Loot System Improvements


Hello again!

I have made some new updates to the game. Apart from fixing bugs and doing small improvements here and there, most focus has been on the loot system, updating icons and adding more puzzles.

Loot System

In the previous loot system, I pretty much just used the good old loot table for specifying what can be dropped and what probability it has of being dropped. The likelihood of an item being dropped was defined by a value between 0 and 1 (0% to 100%). This was fine at first, this gives you maximum control of how loot is being distributed. However, as the number of items increased, it turned out to be nightmare to maintain and balancing became a lot more difficult. An interesting part of this system is that the probability of an item dropping is not an instrinsic characteristic of the item itself. So you could for example have a wooden crate where there is a 10% chance of getting a healing potion and have a chest where there's 20% chance of getting the same healing potion.

To fix the maintainability issue, I added loot tiers, a number between 0 and 4;

  • 0 = No loot
  • 1 = Very common
  • 2 = Common
  • 3 = Uncommon
  • 4 = Rare

Instead of balancing all items in the game, I only need to balance the tiers and decide which tier an item should end up in. This lowers the amount of choices (and my headache too).

Key / Lock Puzzles

I also added procedural puzzle where you need to find a key to unlock a door. There are different types of keys (bronze key, silver key, gold key, etc) to avoid confusion if there are more than one locked door in the map.

Try out the demo here.

Get Underworld Quest Demo [Working title]

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