As many of you know, I'm developing on
Super Matt Jordan and I've hit a really bad indecision.
It's kinda important because it deals with the player's health.
As it stands, the player has lives (health actually) and starts with 40. He can lose any amount of health from 1 to probably no higher than 5. The player also whores coins gathered from the many things he does. Coins are in unlimited supply to the player as enemies will drop them. The player can buy life from the town's shop.
Its a weird hybrid setup because its in between being Mario-style lives, acting more like "Hits" and actual RPG stat style HP. As it is right now anyway.
Also, there is no maximum. With enough money, the player can buy 999999999 lives.
Lives can be bought like so:
10 lives for 100 coins.
20 lives for 175 coins
30 lives for 250 coins.
Things to consider is the style of the game. It is a platformer-shooter (aka Run & Gun). The player gets hit a lot. The difficulty is kinda high by default because of the features. It's not remotely an RPG game so there are no experience points or leveling. There are many pickups already in the game and I like hiding them. I DO have 1 spot left on the Continue Game screen do display the number of life pickups since I've centralized the save point.
So the questions that remain:
1] Should there be a maximum for the lives?
2] Should the maximum be increased by pickups?
3] How high should the maximum go with all pickups obtained?
4] How susceptible to grinding for lives are you?
5] Would you grind for lives often?
6] If the system was set to a full HP system, How do you think the system should change?
Also, I value this community's say on stuff. You guys play a lot more games than I do and there might be something I'm missing.
If you have any question or suggestions, let me know.