Hello everyone! For this weeks update, I added something that is essential for gameplay: balancing the game’s difficulty level in a way that makes the experience challenging, yet fun. Since I’ve made enemies more numerous and stronger, there needed to be a way to help players live longer. With this in mind, I recently introduced the Health and Vitality System to the latest Crumbling World updates.

The Health System

Both the players and enemies are given a Health System that essentially controls whether they are currently alive or dead within the game. In practice, this system works in a pretty similar fashion for both players and enemies, with each given a certain number of life points. When either players or enemies take damage, the Health System subtracts the value of that damage from the overall number of life points. For enemies, the amount of damage that they take depends on the type of enemy that is damaged and the current level of the player.

For players, the amount of damage comes from the player’s chosen class and the number of attack points they currently have. If one chooses to do so, they can allow their player’s character to add more attack points, which therefore inflicts greater damage on enemies (this will be covered in more depth in a future blog post).

Enemies have a fixed number of life points, which means that once they are spawned they cannot be healed (i.e. they can only take on damage). On the other hand, players are able to heal themselves with heal points, which are represented by a heart icon within the game. These heal points are assigned random values, which can change depending on which part of a level a player is currently at.

The Vitality System

While I briefly introduced this concept in a previous post, I’d like to cover it with a bit more depth. The Vitality System is an exclusive attributes that only players can take advantage of throughout the game. This attribute allows the player to perform special actions, with each character class having their own specialties. For example, the Knight class can block attacks from enemies without losing life points, which may be a valuable approach for players that aren’t afraid to take on enemies directly. Vitality points are lost each time one of these special actions are performed, with players able to recover Vitality points in a number of ways. Depending on their preference, players can rest (or let their Vitality system recover) or grab Vitality points found throughout each level (which are represented by a face icon in the game).

The User Interface (UI)

The UI for Enemies is located below their feet, represented as a circle that only displays an enemy’s current Health System status. In other words, this UI represents the amount of life points that an enemy has remaining, and uses a gradient of colors ranging from green (i.e. full life) to red (i.e. almost defeated).

On the other hand, the UI for players is located within the the main UI of the game itself, in the upper left corner of the screen. Here, a player’s Health and Vitality Systems are displayed in a manner similar to that of their enemies, with the one change being that the Vitality System’s colors range from blue (i.e. full) to red (i.e. empty).

It is important to note that the Health and Vitality Systems each play an important role throughout the game, especially when it comes to balancing difficulty and skill growth. These features are certainly exciting, and I plan on expanding on more exciting additions to Crumbling World, such as the Leveling Up System, in future updates. If you’d like to say posted, you can check back here for more blog posts, or check out my Twitter and Instagram accounts. As always, thanks so much for checking out my content!