Something that many may not be aware of is that Holozing is a lot further in game logic and implementation than the visuals we plan on adding to it. Meaning most of the funding and attention has gone towards the prototype and soon a closed alpha version with a few invited gamers we hope will fine-tune and balance the starter creatures and healers up with us.
This will of course also mean they'll have to continue using some borrowed assets we're currently working with which is one of the main reasons it'll be a closed alpha to start with while we continue raising funds to create more game assets and implement them.
I wanted to discuss a little bit about one part of the game logic today, which may give you an overview of how far we've gotten in that regard and maybe something other gamers may enjoy reading and poking holes at.
Mana in Holozing will be scarce and important.
Your healer mana is scarce, you won't get to use your healing abilities like in other games where they are there all the time, this is done this way on purpose. Leveling creatures up is meant to be difficult and time-consuming because these assets are going to be used in many different ways in the future. Leveling them to optimize their stats is going to be even harder so don't expect to just endlessly grind through enemy creatures and one-hit KO'ing them like in other games you may have played. Not saying that will be impossible but while it may be fun now and then long term it won't be in your favor.
We are kind of getting ahead of ourselves there though because in the beta version of the game, encounters are going to be somewhat limited.
The gamification aspect of attempting to earn as high stat as possible upon a level up by using your creatures against creatures of a stronger type compared to yours is meant to eat at your mana. Abilities that may be quite strong and do a lot of damage even on creatures of the stronger type will also have less ability points. Luckily there'll be quite a few different items and consumables for you to use to recharge mana and ability points.
Now you may be thinking "Omg that's pay2win!" and we don't disagree that some aspects of it do help if you spend some money, at least to make things go faster in the game, but compared to other web2 games and potentially many other "web3" games in the space, all the proceeds go to the players as they're in charge of crafting these consumables at the cost of their own progression.
"My healers are all low on mana and they're recharging it slowly while I know there's a few monster encounters ahead of me, what should I do?"
Check the marketplace for mana potions for your healer's level, some players who don't need it for their healer are selling them for Zing. There may even be a few materials available there or from friends to allow you to craft the potions yourself if you have the skills.
"My healer and creature have ran out of ability points and I still wanna fight a couple more creatures before going to sleep and letting them rest, what should I do?"
Again, there may be ability potions or food and drinks in the marketplace, all crafted by other players in the ecosystem who will gladly take your zing in exchange so you can continue fighting and hunting rare creatures.
Before I go off track again and start going into professions, let's go back to some of the game logic I was meaning to discuss.
Let's say you have your Grass-type Raccoon (name tbd) in the battle and you're fighting a fire type creature, you're taking a lot of damage from its fire abilities and hope RNG will be in your favor next turn so that stupid AI picks a normal type attack to give you some time to breath and not have to spend your turn on healing but to attack instead. You bring the enemy creature down to 50% but decide to not continue because your mana is low so you switch your Grass-type Raccoon with a different monster in your inventory, this one a fire type as well making it an even "fight fire with fire" battle.
The game is implemented to record and save the data of the previous creatures fight and influence on the battle, i.e. it will record that Grass-type Raccoon did 50% of the damage on Fire-type, meaning weak vs strong type battle. Now you're battling with your fire-type creature and it's not taking as much damage so you can finish it off without needing to spend more mana on healing, the battle is over, the monster is defeated.
What happens now is that the game assigns XP to your creatures and healer, your creatures will get different xp based on what creature types were used vs the enemy creature. In this example, the grass-type creature is going to get more XP than the fire-type creature (even though they both did 50% damage on the enemy creature) and more importantly, it will get points based on the matchup. Weak vs strong gets the highest point while neutral types (the type is not weaker nor stronger than the other type) and strong vs weak gets the lowest points.
Okay, so what happens during level up exactly?
The points mentioned above aren't just regular points that add up to something, they'll be unique points. Let's call one of them 1vsS-50% which refers to the example above of it having done 50% of the damage on a weak vs strong type matchup while another one could be called 1vsN-50% for the other creature that was in a neutral matchup.
These points will combine to give you a roll chance on the stat gain you receive when you level up.
Let's say it took 10 battles for your creature to level up from lvl 10 to level 11, your creature did 100% of the damage each battle and each battle was vs a stronger type creature: 10x 1vsS 100%. Your creature will have (potentially(not fully decided yet)) a 100% chance to get the highest amount of stat gain during level-up. If its Attack stat at level 10 was at 100, and the stat gain of Attack at level 11 is minimum 6 and max 12, it will gain 12 Attack making it a total of 112 Attack at level 11.
Now imagine a scenario where you fought a creature with a weaker type than yours on one of those 10 battles, this means that during level up you will have a 90% chance to get max stat increase and a 10% chance to get minimum due to that one battle you took an easier type on.
Changing creatures mid-battle is something we also don't want to discourage so healers can optimize their mana and strategies, the reason we decided XP gets shared based on damage done is to avoid players gaming the results of the creature they want to max out on stats. There won't be an "XP Share" item in our game. (:P)
For instance, if XP wasn't split up based on damage done but just evenly based on which creature was out in battle at one point in time or did at least a little damage, you would just have the creature with weak vs strong type out first, then change into a creature with strong vs weak type next (even if changing creatures costs you one round which would result in the second creature taking a hit by the enemy), then defeat the enemy creature easily and share XP gained with the first creature that did no damage that you're attempting to "boost". Instead, the first creature in our case would get no XP and no "level up points" but you just wasted some HP of the second creature for nothing switching between the two.
This is all still not set in stone and we're looking at open alpha to help fine-tune it all and potentially add more functionalities and math behind everything to both make the game fun but also rewarding for being consistent and taking the hard path forward when training your creatures. For PvP on the other hand, XP might still happen but points aren't assigned so that you can go all out on strategies and creature switching to win the battle as that's what is important there.
Healers on the other hand will get a combination of XP based on creature-type matchups that happened and if healing was used, compared to creatures, they won't get different stat gains upon level up but will have to rely on healing items they find, craft and have equipped. The XP they need to level up will be significantly higher than for creatures so users are incentivized to level up a few creatures along the way rather than only focusing on one for a healer and its roster.
Anyway, that's it for today, feel free to let me know what you think of our game logic in this regard so far and I'll try make another post about some other aspects of the battle and progression system over time. At least those we've somewhat decided on thus far and are certain to at least make the alpha. Like always though, we're more than happy to listen to the community and adjust things based on suggestions for improvements.
Images and banner were made with Midjourney for this post alone and don't reflect on the game.