in-game other than being the prefix for the equipment (e.g.: Sturdy Crown of Thorns), but it should provide the player a general idea of the power level for that piece of gear. A same equipment should have a version of each quality, with attributes count and/or values increasing for every quality upgrade.
Another kind of change equipment may provide is Hit-Tag effects. For instance, for the "heal" tag, a specific change may have the heal apply over time instead of on a single hit.
Additionally, a equipment may have a required character level to be used.




Map

The map in Artiforgers Trials is semi generated. The geometry of the map and colliders are static, but the enemies, loot, and other interactive elements are generated during the gameplay.
Every interactive element should be already spawned and functional before the player actually joins the area.



Merchants

There will be different merchants, each with his different behavior/interactions. Perhaps some could sell only potions, or one always try to lowball players items.
As an Easter egg, we'll do ourselves as the merchants Grinning Face with Big Eyes


FaFabio Luis Gomes de Meneses Júnior
Add this content later in this page:

→ The player doesn't feel prepared to engage in battle
  • Stronger Enemies are guaranteed to drop better quality items
  • Player can permanently power up their unlocked characters after death if (X REASON + LORE)
  • Standalone "REST" areas with merchants