HANDZ – Week 4

Unfortunately yesterday I forgot my drive with the project in the studio and I won’t be able to show you the progress I made. But I can talk about it!

Classes

In the last devlog I mentioned my interest in adding a class system, so in the past weeks I worked pretty much on that. Now you can choose between 3 different classes: Tank, rogue and warrior, each with different buffs and abilities. I made this decision to improve the replayability of the game. With the implementation of classes I also managed to simplify the leveling system. With the old one you had to choose between 2 upgrades each time you leveled up but now you will just get more health and stamina since the characters will have different attributes by default.

As for the abilities, I’m trying to build them as defensive as possible, so when you have the weaker element you have something to actually defend yourself with. Abilities have a recharge timer that resets each time you use them.

Right now I’m testing the tank ability which consists in a shockwave that pushes away the enemy and destroys all projectiles in a certain range. As you can see this is pretty much totally defensive. I’m also thinking about implementing a abilities unlocking system, where you have the chance to unlock different abilities after some levels or so.

Visual aids

To prepare the prototype for testing I also started adding some visual aids that will help players better understand what’s going on on the viewport. For instance when you receive damage your controller will vibrate and you character will turn red for a moment. A similar thing happens when you level up. In this case you character will turn blue for a brief moment.

In the next weeks I’ll keep working on the class system and general balancing, which is not gonna be easy since I’ve never done something like it.