Body Swapping / Shape Stealing - extracts from the Game Design Document

BODY SWAPPING / SHAPE STEALING

When the protagonist’s current physical form reaches -10 HP (a nod to D&D) the body dies and the spirit detaches.

The spirit is immune to virtually all forms of attack and is merely repelled or displaced by others.  i.e. a spirit can be caused to flee - which means it drifts swiftly away from the direction of the ‘attack’ for a pre-determined period of time (a counter is visible) during this time the player may move up and down only.  Or a skilled enemy may be able to teleport the spirit to a random location - this can be quite far away in some cases!

A detached spirit may inhabit or possess any other ‘open’ or in other words, 'accessible' creature type (some creatures, like ghosts, are ‘closed’, i.e. they can never be possessed as they have no physical form in which the spirit can reside).

There are restrictions to possession of body-swapping or shape stealing as it is sometimes called.  The level of the creature MUST be less than the level of the protagonist.  This is the penalty conferred to ‘death’, i.e. you cannot possess a more powerful creature than yourself.  Also the time it takes to possess a new shape is one minute minus 10 seconds per level difference.  So a 10th level protagonist possessing a 6th level mermaid will take 20 seconds to complete the possession - during which time they are vulnerable and effectively stunned.  The only action they can take is to abort the attempt and move on.

Being in spirit form has many additional effects.  The protagonist is invisible to most creatures, and may induce temporary fear in others.

Additionally, a spirit may pass through certain barriers and may flip switches and levers, move objects and generally interact with the environment to a limited capacity.  This capacity is determined by an ‘ectoplasm’ meter.  This slowly builds up over time and is consumed when interacting with the physical plane.  A spirit can even ‘shove’ creatures, pushing them off precipices or on to traps.

The spirit form has its own upgrade path which may make the ectoplasm pool larger, recharge rate faster, or confer immunities or resistances to certain attacks or even allow the advanced protagonist to attack from spirit form, or detach at will.

Life and Death - supporting atmosphere and trepidation

As we have mentioned in our last post.  We want to encourage careful, considerate play. The experience we want to deliver we aim to get far closer to old school pen & paper RPGs in some respects.

So how are we going to do this.

As a games designer and RPG fan I often considered over the years the best way to encourage players to refrain from running into combat heedlessly.  For years I thought it there was some death mechanic that could be employed that would suitably penalise a player (so that they avoided dying and were more cautious) without being too frustrating at the same time.

I couldn't work it out.

And then I realised its not how your handle death, it's how you reward staying alive.

So this is how we do it.

There is a meter in the game which buffs all stats and abilities and builds up over time the longer you stay alive.  You die, the meter is reset.  So you don't lose any equipment or gold, but you do lose all of this universal buff.  The hope here is that this universal buff is so useful that players will want to retain it and thus proceed with caution.

Now for the death part.

As I have mentioned before, you don't ever really die.  You just lose your current corporeal form.  As soon as you 'die', your spirit detaches from your corpse and you are then a ghost.

As a ghost you can drift through some barriers, and you have an 'ectoplasm' meter which allows you to interact with some physics objects in a limited capacity.  You can also 'haunt' some of the more nervous denizens of the Under, and push them.  Hurl things at them and generally induce fear.  (We'll come on to the three major skill trees in a separate post.).

In ghost form your primary task is to find another body.  You can possess (and thus play as) virtually any other entity in the game.  Which should in itself present some interesting gaming opportunities.

This body swapping mechanic has another important function however.  In a procedurally generated environment we cannot predict precisely what will emerge in terms of environment, content and creatures.  Thus a player may occasionally or even frequently find themselves in a situation that cannot easily be bested via combat or movement.  So allowing a player to swap bodies means they can circumnavigate flooded sections of the environment, for example, by taking on an aquatic form.  Or through their growing knowledge of their foes, know which shape to take to induce fear in an enemy that would be otherwise hard to defeat.  Or indeed all manner of reactions.

In this way we hope to present the player with numerous solutions to bypass any given zone.

Of course, if a player chooses to swap bodies they don't suffer the debuff penalty associated with death by misadventure.