Swingmeter mechanics

Hi friends, fans & family! 

Today marks the beginning of a new era! It has been two weeks since I put op the steam page and started gathering followers and wish lists. I am satisified with the results so far and now that far more “players” are going to start seeing the game I will begin to go more in-depth with the mechanics. Today I’m gonna focus on the “Swingmeter” which has turned out to be a quite divisive feature. I actually ran a poll on my twitter: https://twitter.com/SinisterSiamese/status/1454680974986514438?s=20 where you can see quite clearly that not everyone is excited about it so I decided to dive a bit deeper this time. Let’s begin!

The feature

The swingmeter appears when the heroes perform some types of attacks. It’s a moving slider that is stopped when you click the mouse and is one of the many factors that decides how much damage an attack makes. It’s important to note that attacks don’t “miss” so even if you perform poorly on the swingmeter mini-game you will still do damage albeit slightly lower. You can score a critical, a normal or a poor hit. 

The controversy

Some players absolutely hate timing mechanics and feel that one of the main reasons for playing tactical turn based games is because they are games about thinking and not reacting. They tend to assume that the swingmeter is more important than tactical thinking but that not true at all in this case. 

The details about how damage works

There are multiple factors affecting your damage output in the game: equipped weapons & armor, passive and active skills, tile bonuses, tile penalties, defense bonuses from allies… I’ll talk more about all of these at some other time but the takeaway is that the swingmeter adds a damage bonus/penalty after ALL of these factors have been applied and it won’t be an exaggerated factor. The timing mini-game is meant to be a bonus, NOT a requirement! 

The fallback

If you happen to be one of the player’s who isn’t too happy about the swingmeter I just want to make it clear that the feature can be turned off in the options. The damage bonus/penalty will then be applied randomly and function the same as in most traditional turn based games. Just random damage in other words. It will also be possible to tweak the speed of the swingmeter if you like it but find it too challenging. 

All of this will need lots of balancing and iterating and might change a lot before the final version though once people start testing the game 😅

Until next time and thanks a lot for following my progress!