The basic perk and rank systems are now done!
I think this is a good moment to state that all of the UI is very much a placeholder atm. The final UI will look much better and immersive.
Just two actual perks done at the moment, though.
The plan at the moment is to have 20 perks, aswell as 10 special perks. To unlock regular perks, you need to spend Allspark Shards which you get by ranking up. Currently Im thinking to have about 15 ranks/levels, so you never will be able to unlock all perks in 1 playthrough. A single rank up will take about an average of an hour (thats the plan atleast), so we are looking at atleast 15 hours of playtime just to get to max rank with one character.
Specials perks you will unlock by doing special things in the world, defeating bosses among them. They cannot be unlocked by using shards. I think this is a good substitute for the lack of "loot" (I think loot is boring) and it will give more incentive to properly explore the world.
I have some really cool ideas for different perks, some of which will make transforming a more important part of the combat experience (as seen above) and as such add more and more depth to the combat system as you progress your character.
Im not 100% sure yet wether or not to have perks locked behind stats requirements (like having a perk require 10 points in "melee"). Currently, the plan is to have all 20 perks available from the beginning, but maybe it is a good idea to lock 2 perks per stat (so 6 perks in total) behind stat-requirements to make character building more interesting? What do you think?
As I said, there will be probably 15 ranks, each granting you an Allspark Shard which you can spend on perks. Each rank will take an average of an hour to get. I also added small notifications now of how much EXP and energon you gained from enemies.
Again, all of the UI is just placeholders at the moment.
Balancing the time it takes to get ranks with the seperate gaining of stats aswell as making the strength of the enemies appropriate to the strength of the player throughout might be a bit tricky, not sure yet. Anybody who has some RPG making experience wanna throw in his opinion/tips on a decent leveling/enemy difficulty curve?
I wanna do a few more things before releasing a new update for the Pre-Alpha version (make all of the UI tabs connected, making shared energon/exp a thing when multiple people take on enemies and maybe even enemy health bars), however, it shouldnt be that long now before a new update gets released.
