I'm creating a turn based game with random enemy spawns, telegraphed with a sigil on the floor one turn prior.
What do you think about having a few sigils, representing difficulty (minion, normal, elite, boss), rather than making all the sigils unique (or all the same?).
For example if you see en 'Elite' sigil you won't know whether it's a heavyweight (better to stand back), or a lich (better get close to kill quick).
@SirLich How about not making them different initially, then later, depending on character skill, the player sees different symbols.
This does a few things: makes it a skill of the character, not (just) the player. It simplified the game early stages. And if your game has RPG or learned skills, it adds rewarding tactical detail when the player invested in that skill.
@j5v Even better! I'm trying to add lots of roguelike elements, but struggling to come up with good skills. I like the ability of having some passive perception abilities
@SirLich I guess, the real question is "based on the sigil, are there interesting decisions player can make?". If the "Elite" sigil is basically "you should get really close or really far", there is no decision to be made, so it's not useful. On the other hand, if it were to signal type of the enemy (melee, long range etc), I can see the potential to make decisions and be surprised by how underprepared I am when a boss level enemy arrives
@a13x Yeah that's sort of what I proposed. So the middle ground between having unique sigils for every enemy (or having a SINGLE sigil for all enemies), is to use a few sigils, representing enemy difficulty.
This could be as simple as easy/hard, but probably should be slightly more fine-grained (e.g., minion, normal, elite, boss).
@SirLich@a13x Have you considered more of a class-based
sigil? So the player knows that there is a brawler enemy coming, but they don't know how strong it is.
That way, they can prepare the positioning of their troops (and hope that it's not the strong enemy).
@supernovafiles I probably just need to play-test. From my perspective there is both pros and cons to giving the player full information.
My thinking was that if the player knew EVERYTHING that would happen it might start to feel more puzzly and cerebral than I wanted, when I want to lean a bit closer to fingers-crossed-strategy. It's not on a grid for example.
Probably for bosses at least you should know what's coming ;)
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