Devlog: Skills

Hello everyone.

Box here, game designer for The Necessary Evil. I thought it might be interesting to talk about the primary ways you can customize your roster and develop your tactics in the game: the skill system.

There are a few types of skills: Passive skills, which trigger effects or conditionally affect statistics; Exploration skills, which are used at the Expedition layer of the game; and Combat skills, which are abilities used during a character’s turn in combat. I’ll only be covering a subset of the latter here, since the magic system will require a little more detail and my writing style already threatens to run to logorrhea.

Skills and Weapons

So, I hate the idea of trivial decisions in games. Every decision you make should matter in some way. Every option should feel different. Applying that philosophy to the skills in The Necessary Evil, I ended up with a system that has a couple of different types of combat skills. These types are Weapon skills, Character skills, Magic skills, and Movement skills.

Let’s go into how they’re similar before we discuss their differences.

General Skill Info

Each combat skill has a number of effects; these can deal damage, apply status effects, move characters around, etc. Each effect can have differing areas and targets. Each of those effects can have conditions to activate.

For example, the Widen the Wound skill of the Poacher will normally deal a small amount of damage to an enemy, but if the target is already bleeding, it also adds a much more severe instance of bleed.

Fortune’s Favor, a character skill of the Naturalist, can target either an ally or an enemy. The former will gain a bonus to critical hit chance, while the latter will suffer a malus. Should you have an item that modifies areas of effect, it can provide a crippling swing of potential.

Oh, yes. The effects of skills can also be modified by various means. That could be the accessory or passive your character has equipped. It might be the result of a choice you made earlier in the expedition to deal with one of the random events that popped up. It could simply be a feature of the terrain you’re standing in - using a flamethrower on a character standing in a pool of refined phlogiston is unlikely to end well for him!

Weapon-Granted Skills

Generally speaking, the skills granted for “free” by weapons are optimized for dealing damage. The weapons themselves have differing statistics (base damage bonus applied to skills, crit chance bonuses, durability, etc), but their real differentiator is the critical effect. These are bonus effects that are applied when a weapon-using skill crits. For example, the Magefire Pistol will slow its targets, while the Mind Razor will cause a long-lasting bleed.

With good planning, you can obviously use the critical effects to enable the more powerful effects of skills. From the above example, you could have a Naturalist use Fortune’s Favor on a Poacher with a Mind Razor equipped, hoping to trigger the critical effect to start a bleed on a target, which then activates the secondary effect on the Widen the Wound skill.

Take care before fully committing to any strategy, however. Power always comes at a cost, and in this case, that takes the form of durability damage. Crit too often, and your character will find their weapons shattering in their hands. Better keep a few spares in your expedition inventory. Or perhaps you should use them to the breaking point – after all, it’s sometimes only after being broken that something’s true potential is found…

Character Learned Skills

These are split into two types. Weapon-based combat skills tend to be more damaging and gain bonuses based on the weapon equipped, as well as benefit from the weapon’s critical effect.

Non-weapon-based skills instead provide buffs and debuffs, control positioning, heal, or more esoteric effects. Without the base damage bonus of the weapon, however, these generally don’t do much to kill enemies. Instead, they focus on the unique advantages each engram provides.

The Poacher, for example, is the best suited engram for using gunpowder weapons. One of the skills it provides to ensure that is Blood Bullets, which allows them to reload those weapons without consuming limited powder resources, at the cost of a moderate amount of health.

Learning and Activating Skills

Character classes (“engrams” in The Necessary Evil - mind-rips of skilled individuals seared into your characters’ heads) provide proficiencies with sets of weapons and a set of engram-specific skills. Each weapon also provides up to four skills when that weapon is equipped - something similar to Guild Wars 2 or some CRPGs, which allows some amount of flexibility in combat, since weapons are swappable for a modest action point cost.

Conversely, a character can learn any number of their engram-specific skills and have up to 4 of them “active.” These will be available during combat for the duration of an expedition, but cannot be deactivated in place of others until the expedition is complete. The exception to this is magic skills, which are always active (again, magic is a slightly more complex topic that we’ll cover later).

To learn a skill, a character must be taken to the Aethenium, a room in the central complex from which you will launch your expeditions. There, they may have the skill burned into their engram for a modest cost of phlogiston and lucre. A word of caution, however; the mind is not infinitely plastic. Every time an engram is burned, the cost to add another skill to a character increases. Invest too deeply into a single individual and you risk a massive loss when they inevitably fall.

That’s a short overview of the skill system in The Necessary Evil. I’ll be going over the magic system as well soon. That devlog will be covering the four “schools” of magic involved and their unique traits, as well as the Channeling status that is required to cast any spells at all. Thank you for reading this and I hope you’re excited for the release of the open playtest soon!