Skills

A major UI element that was missing from my first post—the player GUI—is now in the game. 

It has three components: a character portrait, a health bar, and an energy bar. Health is spent when you get hurt and energy is spent when you exert yourself physically. Health is also spent when you try to spend energy, but don't have any available energy to spend!

Most actions in the game will have an associated skill. Lifting is the only one in the game at the moment, but more will come. 

The skill system I'm using is a somewhat volatile one—which is fitting considering my goals for the game (see previous post). It's a simple system—a skill check (number) is compared with an associated player skill (also a number). In the case of lifting, the skill check value would be the weight of the object being checked. The higher the skill is when compared to the check, the higher your chance to succeed is. The lower the skill is when compared to the check, the higher your chance to critically fail OR critically succeed is. 

This means a few things. If you're super strong, and try to pick up something super light, you're very likely to succeed, but very unlikely to critically succeed. Alternatively, if you're super weak and try to pick up something super heavy—like I did in the above gif—you're very likely to either fail horribly or succeed amazingly. This matters a lot because your stats only increase from achieving critical successes. 

I'm hoping that this will encourage risky behavior and lead to some funny situations. If I had succeeded to lift the rubble in the above gif, my strength would suddenly shoot up to equal the weight of the rubble—from 15 to 100. The game rationalizes this as you discovering some previously unknown latent strength. "Wow! I was this strong all along? Who knew!"

This will need a lot of balancing...