Devlog 002: February 18th, 2025
In the previous Devlog, I ended by teasing what to do about the stats in the card game version of YIIK's Dark Game. Let’s jump right in.
Stat Considerations
In the original YIIK, characters have 6 stats to consider:
Life (HP)
Strength
Speed
Luck
Pierce
Agility
My self-imposed “Character Statistics” rules required that I find smaller numbers and easier math. So the first thing I did was reduce the character stats to four:
HP
Strength
Spirit
Speed
Spirit Dump
HP, Strength, and Speed seem pretty obvious, but Spirit is new. "Spirit" is the current placeholder name—I’m not sure if that will even vibe with the original lore of YIIK—but I had to call it something. Spirit is my dump stat. It’s the stat I want to use for “other things.” Strength does damage, Speed determines how fast you go, Spirit does... anything else.
Speed Dilemma
Speed, however, is always the curveball. Anyone who has played a video game where Speed is a stat knows that it’s broken. In almost any game, especially a turn-based RPG, the more often you have access to your entire skillset, the better you are. Like I outlined in my “Speed System” requirements in Devlog 001, I need to find a meaningful solution to speed that also doesn’t make it so whomever has the highest speed automatically leaves everyone else in the dust.
But before that, I had to figure out how to track the speed.
Speed Math
Normally, a really basic speed calculation in a video game is additive: you add the speed value of a character to a tracking variable, and when that variable reaches a certain threshold, the associated character gets a turn.
Let’s say the threshold is 100, where Alex’s Speed is 20 and Rory’s Speed is 50. Every “tick” I would add 20 for Alex and 50 for Rory. Rory would reach 100 after 2 ticks. Alex would reach 100 after 5 ticks. So Rory would get to act 2.5 times more often than Alex. But, more importantly for out purposes, before anyone acts, the system would have to do an addition for each character every “tick.” This just isn’t feasible in a tabletop game. I can’t have players doing several subsequent equations every turn just to see who acts next!
Racetracker
My first prototype idea was to use a racetrack. The idea was simple: if your player marker rotated around the outer edges, it would take longer before you got a turn. Having a higher Speed stat meant that your player marker was on a track closer to the inside. In the image below, you can see the yellow marker is on the innermost track, which is divided into three spaces. If every marker was moved forward by 1 space, the yellow marker would reach the end and trigger their turn much more often than the outer markers.
Pros:
This requires no math. Simply move the markers by 1.
The aesthetic could easily be built to look like The All or like a vinyl, matching some of the YIIK visuals.
Cons:
Changing Speed value mid-game (and thus, changing tracks) would be complicated, because you’d have to decide which space on the other tracks to move to.
A lot of tiebreaker rules would be needed for when people pass at the same time.
Every time you move the markers one space forward you are just doing boring upkeep. How many times do I need to move these things before it’s my actual turn!?
No other stat would look like this, and thus this would require its own manufactured component, which feels like an inefficiency in design.
The cons outweighed the pros on this one, for sure. However, in playing with this, I got a revelation! The third point of my cons felt the most valuable: just moving markers one space at a time until it became someone's turn was dead air. What if I made it so you could use an action at the same time as moving the marker?
Suddenly, the BONUS ACT idea was born.
Bonus Act
Like a normal TCG or JRPG, our card game should be turn-based. That is, each player takes one turn, no matter what, back and forth. However, during their turn they would move their Speed marker forward by one. Whenever they passed the “trigger” on the track, they would get a free turn! Faster players would then have free turns more often, but not, like, SUPER often.
This is a mental shift in understanding Speed. Rather than trying to figure out who reaches a goal fastest, like a racetrack, we can instead consider that on every turn you are accumulating a fraction of a future turn. Once you have enough fractions, you cash in.
Inner Track (3 spaces) = Each turn is 1 ⅓ action.
Middle Track (4 spaces) = Each turn is 1 ¼ action.
Outer Track (5 spaces) = Each turn is 1 ⅕ action.
The numbers on this weren’t perfect, but after testing it out it felt really good to suddenly have a free turn at your disposal. Plus, ALL of the downtime of calculating turns is completely removed. I decided to work with this system for a while and move forward.
Tracking Strength and Spirit
For the other stats, Strength and Spirit, no crazy innovation was needed. I settled pretty early on having a simple left-to-right track of ascending numbers that you marked with some sort of marker.
This worked well with equipping Karta for stats. Your character would start with, say, 2 Strength. Then you would equip a Karta with 3 Strength. You could indicate the stat growth by simply moving your Strength marker 3 spaces to the right. Neat.
Base Stat (2) Strength
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8
Base Stat (2) + Karta Mod (3)
Strength
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8
But that got me thinking... wouldn’t it be nice if the Speed stat looked the same as the other stats? As it was now, if you equipped a Karta with 1 Speed, you would go to a completely different component—the circular racetrack—and move your marker inward by one. Not only did this setup feel more and more disjointed, but it became increasingly obvious that if I wanted to have more Speed variation, the circle would just grow bigger and bigger with the addition of more tracks. No!
Three Stat Tracks
That’s where the current design comes in. The speed stat is currently set just like your Strength and Spirit stats, whereas increasing or decreasing the stat is a simple movement of left and right. However, alongside your Speed stat marker, you have an Act marker. This is the marker that moves forward every turn. If, on your turn, the Act marker reaches the end of the track, it then teleports to the Speed marker, and you get your bonus turn!
This works great for a lot of reasons. For starters, the math is more intuitive. Before, a speed of 3 was faster than a speed of 5 because that speed was based on the spaces you tracked before triggering the free turn. Now, because the speed marker indicates the front end of the repeating racetrack, the higher numbers are faster than lower ones.
Next time, I’m going to talk about the Bleed mechanic and how I managed to get extra utility from this stat tracker in order to make the Bleed mechanic even more interesting!
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