This Blog Post was part of the Elder Game blog. It was posted by Citan on July 21, 2011.
Additional Blog entries can be found on the Developers page or in Category:Game Blogs
There’s been some great replies to my last post, and I want to thank you for the ideas. I’m still sifting through them and figuring out what I can realistically make work, but I particularly liked these tidbits:
The “rune” metaphor to explain item decay: it’s a lot more elegant than “sharpening swords” and it allows for infinite diversity of power-ups. Because sharpening a sword just makes it sharp. But a rune is maaagggicccc so it could do anything at all.
The idea that items can be “melted down” somehow to provide temporary power-ups for other items. More directly, raw items may even be prerequisites for creating certain runes. The need to use different weapons for different problems (already a part of the combat design)
Legendary items that are permanent and require no repair/allow no runes to be installed/etc. They’re very powerful but very specialized — so for instance you might find the epic sword of frog-man stabbing which is the best frog-man stabber that could ever be… it doesn’t ever need repairing. But it’s also not ver good against anything but frog-men.
And several others. I think a lot of people described what I already had pictured in my head, which means I didn’t explain what was in my head very well!
This all brings us around to the elephant in the room, though: given such finite resources, can I make this system as exciting as it should be? If I can’t do it really well, it should probably not be done: a half-assed item-decay system is far worse than no item-decay system at all. This is one of those mechanics where you need to “go big or go home.” Which I’ll talk about in another post shortly…