Enemy showcase

The project is moving along, so I figured I might show a few of the possible enemies in the game.

As a reminder, the game's battle system is about hoarding up dice that you roll for diverse effects such as dealing damage, healing, or adding more dice for future rolls. You play with a deck of procedurally generated cards that influence those rolls and their effects.

Every enemy will consist of a random choice of a body and two to four arms, each with different abilities. Here are some of the arms added in the last few days:

Power Glow

For each of these arms, the enemy's normal attacks will do 20% more damage. The effects stack, so an enemy with two arms will do 44% more damage!

Salve

This kind of arm will allow the enemy to heal itself. On one hand, that's one turn they're spending doing something other than hurting you, but healing will make the battle last longer and your turns are limited by the size of your deck, so it's not like you can afford to idle away your turns.

Forbidden Relic

This enemy can sacrifice a small part of their health to perform an attack that deals x2 damage. A bit of a double-edged sword, but it can be a nasty surprise if you're unprepared.

Siphon

This odd looking weapon allows the enemy to drain your health to heal itself. Luckily, this draining attack deals less damage than the standard attack.

Battery

With this, the enemy can spend some of its turns charging up energy, which will increase the damage of all future attacks.

Miasma

Each of these arms will make all your healing half as effective. Since all arms' effects stack, two of these arms means you will only heal a quarter of what you usually would!

Aegis

A defensive arm. Each of these will lower all received damage by 1. And for the first few turns of battle, that's likely to be as much damage as you'll manage to deal before you start amassing dice.

Cartilage

You fight your battles by racking up dice, which you then roll to deal damage, heal or further increase your number of dice. As such, dice might just be the most valuable resource in combat, more so than health. This enemy can curse you, forcing you to roll half as many dice as you normally would for one turn, really hurting your tempo.

And those are some of the arms in the game. There are currently 15 different arms, and the enemy will have a random combination of 2 to 4 of them, resulting in quite a bit of variety. Plus, each enemy will also get a random body (from a smaller pool of possible bodies), with a more far-reaching effect. Such as:

Green core

You normally begin all battles with an initial hand of 5 cards, but if your opponent happens to have this body, you will draw one less card at the beginning of the match. Now that's a handicap right out of the gate!

Blue core

Every turn other than the first you draw 1 card to add to your hand. However, a foe with a blue core will force you to skip drawing a card every third turn! That means fewer options for you as the battle progresses, but it also means that it will take you longer to run out of cards, so you will have more time to gather dice. Bit of a double-edged sword, this one.

Red core

The dice you roll will give a random number between 1 and 1000. Usually, damaging rolls will be one-digit numbers, so you will want to roll low most of the time. But this annoying enemy will make you roll dice that can go up to 1200 instead, making it harder to rolls those useful one-digit numbers. Better hoard up a pile of dice to counteract that.

And that's about it. Right now there's four bodies (the fourth one is the effectless gray one) and 15 arms. If we combine a random body with four random arms, according to my calculator, that's a total 12,240 possible different combinations that can arise.

There's still a lot of work to do on the UI, and balance and whatnot, but the main core of the game is done. The battles, the card generation and the deck building are all functional, so I might drop something like an early beta version in the next few... weeks, maybe?

Anyway, thanks for your time, and have a nice day.