SMJ question... Created 11 years ago2012-05-04 14:34:46 UTC by Rimrook

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.

1] Yes.
2] Yes. Pickups or expensive items.
3] Something that wouldn't make the game too easy at its latest stages. Balance it with your difficulty curve.
4] Depends on how rewarding/fun the process of the coin gathering would be. If it's plain backtracking to check every nook & cranny then no.
5] Only if I were to hit some sort of area that I can't progress through with the lives I currently have. And only if the grinding itself is fun.
6] Potions/powerups could replenish your HP. Lives could be more expensive items, letting you respawn where you died without having to restart the game.

Look into Terraria. Its HP system sounds a lot like what you're trying to create. In that game, you start off with 100 hitpoints. You can use potions to heal yourself and life crystals to increase your max HP to 400.

from what you're telling me here, I'm thinking your game is like stickman sam or metal slug, etc.

It looks like you are asking whether to have a cap for maximum health. Without having played your game I would have no idea exactly how high the cap should numerically be. However it looks like lives are fairly cheap, so I would assume the cap for max HP should be rather high. But there should definitely be a cap to max HP to prevent mindless grinding. It would definitely be sad for someone to go thru the game tanking all the damage with 9999999 HP, can you imagine?

Regards, pickups that increase the max HP would definitely be helpful to players and is very rewarding for explorers. You said that enemies can do as much as 5 damage per hit, I think, so 100 coins (no idea of how fast income goes) buys about 2-10 lives, or 6 on average. So, is this right about how you want your game so far?

Pretty much agree with all of Daubster's answers.

Yeah, Daub basically hit the nail on the head for me as well. I think the only times I ever grind for lives when I really need to. Also, there is the one level in Super Mario World where just a few (literally 3, IIRC) playthroughs can get you to the max of 99 lives through a super-long shell combo. But as long as you don't include something so game-breaking and simultaneously fun, grinding shouldn't be a problem.

If you do end up going with a health system, I hope that healing items will include foodstuffs. For some reason, I prefer them a lot to potions.

Agree with Daub's answers. I'd replace it with a full HP system as well since that's essentially what you were describing anyway, except with no recovery options like potions and so on. When I was reading your description I had to keep remembering to replace your use of the word "lives" with "HP" because it made much more sense that way