Displaced: New mechanics and gameplay (Patreon)

This is the time to reveal some more design choices I've come up with, to make Displaced stand out. Well, obviously, I'm not focusing just on the story, as gameplay will be a substantial part of it. So, what Displaced has to offer?

Crafting system. Crafting system is omnipresent, yet hardly ever goes beyond "put 2 items together to get a new one". There's rarely any options or decisions and it's really boring when it's a straight path, at least for me. 

So, how do you improve it? By introducing more options and outcomes for a singular item. Firstly, there's 2 main item categories: materials and gear. Materials will be gathered and obtained from combat, while gear will be crafter from it. The catch is that you will be able to craft same piece of gear out of multiple material variations, resulting in very different items. For example, initially you will only be able to use generic "Wood" for crafting basic stuff, which will be okay for bows but not so much for swords (although you will still be able to craft a wooden sword, if you want), but then "Elven Wood" will be introduced, allowing to craft same items but with greater alternative. The same way craft will be utilizing ores, metals, bones and fibers. As you progress, you will be getting more and more options with all sorts of cool stuff. This way you won't hunt eventually epic monsters just gold and exp, but also to use their remains to get cool stuff. 

And all of it will be coming with dynamic icon generation.

The second major thing I'll go through, is the leveling system. For a quite long time I've been wondering how to make it more meaningful than "Your stats grow bigger as you levelup", yet easy to grasp. My approach to this is a trait system. The characters will have a large pool of available traits, but on the levelup you will only be able to unlock 1 out of 3 random traits presented to you (so you have no idea what you gonna get until you actually gain a level, making it always a surprise). You will still be able to unlock other traits you didn't get, but still want to, with money. 

Besides that, the traits will require certain amount of levels to activate, so as you grow bigger, the more traits you can have active in same time. As other stats won't be increasing on levelup, this means that trait options and gear will make the core of characters' strength, which I find rather nice, as it allows to keep numbers in simple order without thinking too much of stuff like level caps and supposed enemy difficulty. 

Last, but not least, we've acquired a side programmer, who will be taking care of most of the mechanical stuff for the project, allowing me to stick to the design and writing. With that, we are getting rather close to the demo release, and assuming we move in same stride, it shouldn't take more than 1.5-2 months. 

As always, let us know what you think and thanks for the attention!