ANBW COMBAT PROGRESSION AND WEAPON UPGRADE SYSTEM

Heyhey Scientists! Today we're introducing Turtle to you, one of our animators and the artist & designer responsible for wrapping up the remaining work on combat design and animations.

TLDR; Turtle Introduces himself and gives some context for how his work on combat started. Following that he showcases the current Skill Grid System and the process that led to it. Have fun with the detailed read OR listen to it with Yara´s beautiful audio version attached below!

Introduction

I joined the ANBW dev team as a 3D animator-in-training back in January. My background comes from pixelart animations (I previously was working on the Kagura Survivors Team), and I’ve always enjoyed combat systems in games. Fortunately, I was assigned the player’s combat animations quite shortly after I joined.

A quick summary of what's what with the current combat system:

There are 9 different weapons that you eventually unlock and get to use in combat, with each weapon having its own unique playstyle and moveset. There will be both melee and ranged weapons, and each weapon type will have its advantages and disadvantages. All weapons will have 4 move-sets they can use: a regular attack, a heavy attack, a special attack and an ultimate. Alongside this, each weapon can be upgraded separately and offers an innate passive that emphasizes its playstyle.

Power Progression through the Skill Grid Upgrade System

The skill grid shown above is how we plan to let you upgrade your stats & skillset and tailor it to how you’d like to play the game. Throughout the game, you’ll receive a currency called “Virus Matter” which you can spend on unlocking grid nodes. Some of these upgrades will increase your stats like HP, Attack or Defense. Others grant you special passive effects, like doing more damage up close, or obtaining buffs whenever you land a critical hit. There will also be ways through which you can upgrade the weapon’s moves and innate passive.

The rest of this post will dive into the process that led us to this skill grid. We´re pretty confident in the current skill tree design, but it is still marked as a work-in-progress and not 100% finalized, so if you have feedback:, Please share your thoughts in the comments! <3

Why an upgrade system?

“If we put in a combat system we might as well make it actually good”
- Helltaker, probably

The main reason for an upgrade system is that it gives a sense of progression in combat. Upgrade your stats and unlock more skills in order to feel more awesome and powerful. A proper skill tree allows the player to create their own combat style. With a plethora of weapon options, it can really allow for unique weapon loadouts and playstyles.

What is going on here (Path of Exile)

Of course, there’s a fine line between allowing enough creative freedom and becoming Path of Exile. As much as we’d like to flood you with thousands of options, this just isn’t the game for that. But on the other hand, making the tree too simplistic is not going to be very interesting. It becomes less of a tool to create builds with and more so a system where you just linearly unlock more parts of the weapon.

Which is funny, because my first proposed skill tree was exactly that.

Skill Tree, Round 1

• Selected weapon skill tree

• A tier of unlocked skills. The center skill is currently toggled on.

• Costs to unlock the next tiers of skills

• Capstone skill, requiring a special currency

• Bonuses for unlocking a skill tier. Applies to all weapons.

Anyone who’s played Doom: The Dark Ages or League Of Legends is going to be familiar with this sort of skill tree. It’s a mostly linear skill tree, with some modifications made to give the player more options & decision making.

Each weapon would have a couple of “Upgrade Tiers”. You spend currency to unlock these tiers, and once unlocked, you can select 1 of the skills to be set to “active”. These skills would be weapon-specific and would upgrade its moveset. In addition to the weapon skills, each tier would also grant a stat bonus that applies to the player, rather than the weapons. The final upgrade in the tree would be a sort of “Ultimate” 

This version ultimately got canned after some discussion, as it just doesn’t allow for the sort of freedom of choice we were looking for in the skill system.

Skill Tree, Round 2

Option 1 (left): Skill tree

Option 2 (right): Skill grid 

After a bunch more research, I eventually settled on these 2 options for an upgrade system. Let’s start with the classic branching Skill Tree in the first image. 

Option 1: This one is pretty much a typical skill tree in the way people imagine it: Starts from a central point, then has many upgrade paths that branch off from this starting point. No wonder it’s called a skill tree. 

The main draw of this system is that it’s pretty simple to understand: If you want to reach a certain upgrade, you just follow the lines to that upgrade, and voila: you’ve got your upgrade path. It would also work really nicely with a virus aesthetic, as the big upgrades can be the main virus body, with the smaller stat increases being the receptors you typically find on virus visualizations

There’s definitely some downsides here, though. Referring back to the Path of Exile skill tree shown before, these types of skill trees can very quickly become big and overwhelming due to the various connections going everywhere. And ultimately, there’s still linearity in here, unless you want to create an intertwined Spaghetti Skill Tree

Viruses

Option 2: the Skill Grid, is a little more unorthodox and I could only find a couple of examples utilizing it - the most notable example being Final Fantasy 10’s License board. This grid-based skill board has all the possible upgrades laid out as tiles on a grid. 

In our case we'd use it like this: Once you obtain a weapon, the central weapon tile is activated. Unlocking further upgrades requires you to build a path from an activated tile to the upgrade you want. I think the best aspect of this skill grid is that it’s pretty intuitive to understand - from any square, you can move 4 directions and activate another one. 

Besides it being pretty intuitive, I think it being a grid also allows for some cool additional upgrade ideas. For example, the player can get bonuses based on how much area on the board they’ve covered. Or you can introduce elements that can be placed on the board and enhance whatever is underneath them.

The big drawback of the skill grid is that it’s going to require a whole lot of regular stat increases compared to the skill tree, because there has to be a lot of pathways the player can take. This needs to be taken into account for future balancing to make sure the stat upgrades don’t become too much, while still feeling meaningful. Besides that, I initially also had some issues visualizing the grid with a virus theme.

Both versions got pitched to the team, and after weighing the benefits and drawbacks of each option, the decision was made to continue with the grid.

Art Pass 1

With the general direction settled, we started working on the in-game presentation.

2 versions of the layout and general presentation

I made the first visualization, but it has many visual issues - Interface design is definitely not my strong suit. However, my coworkers Taco and Zul can actually make good interfaces. So, after we figured out how various elements should behave and look, we have the first art pass for the skill grid:

We went with the direction of a futuristic “circuit board” look to fit with the overarching sci-fi aesthetic of the game. You can see all of the grid nodes that belong to the one-handed sword form, with the icon itself being in the center of the grid. The coloured nodes are unlocked, whereas the greyed out nodes are not unlocked yet. The other weapons are currently collapsed, but their grids can be expanded in a similar way.

How it works

As described earlier, you unlock upgrades on the grid by building paths to them. Each node on the grid either increases the stats of the player, or grants access to a global upgrade. Then, in addition to that, you get weapon upgrades based on how much of a weapon’s specific grid squares have been unlocked. 

Unlocking a stat node

Stat nodes are quite straightforward, each unlocked one increases a specific stat for the player by a fixed value. Some of the nodes have different shapes and offer a bigger boost. They also border more tiles and can be used to unlock paths faster than if you just unlock small stat nodes.

Global upgrades are passive effects which can enhance certain playstyles, or change how the player interacts with certain combat mechanics. These are the upgrades you’d want to pick based on what playstyle or build you want to play.

Some of the one-handed sword’s skills

Weapon upgrades only apply to that specific weapon, but are often quite powerful. They generally won’t change how a weapon plays, instead enhancing their moveset and opening up more niches for the weapon. 

Going all the way and getting all the weapon upgrades for a single weapon is going to make that weapon very powerful. Picking global upgrades that synergise with each other might make the individual weapons weaker, but you’ll get a skillset that can really impact how you’d like to play the combat.

Heyhey! Helltaker here again, I hope you enjoyed the detailed presentation from Turtle about our combat modes skill tree system! I'm always happy when I can have the actual designers write up their own thoughts to share with all of you, so you can see how many individuals are working on this game. With that said I noticed that there are a few small details that I think I should share to put the above into context:

We´ve been working on combat design on and off over the years now and we're closing in to the “final form” that we´ll be able to see in the finished game. Originally I did a lot of the combat stuff myself, but I handed it over to Turtle since I know how much motivation he has to work on combat design in general and I can tell from experiencing his work over at Kagura Survivors that the results will be fun and creative gameplay moments for players.

Timeline wise we are currently preparing a large UI update which is why this post specifically focused on a mix of visuals and gameplay progression instead of going even further into the combat design. I think it's best to simply let you PLAY the next combat iteration to get an idea on the direction it's going to take and then use your feedback to further polish that feature's gameplay loop.

Looking forward to that and as usual: Thanks a ton for your support!