Taival Mechanics #5: Player Energy System
Do you feel overwhelmed in an RPG game by watching your stamina bar, while trying to maintain mana with potions and keep combo bars up simultaneously? Fear no more, Taival has none of those!
We've created a single bar of energy, Virta, which is used to power up everything from crossbows, staves, abilities to heavy strikes from an axe. Sprinting, rolling and other movement abilities use up Virta too, creating gameplay situations where overusing Virta may make it difficult to escape a tight situation.
Now, we don't want watered down gameplay either. The idea behind this decision is to move the combat mechanics to the actual game world. Instead of basing the combat on watching the UI for meters and bars, we want the players to experience the gameplay by focusing on their character, surroundings and the gameplay itself. This allows for less time spent watching moving images, and more time spent slaying foes and exploring the world!
In an ideal situation, the players would learn a "muscle memory" of how their weapons and abilities of choice affect their Virta. By having a single bar this is possible, and it makes it possible to chain elements to each other that rarely synergize with each other in similar games. For example, you can use up a heavy swing from a battle axe, dodge an attack by rolling, and drop an ice spell to finish things off, using up a full bar of Virta. Of course, the consumption of Virta is always visible on the UI right below player health when needed!
Virta is the pure energy of Taival itself. As the lore goes, the world of Taival is also a living entity, which has called the adventurers to aid its worsening condition. During this summoning the players gain new powers from Taival, including Virta and the shapeshifting companion we named Henki.
The word for power or current in Finnish is coincidentally enough "virta". Using finnish words as an inspiration for lore has proven to create quite unique names!
What do you think of this mechanic? Do you have any ideas of how you could extend or improve this?
Comments (2)
This is great, it helps big time with having multiple weapon classes like Taival does so you don’t need to be looking at different stamina/mana bars. You can also add a screen effects for low Virta as well to further help players not watch their resource bars during a fight. It also helps with items stats (if you guys add them). Instead of having gear sets that add stamina be completely useless for let’s say, wands/staffs/etc. you can make them add Virta instead and be useful for any weapon class. The biggest issue you guys will be fighting with though is the consumptions. If an ability/action costs too much Virta but doesn’t have enough impact, plays will most likely just straight up ignore it. And if it’s too cheap for a very impactful ability/action, plays will just use that one action and not experiment with builds as much. Awesome idea all around though and it lays a good framework for future additions.
Thanks a lot for your thoughts! That's a really good point with the stats, this way you won't be locked to certain type of armor while making most other equipment obsolete when using a certain weapon. The screen effect is definitely needed, great idea! You're right about the consumption part, we really need to balance it well to give enough payoff for high Virta consumption abilities. That's gonna take a lot of trial and error and playtesting for feedback, but it's definitely possible!