Hey guys,

in our previous articles we told you how we decided to use jMonkey Engine and why we use it.
Today we will get back to talking about the game itself again.

We want to show you the game in its current state, focussing on the new Item- and Skillsystem, which we crafted in the last months. You can see a quick overview in this video:

Families

Nearly every MMORPG has the problem, that a single player cannot do much by himself. The “solution” is usually to give healers offensive skills, so that they can play Solo. In Project Aleron we solve this probem with our Family-System.

All of a players characters on a server belong to his family and he selects 2 characters while logging in. This way single characters can focus on their role in combat because they are never in a “Solo” situation.

At the moment we, as developers, can login with an arbitrary number of characters to simulate great battles with little effort 😈

Character Stats

Another specialty in our game is that a characters stats come solely from equipment. All characters start with the same base stats and these are changed by equipping items.

We plan to add a mastery system later, which will determine when characters can equip stronger items.

Here is a list of all currently implemented stats with description:

• Health (HP) – Health, as in most games, indicates how much damage a character can take. When the health drops to 0, the character is dead.
• Barrier (BAR) – A barrier behaves like an extra layer of HP. Before damaging a characters HP, one must get through the barrier. The barrier regenerates every round.
• Action Points (AP) – Action Points are required to move or use skills. Movement costs 1 AP per tile and every skill costs a specific amount of AP. Action Points regenerate every round.
• Damage (DMG) – Damage is the base for the damage calculation of physical skills.
• Magic Damage (MDMG) – Magic Damage is the base for the damage calculation of magical skills.
• Defence (DEF) – Defence is used to calculate the percental absorbtion rate, which reduces incoming damage.
• Initiative (INIT) – Initiative determines the turnorder for the characters. Characters with higher Initiative get to play first.
• Jump (JUMP) – Jump represents the maximum height difference the character can overcome.

Items

At the moment we only have equipment items and we limited these to the most important ones for now: Weapons, Armors and Shoes. We also chose to only implement items, which differ greatly from eachother.

Of course we have many more items planned. The current items just help us to build a variety of character roles for development and testing.

Weapons

Sword, Shield, Bow, Healing

All our weapons are one-handed. And because every character has two hands, you can dual-wield any weapons. (Yes, you can carry two bows or two shields if you like 😉 )

Additionally characters gain weapon skills according to the equipped items. This will be explained in the next section.

Stats-wise weapons primarily grant DMG and MDMG.

Armors

Light, Medium, Heavy

Armos grant the most stats, especially HP and Initiative.

We are implementing a balance between defensive stats and a charcters mobility. Heavily armored characters are slower in their initiative and have reduced AP. Characters with light armor gain initiative and additional AP.

Shoes

Light, Medium, Heavy

Shoes give few stats, but influence a characters mobility. Currently Shoes only offer additional JUMP. Later we want to introduce special tile types, such as water. These tile types cost additional AP to pass them. If you are wearing the correct shoes, however, you can pass them without any penalties.

Skills

Characters can have two types of skills: Active and passive skills. Currently only active skills are implemented. 😛

A characters skills are bound to the weapon types he is carrying. So when a character carries a sword, he gains the sword skills.
These will be unlocked by the mastery with the weapon type in later versions.

As a character can equip two weapons, he receives the skills for both weapon types. He also gets a special skill for the weapon combination he is wearing. This also happens when a character wears two weapons of the same type.

Every character, that wields two weapons, will have 3 skills at minimum:
1 for the left weapon, 1 for the right weapon and 1 for the combination.

Here are a few examples of what our current skills can do:

• They have a minimum and maximum range
• Damage or heal the target
• Leech HP from target
• Push away or pull target
• Leap to target
• Swap positions with target
• Add buffs to target
• Some skills require a target

Orientation

Typical for tactical RPGs, the orientation of a character will be of extra importance.
Characters receive more damage from the sides and from behind. To be precise, a character receives +15% damage from the sides and +50% damage from behind. ( information subject to change… 🙄 )

Push and Falling Damage

This is another must-have for the genre.
When a character is pushed against a wall, he takes push damage. When a character is pushed off of a ledge, he takes falling damage.
When a character is pushed so far off of a ledge, that he hits the next wall, he takes both.

This damage is percental in relation to the characters Max HP. We haven’t decided yet how high this damage will be. For this we still have to squish more characters in our research lab.

With this damage calculation we want tanks (heavily armored characters with high HP) to suffer, so that they must pay more attention to their positioning. They can’t just stand where they want and get healed up all the time.

Replays

It may sound surprising, but in this early stage we already implemented the possibility of watching replays of finished battles. You can not spectate battles as they are being fought in real-time yet, but that feature will come soon too.

We need replays for our next task, which is why they were preponed. We will not share any details about this mysterious task yet, as we have to keep some topics for further articles.

We currently save all replays in our phenomenally gigantic, steadily growing database, from which we can load and play them.

Closing Words

So this the current state of Project Aleron.
Now we will stop talking and get back to work.

However we will happily take our time to answers questions in the comment section or social media! 🙂

Authors: Sergej Tihonov, Eike Wulff and Benjamin Justice