I've decided to resume development of this project. I've been procrastinating because I really just don't want to do SDL development now that I've gotten comfy with Raylib.
Having played the current build quite a bit, I've identified some core weaknesses in the design that need addressing. I'll go over them one at a time and point out where I'd like to go in the months to come.
1. There's no emphasis on getting the player into danger zones.
Grasslands are about 50% of the map, by volume, and are reasonably safe to walk over. Mobs can chase you, but they don't generally stray too far from their preferred biomes, and they will get tired eventually and disengage. You have to explore the whole map to find the points of interest that hide essential upgrades, but early on players will want to farm weak enemies for money, because combat is too dangerous if you wander into tougher biomes. And really, the money you get from fighting tougher enemies isn't worth the risk early on because you only have one life.
The idea I came up with is to scatter caches around the map in semi-predictable areas, to encourage the player to wander through dangerous areas, but still avoid enemies. For example, ruined towns tend to spawn thieves (weak enemy) and marauders (tough enemy), and unless you have to pass through them, there's no reason to go in there. But I plan to put a money cache in most of them. I can do something similar in other biomes.
2. Food is fairly easy to come by. Water, however, isn't.
You have to maintain a supply of food and water in order to automatically heal wounds. If you run out of either, you stop healing. That's a death sentence unless you can avoid combat and find what you lack. The problem is that springs are the only source of clean water, and while springs show up on the map once you've discovered them, they are really small (one tile), and can be hard to spot. My intent was to have the player hang around the springs, staying near them until a new one is discovered. This allows a sort of "island hopping" strategy, where you explore an area around the spring, until you find a new one and move to it, repeating the process until you get enough flask upgrades to carry a bunch of water.
In practice, this didn't work out too well. I frequently ran low on water, and had to check my map and backtrack. And I guess it just got old quickly? I may adjust the rate of water consumption down about 25% across the board. I also plan to tint all the tiles near a spring blue, radiating outward a good distance, so you can "see" them from afar. That should help players home in on new ones.
3. Combat still lacks something
I'm kinda fascinated by "bump combat" where you bump into things to inflict damage. It's quick, easy, and you don't have to push buttons, or get into prolonged battles. Just walk into the enemy until someone dies, or one of you runs away. Which is cool, but I'd like to have interactivity of some sort. Maybe a button you can press at the right time to do a critical hit, or evade an attack. While that seems dangerously close to QTE-territory, which I utterly despise, I have seen it used to good effect in Xenoblade 1 and 2, so long as you make it something that helps the player when they succeed, rather than punishes them if they fail.
Overall, I feel like the project has shaped up nicely, and I'm proud of where things are, but I'm cognizant of just how much further I need to go. I'm tantalizingly close to something interesting. Just need to beat the damn thing into shape a bit longer
