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The results are interesting. I definitely was aware the pray was designed to basically be a get-out of jail free card if you were aware of your surroundings and near a light, this is why it's got quite a high cost so if you use it poorly and end up in another fight you'll be in trouble.

I was definitely thinking of adding a stronger guard at some point midway through the game but couldn't really think of a good reason to suddenly give you a new ability. I want the player to feel quite weak and, well, defenceless so giving an upgrade midway through the game just felt wrong. 

Swipe honestly started out as just being an ability that added more escape chance at the cost of more sanity, but I found I never really used it so I kind of redesigned it be a bit of a gamble to add some escape chance while also having its own chance to instantly escape the battle. I actually added a mechanic quite close to the end of development to it where if you use it at 80% then you can instantly guarantee your escape by using it but i'm not sure how useful that was. maybe if it came with a reduced cost it would be worth doing.

Thanks for doing this analysis! It's interesting to see as I was unaware of a way of doing some raw data testing on the combat before.

It's only really possible because player choice is so limited and enemy behavior is nice and simple. I just threw together a tiny JS fiddle that tested different scenarios and tracked statistics in a loop. I think 'Swipe' suffers heavily from the fact that taking an action other than attempting escape more than once is virtually always a terrible idea - and you need to do so to get escape chance to 100%