MENACE - Dev Diary #41

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Dev diary #41 for MENACE:

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Dev Diary #41: Stats And Attributes

Today, we are diving into the last big rework we do before the Early Access in February! So far, all Squad Leaders and Pilots have had the same stats, which is very unusual for any kind of RPG-like game, and indeed, it was always planned that all characters would have different stats.

However, we did not just change stats around; we added a whole new category called "Attributes," and they increase through the game in true RPG fashion. Let's dive in!

Truly Distinct Characters
If you read the last dev diary about the perk tree rework, you already saw that we want to make sure all characters are not only different in personality and looks but also offer different playstyles and upgrade paths, ensuring maximum variety and replayability throughout the game.

It also makes sense from a lore perspective, as some characters are trained and experienced soldiers or mercenaries, while others might come from rank-and-file troops or even lack any actual military training.

Stats in this case are combat-relevant values: Action Points, Discipline, Hitpoints, and Accuracy. We quickly realized that just giving them different stats and calling it a day would not work.

First of all, these are not enough to properly differentiate characters. With around 26 characters planned in total, swapping around four stats would simply not cut it, so we had to create more values we can leverage to make the characters actually different. In true RPG fashion, we took a step back and added a whole bunch of attributes for each character:

Attributes
Like many other RPGs, we decided to go the classical route and have each character have a set of attributes from which the combat stats are then derived. To ensure players can understand differences between characters more easily, all of these Attributes are leveled to 100, meaning that the minimum is 0 and the maximum is 100.

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