Health Regeneration Discussion Thread - Claustrophobia: The Downward Struggle

Hello there.

Health regeneration and the way you regenerate has been mentioned to me quite a bit. Here's what I put the issue down to, and what I'm going to do about it:

So the issue of health regeneration comes from a few problems:

• At higher level, enemies out level you, so battles end up taking a lot of health from you each turn.
• Passive health regeneration does not restore enough health each turn after level 10.
• Running around or skipping turns to regenerate has no consequence, and so becomes a (rather boring) necessity after every fight.
• Kiting is the most obvious thing to do, as you still restore health that way, and is both time consuming and takes a fair bit away from each encounter.
• You can easily barricade yourself into a room by closing doors, giving you more time to spam regenerate.
• = Not the most interesting nor fun regeneration.

So, what I'm planning on doing:

• From next patch (alpha 1.1.0), enemies will no longer scale with your level, and will instead by leveled based on the area of the dungeon, or the floor they are on. This means that you will not be fighting an uphill battle, and can farm floors until you feel ready to progress to harder enemies.
• Passive health regeneration should heal more health per turn, but not while enemies are visible around you, or you have debuffs on you, and not from staying in the same area for too long.
• Enemies should be able to break down doors if you have already engaged them in combat, stopping you from sealing yourself in a room to heal (you shouldn't need to with the above changes, so this will just put a stop to doing that to cheat your way to full health)
• Finally, possibly a more radical change based on a different health regeneration system. This one is more of a thought that I will be testing out. Food, as well as healing you a small amount, should be needed for the purposes of hunger. You would only regenerate health when your hunger is above a certain point, and your hunger goes down the more you move about. The fuller you are, the quicker you regenerate. This would give a real use for food over potions and natural healing, and a way to cook and prepare food for it to be more effective could be implemented.

Let me know what you think of these ideas, and by all means, feel free to add to them here.

~TheIndieForge

Edited by: TheIndieForge

While I like that enemies now level with floors, the other changes sound a little risky. It's hard to judge from text alone, but it could work and it could not.

Hunger is very hard to add without it being a tedious task instead of depth to the gameplay, but it could end out great with a bunch of testing.

TheIndieForge wrote:
Passive health regeneration should heal more health per turn, but not while enemies are visible around you, or you have debuffs on you, and not from staying in the same area for too long. ]

Interesting, will be fun to see how this works out.

i just bought the game so havent tried the earlier versions but i like whats in it and i like what you talked about changing and the food thing sounds really interesting but please what ever you do dont change so you lose health when your hunger is low like in 100 rogues on ios, i liked that game but stopped playing it after just a couple of runs.. theres nothing fun in having to keep eating to stay alive when theres barely any food to find.. loving the game, bought the hellish dungeons bundle mostly because of this game.. keep up the good work!

Edited by: JimZiii

Hey there! Just to update on my current thoughts (still only thoughts, mind) about health regeneration:

Food will not be a life or death necessity (not directly anyway), meaning there won't be any starving to death. Instead, the amount of health, and speed at which, you naturally regenerate will be based on how well fed your character is. Even with no food, your health will still regenerate, but nowhere near as fast as if you were well fed. You will not be able to regenerate health whilst in range of active (that is, awake and aggroed) enemy units, meaning kiting enemies will not allow you to 'cheat' your say back to full health.
Food itself will be as readily available as it is currently, with the addition of cooking which will improve an item's hunger decreasing properties. I'm unsure whether to also keep food restoring some health as well, so that there are still health regenerating items outside of Health Potions.

Anyway, that's my thoughts at the moment, don't take them as final or anything, I can be indecisive!
~TheIndieForge