Game design issues

Today I finished work on the grenade display (and the consumption of items)… Nothing to show for it, since it’s all temporary art for now…

Then, I was going to start with the health injector.

The idea of a health injector is that you can use it to recharge your health bar. It’s like you have two health pools, instead of one. It would act as a “on-demand” health pack…

But when I was going to implement it, a thought struck me… what’s the actual difference between the health injector and the shield?

The shield’s charge goes down when the player is damaged, and recharges slowly… If it depletes completely, it takes some seconds to start recharging again.

The health injector was something you could do on demand, but it doesn’t recharge…

That means that the shield is almost always a better choice, unless the health injector has a better conversion…

For example, let’s imagine the health pool has 1000 points. The shield and the injector also have 1000 points… In actual terms, this means you can take 2000 points of damage minimum, but potentially, the shield can give you much more, if you take moderate amounts of damage every time you enter a fight… But if we improve the health injector conversion (2 to 1, or 3 to 1), with the health injector, you can recover (quickly) 2000 or 3000 points of health… But this seems a bit overpowered in the short term, which mean that for this difference to exist, I’d have to reduce the conversion of the shield (0.5 to 1, for example), which would make the shield a bit on the useless side…

I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to add this anymore, to be honest… The shield always seems like the better choice, except if the conversion rates are tuned so that it makes the shield almost useless…

I need to think about this a bit more, to be honest… What are your thoughts on this, everyone?

Now listening to “Land of the Free II” by “Gamma Ray”

Link of the Day: This looks so neat… also looks tiring, but the coolness overweights that… It’s awesome people are looking into ways of using VR in novel ways, instead of just the same old, same old…