Hello you gorgeous deviants,I wanted to keep you updated that I have the basic level up and decay functionality working.And thought Id take the time to better explain some aspects like decay and repair.First, I wanted to add a quick placeholder for when your gear does level up
Right now, it just says "Gear Level Up" but my plan would be to have symbols or dedicated notices for the different gear, so you can tell which on your gear leveled up, and then a separate one for when your character actually levels up. As your player level will be tied to the average of the gears level.The Level of the gear will be visible at the bottom right of the items stats in the Inventory Screen:
Decay and how it works:So decay is not like standard repair mechanics, which truthfully Im not a fan of. The mechanics where each hit degrades the quality of your item until it breaks.In Gift of Hedone, hitting an enemy does not degrade the stats, however on level up, there is "decay" - (I may think of a different term) - but in short, your gear will level up, and it will get stronger, but it wont be as strong as a fully repaired or new equivalent. What I mean by this is, you could level up a bit of gear from level 1 to 20, not repair it once, and level; 2 will be stronger than 1, 3 will be stronger than 2 etc. So there will always be an increase - but it wont be as much as it could be.In the below image, what we have is the following:
Level 1 > levels up to 9 (as a result it now has 33.7% Decay) > This then levels up to 15 (which now as a 51.2% decay)But you can see that the level 15 is stronger than the level 9, and the level 9 is stronger than the level 1.You then repair the gear, and the Decay is gone, and it is now much stronger.You then level it up to level 16, and the decay starts over again. So the decay is applied per level, and is reset by repairing
I thought this was a cool way to introduce the "repair" concept, but its not nearly as invasive - because when you level up you get stronger, your gear never breaks - but repairing will bring it to its full potential.When we look into crafting more - the other consideration is that a newly crafted bit of gear will be stronger than its leveled up, repaired, counterpart gear (because you will as a blacksmith get better at crafting that gear) What I mean by this if we take the above example of a level 15 bit of gear you leveled up from 1, that does 128 damage, but then if you craft bit of gear at Level 5, leveled up to to 15 and repaired, it may do 145. Then if you craft the same bit of gear at level 15 that same gear would start at 160. I hope that makes sense - essentially incentivising crafting new gear not just leveling up one bit of gear and repairing once, and moving on.I hope this explains this, and let me know if you have any questions or feedback.