Soulash 2 Devlog 6 - Progression System

Greetings fellow gods,

Today we'll finally talk about the progression system planned for Soulash 2!

Let's start by having a little retrospective about the first Soulash and its progression. As you remember, we had a relatively simple system with seven professions, each having 13 - 14 skills for every level of experience. We can pick the core profession ability or one of two random choices during each advancement, which allows us to either follow the predefined path or deviate if something more fitting to our character shows up. The system was straightforward, and I think it worked ok for Soulash, it wasn't the best thing ever, but in the end, we had over 170 unique abilities, some attached to items and all used by enemies. There was some criticism which I think is worth mentioning. First of all, the leveling was too slow, and levels were too few - I didn't want to sprinkle passive abilities in-between skills just to have more dings, and having more active abilities would be very difficult due to them taking a long time to implement. It took me years to finish all the professions during the alpha.

On the other hand, the world was tightly packed with enemies to reduce travel time as much as possible between fights. More levels would also cause more problems for less-experienced players, like the bear situation or the archers to the south of starting areas. Some people felt the game should reward the player more for non-combat activities, like providing exp for butchering or woodcutting, and I agree, but it didn't fit with the soul-sucking theme.

Even during the Kickstarter, I've felt that the progression system could be better, and a remake was one of the stretch goals. Unfortunately, we couldn't fund it then, but we can now with the income from the first game and our amazing Patrons!

The first crucial change to the system is that I'm removing the character levels and replacing them with a skills system that is my twist on the design that you might know from Skyrim, Kenshi, or other games. Here's the first draft I made in 2021 before the Kickstarter. 

There were 31 skills I imagined could be an excellent addition to Soulash, with many abilities assigned to some of the skills and unlockable through advancement there. The skills would grow as we used them, and new things would unlock on levels 1 - 10, or as you can see, I've toyed with every 2 - 3 levels too to have more room for improving the characters. The rewards on some levels would be abilities and crafting recipes. All skills are assigned to a specific statistic and would add them in-between ability rewards or otherwise be connected to it.

Since then, however, I've scrapped that system.

Here's the main issue I had when I got pretty far into the design of it. I've realized that I was forcing myself to figure out all skills delivering exactly 10 cool rewards. Also, I had to have higher-level rewards be more remarkable than the previous ones because otherwise, it wouldn't be a clear progression. And I've realized I had a similar problem in the first Soulash, where some abilities were not as exciting as others, still useful, but rarely worth picking over some alternatives. People rerolling characters to get the quick step on level 2 comes to mind over the Light spell, even though there were stories of high-level Djinns dying in the dark, without a light source. There's another big problem connected here - I've had many more awesome ideas for Pyromancy or Necromancy than I had for Labour, Trading, or Survival skill lines. So there was a hard cap on the things I could add, and I felt compelled to add something where I didn't have a good idea.

And with that prolonged intro to what I've settled into, I present the current skills screen to you.

A lot of things on the screen, but it shouldn't be too complicated with tooltips explaining every part. First, let's talk about the skills. The skills will be a straightforward progressing counter that gives your character a percentage bonus (or multiple bonuses) related to that skill. For Adventuring, it can be a bonus to movement speed on the world map, Necromancy - extra duration on some temporary summons, damage bonus to death spells, etc. Progressing them will be related to what you do in the game.

If you look to the right side of the skill border, you can see something like Adventuring 1/10, which means the current level of Adventuring is 1, of potential 10. You can't level your Adventuring above level 10 until you increase your potential, and you'll be able to do so by finding a teacher, accomplishing some Milestones, or finding a book on the topic. I'll explain it more when we get into permadeath.

The next part is Milestones, which are the bread and butter of the system. Milestones are assigned to Skills and provide rewards for accomplishing a specific multi-step activity. These can be simple, like visiting multiple biomes in Adventuring skill, or more complex, like a road to becoming a Vampire or a Lich. You can think of them as quests that provide important unlocks that define your character. Some of these milestones will exclude themselves, like the mentioned Vampire / Lich transformation. The rewards of the Milestones will always be visible, but the progress steps may be hidden so as not to spoil what may lie ahead. I haven't decided how the milestones will be provided, whether they will come at certain levels of skills (but I would rather not go this road due to issues mentioned with the previous iteration), or if they unlock themselves when some previous ones are finished or multiple conditions. I thought about having them all unlocked, but this would be too overwhelming to choose the next thing to do. Either way, I don't plan for any "balance" between different skills in terms of milestone counts, the purpose of each skill is to have a fun way of progressing the character.

Now let's talk about the rewards, you can see four areas for them, but there are actually more as crafting recipes have a separate screen (including building). The unlocked abilities are probably apparent. These will be abilities working the same way as in the first Soulash. Unlocked actions, these we also had, if you dabbled in modding you may know them known as production actions in the first Soulash - Butchering, Skinning, Woodcutting, etc. The potential of the production actions is pretty great and allows us to interact with the world in many different ways. Here's one example to give you some ideas - Ghost Summoning. Imagine you're a necromancer with a pile of bones, using your unlocked ability to summon the ghost of the person that these remains belong to and be allowed to talk to it. 

Next, let's talk about a new thing - passives. You may remember passives from Soulash races, but these are meant to be much more. Passives unlock new mechanics in the game. This can be an ability to communicate with the dead for a Necromancer, but also things like quickly discovering nearby points of interest for Adventurers by talking to an innkeeper or scouting for available resources on the world tile. Passives provide tools for characters that will enhance their chosen roles and allow them to do stuff in the game that other people cannot. And finally, we have the Words of Power. Now, I'm still the least sure about these, but I will give them a try during testing. The idea behind Words of Power is to enhance or change abilities. Now the exciting part about it is that we can do this already in Soulash because we have the Ability Editor, and we can manipulate any ability already. Now I think of Words of Power as an invocation power that can change the abilities in some way, either by adding an effect, changing the duration, range, damage, or maybe even shape (instead of line targetting, make it a self AoE). My biggest worry with this is animations, however. The more exciting stuff might require drastic changes to animations. With the ability to combine multiple Words of Power, this can quickly get too overwhelming for a team of two people. So we'll have to see. These will be the lowest priority for a long time, and I think other rewards are enough anyway.

I think this would be it for how the progression system will work, but there's one more related thing that I believe is worth discussing: permadeath. I've been thinking about limitations to the system because I don't want a single character to acquire all skills and milestones in the game. The goal of such a comprehensive system is to have diversity and replayability. But I also put some thought into permadeath and how I want it to combine with the system not just to be a burden that forces you to start over but provide high-stakes gameplay with the possibility of creating exciting stories after death, and being able to experience the impact previous characters had on the world. That's why the world will not be removed after the end of a character, and you may be able to continue playing with a new character in the same world. The critical thing in my mind to get right here will be to have fast-paced progress for most characters, but not as fast as being unable to get attached to them.

The permadeath with a sort of world progression opens up many exciting possibilities like becoming a master blacksmith to create a unique artifact and passing it on to your son. Summoning a ghost of your previous character to learn something from it, or maybe even resurrecting it as an undead zombie companion? But what if a character achieves true immortality? Perhaps trapping them in a prison would be their doom, and the second character, a cultist of the dark god, is going on a self-created mission of breaking them out?

This is also where the potential of the skills and age of the character comes to play. Death will not come just by the sword of a foe but also the inevitable curse of old age. This is where I see great opportunities for race diversity, like humans who lead short but fast lives. They progress quickly but die young compared to an elf, who has seemingly all the time in the world. Humans also feel the lure of Necromancy that much more to prolong their own lives and hold on to their fleeting existence. But returning to the skills potential, learning from masters, or studying books will take time. Traveling will take time. Crafting will take time. Recovering serious wounds will take time. The goal will be to live a character's life in a limited timeframe, with choices like necromancy, or other magic ways (fountain of youth? bathing in virgin blood?) to prolong your time (or picking a long-living race from the start at the cost of progression speed).

Whew, so many ideas. I didn't even get into the Crafting and Knowledge screens that I've also worked on during these past two weeks, but I think that's enough writing for today, as I need to keep implementing all of this! Let's wait for some pretty graphics from Xiclu and talk about the changes to Crafting in the next two weeks. Thanks for reading this far, and I hope you're as excited as I am about Soulash 2!