HTD Day 9

Last week we talked a bit about character creation so this week let's talk about character stats.

So since this is part RPG and part TD we of course have to give the characters some attributes that increase and make your character stronger. We decided to go along with the traditional strength, stamina, etc stats because everyone is familiar with them and they work well. However, the actual affect of each stat tends to vary from game to game but they usually follow a general idea. We'll be doing the same in HTD.

Here are what we have as the Primary stats:


 * Strength (STR) - Increases Physical Damage
 * Stamina (STA) - Increases Health Points
 * Agility (AGI) - Increases Speed
 * Dexterity (DEX) - Increases Skill
 * Intelligence (INT) - Increases Magical Damage

Pretty straight forward however something to keep in mind is that Magical Damage does not refer to elemental damage. Physical Damage covers the Physical side of the elemental skills while Magical Damage covers the Magical side of the elemental skills.

You might be asking, what does Speed and Skill do? For that we have the Secondary stats:

General:


 * Health Points (HP) - Your amount of life
 * Speed (SPD) - How fast you are at attacking and dodging
 * Skill (SKL) - How skilled you are at hitting and recovering

Attack:


 * Physical Power (PP) - How strong you are with physical weapons and skills
 * Magical Power (MP) - How strong you are with magical weapons and skills

Armor:


 * Physical Defense (FD) - How much physical damage you mitigate
 * Magical Defense (MD) - How much magical damage you mitigate

Attunements:
 * Fire Attunement (FA) - Your ability to control and resist Fire
 * Water Attunement (WA) - Your ability to control and resist Water
 * Nature Attunement (NA) - Your ability to control and resist Nature
 * Light Attunement (LA) - Your ability to control and resist Light
 * Shadow Attunement (SA) - Your ability to control and resist Shadow

Speed basically increases how fast you are dashing up to the enemy (if you're meleeing) then attacking and your projectile speed whether it's phyiscal or magical. Speed also increases your chance to dodge physical attacks. Skill increases your chance to get a critical hit, possibly increases your chance to hit with a physical attack (if we even have missing possible which we are still figuring out), and cooldown rate. If you look at the Skill stat you can see it's pretty awesome, but this is a stat that will be difficult to raise and won't have an abundance of it so don't think you'll be able to make a character with nearly 0 cooldown.. well if you managed to expect something to get nerfed :P

We changed our use of the word attunement, when we first mentioned it we referred to it as the element you initially picked that defined your character's starting point. We'll just call that your Native Element or something instead because the term is better used here. So your attunement stats are dual purpose. They represent both how strong you are with that element and your resistance against it.

Now here's where we add in some S&D flavor and change things up a bit. You won't be getting any actual attribute points to assign to these stats specifically. Instead these stats get raised by items and what we refer to as Class Skill Points (CSP) that you get every time you level up. CSPs are used to get class skills which follow a similar Physical/Magical set up with 5 categories on each side with skills for each. This is how you'll be choosing your class essentially and how you use these points will determine your Class Title (like Warrior, Paladin, Mage, etc). I won't be going into details about this yet but basically what happens is as you level up and build your character by assigning the elemental and class points you have earned your Class Title will change accordingly.

On the art side of things Kevin is working on the female animations and hair which you can find more of at Kevin's blog, KXN @ HTD. He also has a poll up on which hairstyle you guys would like to see first, be sure to put in your vote! Here's some sketches:

That's all for now, sorry for the end-of-day post but we were both busy most of the day.

As always let us know what you think and leave your feedback in the comments, thanks!

-Dan