Character Progression

Apologies no vlog this week…

We’ve been full on with all kinds of stuff and preparing for the Christmas holiday. Although no visual progress, there is design and technical progress!

The past few days for me was juggling between game development and game design. And one concern that we wanted to address is character progression.

We envision Mahika to be a fast paced, top down, roguelike (or rogue-lite) game. And, adding too much things to tweak makes the game cumbersome to play. This is especially true when we added a long list of character attributes ala D&D game play.

So we ditched much of the complex stuff and left three (3) main character attributes.

Health ~ the attribute that keeps players alive in the game! Avoid getting hit and player survives the level 😁

Mana ~ the attribute that enables players to conjure spells and wield magic weapons. 😍

Stamina ~ the attribute to limit dash and run movement. A simple simulation of the real world 😊

We then focused on designing an easy but comprehensive skill progression. We feel that a solid skill progression will provide more depth to the game without overcomplicating stuff.

Here’s a sneak peak of the skill map we envision for Mahika.

Language Skill ~ The first skill and will be intrinsic to the character at the start of the game. Again, a simple simulation of the real world.

Language is one of the foundation for learning. We need to be able to read, write and talk to learn stuff.

In Mahika, the level of the language skill determines the character’s ability to learn other skills, including other nation or race’ written/spoken language.

Life Skills ~ Yep! we’re going all out in real world simulation! We’re going to add four (4) RPG player favorite skills: Farming, Fishing, Cooking and Merchant.

Magic Skills ~ Mahika won’t be Mahika without magic… We plan to add 10 major magic skill group to the game. We don’t know yet how many skill per group, but we already have a list to choose from.

It’s an ambitious list! And we know it’s a stretch to deliver all at once, so we’re targeting piecemeal updates during early access.

Players won’t get all the magic and life skills at start. They need to unlock non intrinsic skills to use them.

But we’ll give the player three (3) intrinsic skills at the start ~ The language skill and two (2) magic skills.

Now the first magic skill will be determined by the Sage Class of the character. And the other skill, life or magic, will be selected by the player.

Any intrinsic skills will get a mastery boost, meaning, players will have the opportunity to level up the intrinsic skills to mastery level. All other skills will max out to expert level.

To unlock non intrinsic skills, the player needs to read books or learn the skill from NPC masters 🤩

And that’s how we envision the character progression!

Thanks for reading.

Stay safe and always have fun!