Legends of Pixelia - Hero Upgrades news

What's new?

Hey there! I worked on the hero stats, level up bonuses, items and I reworked the menu UI. Today I'll explain how the new systems work in the current stage of development and show some screenshots and gifs.

Stat Overview

There are lots of different hero stats in Legends of Pixelia. A unique stat can appear in different versions, for example +Defense, +Defense% and +Defense/Level. Here's a screenshot and a short explanation of the character stats:

• Attack Rating: An estimate of your hero's total offensive power. This value helps to identify the usefulness of new items and can be used to compare a hero's offensive power and survivability.
• "A" Damage: The damage of your basic attack.
• "X", "B", "Y" Damage: The damage of your skills. Note that this is just the basic value, skills have internal damage multipliers to balance single hit and multi hit skills.
• "X", "B", "Y" Cooldown: The cooldown of your skills. Cooldowns can be reduced by items or passive skills.
• Critical Chance: Chance to deal the double amount of damage. Applies to attacks as well as skills.
• Attack Speed: The speed of your basic attack. Does not apply to skills. A high attack speed really helps when trying to do combos.

• Defense Rating: An estimate of your hero's total survivability. See: "Attack Rating".
• Hit Points: Your hero's life. Reaching 0 leads to death. Death is not good. Not good means losing EXP.
• Defense, Defense Reduction: Defense reduces the amount of damage taken, based on the enemy's level. Max. Reduction: 50%.
• Heal per Room: The amount of Hit Points recovered when clearing a room. Max. healing: 10% of maximum HP per room.
• Guard Chance: Chance to take half damage from enemy attacks.
• Movement Speed: Wanna be Speedy Gonzales?

Where are Life Leech and Regeneration? Hit points have to be a finite resource in order to allow some kind of roguelike feeling. Life leech and high life regeneration in games generally leads to enemies that have one-hit-KO attacks to offer some kind of higher difficulty. I prefer the concept of slowly diminishing hit points, therefor no imbalanced healing in Legends of Pixelia. Collect potions or get some "heal per room" to keep your health up. :-)

Stat Points, Passive Skills

Okay, now we understand the stats. But how to increase them? There are different ways, one of them is leveling up your hero and choosing stat points. There is a choice of 5 different stat "packages":
• Melee: Increases your "X" skill damage and 2x your hit points
• Ranged: +"B" skill damage, +all damage, +heal per room
• Special: +"Y" skill damage, +all damage, +defense
• Offensive: +3x all damage
• Defensive: +hit points, +defense, +heal per room

Choosing the same package 5 times grants access to a passive skill. There are 8 passives skills per package, you can max. put 40 points into the same package. This gif shows the functionality and the UI:

Items

Another way to build the stats of your hero is by choosing the right equipment and by upgrading your items. Every time you find a big treasure chest, your hero has the choice to either pick one of two randomly generated items or to pick gold:

See how Attack Rating and Defense Rating are a great help in comparing items?

Now, why should we choose gold, what is it used for?
The Blacksmith! He can upgrade your equipment in exchange for gold and item durability. Durability shows the number of possible upgrades left. This gif shows how to burn your money by upgrading items:

Wait. What are "Blood Boots"? When rolling a new item, one of the stats is randomly defined as Lucky Stat. The Lucky Stat is slightly higher as the other stats on the same item and it determines the item's name and color. "Blood Boots" for example have a high hit points stat.

Blessings

The last possibility to increase your hero's stats are blessings. There are stone statues scattered around the dungeon's dead end rooms:

Breaking these statues will either free an angel or a demon. Both are grateful for your help and both will bless you:
• Angel Blessing: A small permanent bonus to a single stat.
• Demon Blessing: A big permanent stat bonus. Will be removed on death.

I helped this yellow shiny angel on my last adventure:

The new UI

We already saw some screenshots of the new UI. Here's a gif showing the creation of a new hero:

The philosophy of Legends of Pixelia regarding user input is "gamepad first", so you can't type the hero's name on your keyboard directly, haha. It feels like playing on an emulator and that totally fits the style of LoP.

That's it

The UI development was very time consuming, but I like the result. What do you think about it?
Do you like the stat system of Legends of Pixelia?
Thanks for reading, feel free to give some feedback. :-)

-Sima