Sui Generis Post-funding Update #22: Stats and Combat AI

A new post-funding update has gone live for Sui Generis, which covers item and character stats and combat AI, in preparation for the upcoming gameplay video. Here’s a snippet:

Item and character stats

Stats must play an important role in the game but player skill, action gameplay and physics are already playing a huge role. We want to retain the skill element and the fluidity of the combat, stats must interact seamlessly with this process and give advancement and loot a good purpose. The effect of stats compared to many other RPGs is quite small, you will never be 10 times as strong or do 100 times more damage, but that extra speed or force does make all the difference.

It’s taken us some time to design and test a stat system that would work well. Weapons in particular are tricky because their shape and size alone have a huge impact on gameplay and character animations. Just the distribution of the mass of a weapon (this is accurate and based on the 3D mesh and can also be tweaked) can completely change how a character effectively wields it. We need to use the weapon’s inherent physical qualities and allow them to interact with character skills and physique realistically, we also need to provide the player with an intuitive yet accurate overview of a weapon’s qualities. We think the fact that every weapon feels and plays differently is great. We’re thrilled with what we’ve come up with and you’ll be able to see all this in game.

We’ve now got almost all our weapon types implemented with the notable addition of pole weapons. After all, what’s an RPG without halberds? We’re having to redesign all our animations yet again as we’ve made some changes to accommodate the effects of weapon and character statistics interacting with them. We’ve also added some new manoeuvres such as thrusts and more elegant parries which were previously entirely procedural.

We’ve been adding a lot of polish to the combat mechanics and made a huge number of improvements that show both in gameplay and visual realism, we feel we’re rapidly approaching completion here and damn is it good. We have always firmly believed the combat was exceptionally fun and to this day we become excited every time we play, but with the latest improvements it’s really shaping up to be breathtaking.