Redemption Harem - Time, Survival, and Experience

Like the crafting system, if you've played the demo for Redemption Harem (and if you haven't, you can still find the demo in the collections or over on itch), you've run into some of the survival mechanics. Mostly managing Condition using the items you can craft, find, and buy.

You might also have noticed it's very easy to "break" these systems, as items are plentiful, shops buy basically everything, and it takes very little work to reach a point where you no longer have to work at managing Condition outside of capturing Nadua, who is probably overly difficult to manage until she's recovered and you let her go.

This is where the most changes are going to be occurring from the demo to v0.1, and it's lots of little systems that all relate to each other in varying ways, but it all ties back into the way I want the game to feel, so I'll try and cover as much of it as I can in this post, because I also want feedback on these systems as early as possible so I can adjust them before they're too set in place to make any significant changes.

First, general survival. This is pretty much unchanged from the demo; you'll still be managing both your and your party's Condition to prevent them from degrading, which you'll be able to do a number of different ways, some of which will have different effects based on the character. The change here you'll feel the most is that I want to make this system more forgiving, especially if you're leaving people at the fortress. This will take a lot of testing to dial in so it feels the way I want it to feel without being so easy you forget it exists, but this is the direction I'm approaching basically all of these other changes from.

Next, and probably the biggest change - I want to move to a "zero XP" progression system. And before you groan and/or say "screw that" and click away, at least jump to the bottom of the post and read the last paragraph. I want combat to feel like a necessary evil that you have to prepare yourself for rather than your primary means of progression. The core purpose of a Redeemer is to save people rather than kill monsters, so this fits the story, but I admit it will feel very weird if you go into the game expecting to gain levels as a result of violence. That's not to say there won't be any character progression, though - the stat boost exploration rewards will still exist, and you'll still be able to train (both by yourself and with party members) for stat boosts and new skills, and I'm working on a research mechanic to learn the simpler crafting recipes that may also provide stat boosts (though mostly as a consolation reward if there are no new recipes to discover). If you've ever played Dungeons & Dragons, think of this as milestone leveling. That system levels your characters based on reaching certain points in the story rather than earning experience, which discourages "murder hobo" behavior by moving the primary progression rewards into exploration and engagement. RH will go one step further, where instead of leveling up for one giant boost, you'll get lots of small boosts for different actions.

This ties pretty closely into enemy item drop rates. Enemies will have a much lower chance of dropping any given item compared to the demo, though (with a few exceptions) they'll still have 2-3 things that they can drop when defeated, and I'll be putting more work into implementing the capture system that only got partially implemented in the demo. That capture system will allow you to inflict the Bind ailment on enemies, and if a Bound enemy is the only enemy you're still fighting, you'll capture them. If the enemy is a monster or animal, you'll be able to butcher them for guaranteed items (which is likely to be affected by a "crafting" skill you can learn, awarding more items as your skill improves so you're not decimating the local wildlife population just to feed the fortress for one day). If they're not, capturing them will mean you can try to redeem them (like you can with Nadua in the demo), or may result in some other story beats.

Which brings us back to experience. Enemies having low drop rates but giving XP means you might feel like the answer to your struggles is to kill a massive pile of enemies, since even if you're not getting many items, you're still getting levels, and that makes killing that massive pile of enemies (plus the rest of the game) easier over time. That's the exact opposite of the conclusion I want you to arrive at, and taking away XP as well means you'll almost certainly come to the conclusion that combat isn't worth it, even if the way you got there isn't exactly frictionless. This will hopefully also make you think a little bit more about when you're expecting combat to happen and how to prepare for it when it's unavoidable, which loops in all of the crafting systems (especially Blodwerk injections) and feeds back into the enemy drop rates and the capture mechanic, which feeds back into the survival mechanics and it all kinda hinges on a combat overdose not turning you into an unstoppable killing machine.

The last piece of this is time. In the demo, certain actions just make it night, and once it's night, you can't do a bunch of stuff (or it's just a bad idea to do that stuff because enemy encounters are tougher at night). While this works, it's not particularly intuitive, and leaves all the survival actions you can take to be unlimited, so there's nothing stopping you from filling up the farm and spending forever training before you go do any jobs. That's retiree behavior, not main character monster hunter behavior, so now you'll have an hourglass that tells you how many half-hours you have left in the day, and a lot more actions will take time now that it's easier to measure. This includes crafting, traveling to new locations (not just hunt areas), training, research, and traveling within hunt areas. This way, I don't have to worry about balancing the game around you being able to make 50 swords in a day, then buy all your supplies with the silver you get from selling those swords, then spend the next week chasing girls around the fortress instead of doing the monster hunter thing. You're restricted to making one, maybe two swords in a day because they take a lot of time to make. On top of that, you no longer have to worry about stepping into the woods to find the single bit of grain or couple of berries you need for the recipe you wanted to cook, forgetting that it's night as soon as you leave, and not being able to cook the meal despite doing barely anything outside the fortress - that little "errand run" loop will now only take an hour or two of in-game time instead of all day, whether you go into a town to visit the shop or into a hunt area to forage it for yourself.

There's a lot of other smaller pieces that all come from and feed into this, but this is already a very long post, and I haven't even gotten to all of the above in making v0.1 yet, so we'll talk about all that another week.

I know the idea of not getting XP out of combat is anathema to a lot of people, especially in an RPG, so if you have any questions or concerns, please leave a comment. I'm more than open to explaining my thought process and exploring options, because this is very much a "if one part doesn't work the whole thing won't work" type of scenario. I'm currently very confident that everything does and will work, but I want you to share my confidence.