Hammercalled Combat Revised, Part 2: Attack Actions, Move Actions, and Reactions

Yesterday I talked about how Hammercalled was getting a simple-but-fulfilling action system, today I want to go into more detail about how each of those actions can be used in combat.

One quick thing to remember is that actions can be used in any order, and can be used simultaneously, or split apart to different parts of the turn. This impacts my decisions in some of the defensive rules, since I want Hammercalled to be quick-playing and not get bogged down.

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Hammercalled Combat Revised, Part 1: The Action Economy and Initiative

I’ve gotten the idea that to get Hammercalled to the point that I want it to be at, I should probably break the development down into waves. The first wave of development is to focus on the gear and combat (the part of the game most currently developed, but also the most prone to needing a big overhaul.

When I started working on Hammercalled, I wanted a very complex combat system, but I’ve changed that to be more minimalist. I think that there are ways that I can still compete with and improve over equivalent market titles without falling foul of what I want to do here.

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Into the Breach Review & The Joys of Simple Combat

I got Into the Breach today. It’s a tactical strategy game with roleplaying/roguelite elements. I figured that it would be an especially good case study after yesterday’s article on designing combat systems for games, and I was not disappointed.

The whole game is quite charming, as one would expect from a title from the FTL developers, though I think I enjoy it more than I enjoyed FTL (which I loved certain elements of, but didn’t particularly find replayable or mind-blowing, merely competent and well-designed).

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Five Maxims for Designing Good Combat in Games

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about as velotha’s flock goes into product line expansion and maintenance and the core game is essentially finished is how to design a good combat system, not the least of which because Hammercalled needs one that works.

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Project Update: Combat and the ABACUS Large-Scale Dice Tester.

This week I’ve mostly been working on some combat stuff, both for social and physical combat, in Ostravia. I also learned the basics of PHP, which is related to some of my more recent work in Ostravia. Long story short, it’s time to get really into crunch mode on the combat mechanics so I’ll have something to showcase in the Kickstarter.

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Project Update: Ostravia Marches On

Continuing with Ostravia, we’ve seen some significant progress in terms of setting development, namely in that I’ve started to finally make Ostravia a tentative map. I’m not very good at cartography, so it isn’t pretty looking, but it’s sitting there and forming a basis for future progress. In short, not a lot of interest beyond a few musings; I’ve tried to have a couple proto-playtests but finals and the like have been messing with scheduling and they haven’t pulled through.

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Project Update: Combat and Initiative in Orchestra

Orchestra is really at heart an experimental game; I’m working with a system that has a fair deal of intentional quirks to see how it works; such as the probability curve-based system 2d20 core roll system, which means that there’s a number of things that I can take into account as a difference between Orchestra’s unique mechanics and some more mainstream mechanics such as linear dice or multiple dice. Continue reading “Project Update: Combat and Initiative in Orchestra”