The Witch Docta

So this week, we have the Witch Doctor.

He does an bit of voodoo, and knows a bit about medicine. I tried to avoid the dedicated healer roles in the game. I've never liked the tank / healer / dps trichotomy [wow, turns out I didn't make that word up... go me?]. It always struck me as a bit limiting and confining on a broad strategic level. You still could play the game that way, but you probably won't win fights quick enough to get the unlock.

The witch doctor is probably the closest class to a dedicated healer in the game. I'd have to check, but I think he's the only class with two heals in his moveset.

• The witch doctor carries around a staff, he can whirl it around and hit everyone around him. He's not the strongest, and you probably wouldn't really want him surrounded, but if he happens to be...
• He can cast a hex. This hits the enemy with a random condition.
  
• He can apply a healing balm to someone next to him. This is cheap and effective healing.
• The other heal is a healing prayer, this heals all of your allies in a certain area. Not so cheap healing.
  

Originally he was designed with more focus on the voodoo aspects - he had a summonable voodoo doll. I had cut the Surgeon, which was another somewhat dedicated healer, and I was trying to cut down on summons where possible, so he lost his voodoo doll and gained the healing balm.

Below the cut, I spend too long talking about some very minor design decisions.




*snip snip*

Had some more great ideas when I should have been sleeping. I'd been struggling with how to show character allegiance to the player. I'd toyed around with various flags, symbols, and such. None of those really worked too well. It was hard to check who was on your side at a glance. I mean, I hope you know which ones are yours, but maybe someone is watching you play? It feels neccessary. Anyway, the brilliant idea was to change the story. Story, what story?

Originally I was just going to say in the game description something like: "Build up a team of mercenaries to defeat the evil necromancers". And that was the story. That sentence. It wouldn't even appear in game, you'd just beat the necromancers and the credits would roll. Why do you need to fight other people along the way? I dunno.

What I could do was have every enemy "posessed" by the necromancer. They'll have an overlay around their head. This way, you "free" the enemies from being posessed, and they choose to join you. Stupid, but I feel it will help give players some motivation and sense ofaccomplishment. I do forget that other people don't obsess over strategy like I am wont to do.

I almost feel guilty putting that much context and build up just to say "I'm putting a filter in front of enemies faces." Almost.

Second idea. I had also been struggling with how to help players in game. I may have decided that a pixelpedia (in-game guide) might be a little too much work to ship in reasonable time. This introduced a problem however.

It would take all of 10 battles for someone to think some of the attacks are bugged. Some moves only affect allies, almost every attack can potentially hurt your own men, some attacks behave differently based on the target or casters buffs or conditions. It gets complicated quickly, and it's easy to feel like some decisions are buggy.

I could have made the attacks very sedate and limit their potential, but I really like the subtle attack affects. If all the attacks are just slight variations of range, damage, and cost, we've reduced it to a spreadsheet. I really want to reward players for experience, but there are no RPG elements. As they play with the classes more, they'll learn little strategies to help them out and win in situations they couldn't before. Let's take a look at some of the reasons there are some subtle side effects:

• You can in most cases use an attack on your own guy to inflict conditions on your men. You can use this to your advantage however. The poison condition will not end on it's own, but since each character can only have one condition, you can "overwrite" the poison with something else. Being blinded is better than being dead.
  
• There is one attack (might be a second one, I'll have to check) that drains health from the target to the caster. You can use this on your own guy when you have no other way to heal. It always regains a constant amount of health, so use it on a summonable minion close to death for a cheap health boost.
• Even if your blinded, attacks that move a character always move that character like normal. (Ok, this one was a bug, but I found it useful once, so it stays)

Again, I spend way too long building up something that is trivially easy to implement. What I will do instead of having a complete guide in game is have a lot of random tips that will appear on the title screen. The title screen doesn't have any options anymore, but I needed something there. Now it'll just be a "press start" title screen with a random hint at the bottom.

(Again, like multiplayer, I'll put the full in-game guide in a future version if the demand is there. Supposedly one of the massage games netted $60k, which gives me hope. And angers me immensely, but that's for later.)

Ok, so maybe those changes would have taken less time to code and test than to talk about, but they will have a significant effect on initial impression and learning curve.