Warscale 97 - Shhhh... I'm hunting Wagons...

Hello everybody,
I'm dangerously close to my post 100 in this series. I really never imagined to reach this point... honestly, I imagined the game was going to be released by the post 50 or 60, poor inocent me.

This week the post is about dragons, you know, those tiny creatures which are the masterminds behind most plots, intrigues and arguments in almost any decent level RPG games. And honestly, there are few things more impressive to see than a fully grown and completely condescending red dragon staring at you like you are some kind of fly it found in his supper. Once your character is facing a wyrm you are not sure you will live or die in the ensuing battle, but you know your death will be glorious (smashed to a beating pulp or extra cryspy to a level KFC would be proud of).

Preparations
This magical beasts start small. In any fantasy book or literature you can see a dragon egg is not that large and one or two people are usually able to lift one. When a dragon hatches, the dragonette is not tiny but maybe the size of a small crocodile or maybe one of those small velociraptor-like dinosaurs which appeared in Jurassic Park and I forgot the name.

Dragons have no natural predators, unless you count treasure hunters which are usually opportunist PCs going for a quick buck. But dragons grow in magic and strength and after some 300 years or more, the small thingies turn into gargantuan monsters which are later hired by japanese studios and go by the artistic name of Gojira/Godzilla atracting legions of fans.

something I have always wondered how the heck in any world and RPG rules, is any level fighter going to stop a dragon. You know, two handed swords (even those huge final fantasy swords) are basically the same size as the pinkie nail of the dragon. To the dragon, such fighter looks like a cocroach (and not the large nasty ones... maybe those who looks like raisins at most). And the powerfull lighting bolt of a wizard is at most a bee sting for them.

I have to start with age progression for dragons. In Warscale Dragons are divided in 5 age categories as:
D W A L F
Hatchling 2 3 4 5 6
Drake 7 8 9 10 11
Adult 12 13 14 15 16
Ancient 17 18 19 20 21
Wyrm 22 23 24 25 25

The numbers in the table above arereferences to the spell level to bring one of this beasts into play. The letters stand for Death, Water, Air, Life and Fire respectively. And in this case, the now classic chromatic dragons are almost a perfect fit for Warscale with Black, White, Blue, Green and Red respectively.

Earth, has no dragons, but of course but I'm planning on metallic dragons, which are basically dragon constructs or golems.
And, if you notice the black dragon is the least pwerful of all, and that makes sense given Death will also have undead dragons.

So, now that the base dragon concept is set then I can proceed to building them.

Balancing stats
Up now, creating a creature was now that difficult. Get a monster from some book, imagine stats, calculate the level, simple.

But in this case the task was to add those 25 dragons to the game while not breakign any balance. Meaning, if you are summoning say, a level 12 dragon, that dragon should be balanced against other creatures.
So, I had to go back to the design board (Excel in this case) and do a full balance of all the creatures based on rules and a strict point system. That way a creature for a specific level will be worth its levels.

So, what this balancing means? Say you have two creatures, both with exactly the same attack and defense abilities, but one can fly and the other doesn't. In Warscale, a flying creature can attack the non-flying one but not the other way, so the flying creature is obviously in advantage. So, those creatures have different levels, but how much.

Say I want two level 3 creatures, but make one of them move faster or deal more damage, what should I sacrifice to still consider the creature a level 3? More speed, less life, maybe less attack?

Also, a level 3 Water creature is not the same as a level 3 Life creature. Both should reflect their elements. One will have more defense, the other more life. A fire creature will deal more damage, an Air creature will move faster.

So, I considered all those things for a long time, testing Excel formulas until I got a nice balance. So how to test this?

Creatures revisited
So, with the new stat system, I was able to adjust each creature alreasy in the game. Surprisingly enough, most creatures were quite accurate, some gained some attribute points, some lost them. In some cases the different was really large.
The problem with this is that after changing all the creatures, of course all my test cases went down. Almost every one failed as stats changed. So I had to revisit each one and fix it.
After all that work, I managed to add the first small black dragon to the game.

So many changes
The small black dragon got me into a lot of trouble. A long explanation will make you flee in panic so I will just mention some things I had to improve.

- I had to create a way to invoke spells in conical areas, which is great because now I have support for breath weapons in general.
- Change the spell system logic, this one was a major rework.
- Extensive use the stack system as the way to resolve events.
- A lot of refactoring and code cleanup.
- Support for specific types of damage.
- Support for acid areas and damage.
- Separate area selection and area of effect during spellasting. (This is a huge improvement).
- Fixes on cursors and areas during gameplay.

The final result was this:


The big problem here is that I decided to start with the black dragon and, of course, the thing is black, over a black death card... so you see almost nothing. If anyone would like to help me creating a more impressive black dragon texture, please send me a mail.

This is the image for the nice little family.

Now the Wyrm is not there for a simple reason. It costs 22 mana to summon, but the mana limit is 20 and I still haven't added an item to increase the mana pool limit so, it will be unsummonable for now.

Plan for this week
So with black dragons in place, now I can try the other dragons and more support for other types of damage and damage effects.
Also, with dragons in place, I need to improve the single player game. I guess the bear and the skeleton were not enough. Dragons make for way better opponents.


Nothing else.

Luck with your projects!

Guimo