by Brian Giaime
[Meet Brian. He has gaming in his pores, starting with building with the Warcraft III editor as a kid, to setting his sights on video game design in college, to shipping Marvel Super Hero Squad Online while still in college, and from there becoming a designer at Glu Mobile working on several games, the best known of which was the incredibly successful Deer Hunter 2014. The back of his car contains every RPG handbook known to man, as far as I can tell. Certainly there is no room for actual people to sit. We love his enthusiasm, and how much he cares about our future Moonrise players. — Sanya]
One of our favorite aspects of Moonrise is the way in which your character (your Warden), participates in combat. You’re right there with your team, hurling fireballs, doling out heals, and actively engaging with powerful foes.
Every player will play their Warden differently. Some players will build their Warden into an artillery piece that slings powerful attacks from behind tanky, defensive Solari. Other players will bring healing and buffs to support and strengthen their already formidable offensive Solari. Some players may equip relics with unusual effects like:
- Restoring all Solari on the battlefield to full Health
- Petrifying and healing your team to protect them from defeat
- Simultaneously setting an enemy aflame, poisoning them, and rooting them to the ground.
How will you build your Warden? What tricks are up your sleeve?
Under the Hood
Before getting into the meat of how our game systems work, you’ll want to know a few things about stats in Moonrise.
A Warden has six stats, just like their Solari: Strength, Armor, Spirit, Resist, Speed, and Health.
- Strength improves the damage of your Strength-based attacks.
- Armor reduces the damage of Strength-based attacks used against you.
- Spirit improves the damage of your Spirit-based attacks.
- Resist reduces the damage of Spirit-based attacks used against you.
- Speed reduces boot times and cooldown times of all skills.
- Health determines how much damage a Solari or Warden can withstand.
A note on Skills and Speed
A skill’s boot time determines how long a Solari or Warden must be active in the battle before that skill can be used. The cooldown determines the length of time that a Warden or Solari must stay in combat after using a skill before using that skill again.
Increasing your Warden’s Speed, through leveling up or by equipping the right gear, will decrease boot times and cooldowns on your skills.
Your Warden’s Arsenal
A fully equipped Warden has five pieces of gear in their kit. Each one serves a different but important purpose.
First and foremost is your major relic. All relics empower wardens with skills, but major relics provide skills that turn the tide of battle. We’re talking waves of fire cascading over combat, big damage-enhancing buffs for your active Solari, or bolts of lightning that stun your opponents. Major relics are your most prized possessions, often hiding in deep dark corners of dungeons, guarded by powerful boss Lunari.
Skills don’t have to be earth-shattering to be useful, though, and minor relics prove that point. Your minor relic is your handy toolbelt: a low-cooldown Regeneration skill, a simple fire bolt, or even a dizzying strike, causing enemies to sometimes hurt themselves while attacking. Major relics are great at doing one thing particularly well, but minor relics supply valuable tricks that let your Warden prepare for the challenges you’ll face.
Just like your Solari, your Warden’s combat potency relies on your Strength, Spirit, and Speed. These stats automatically improve as your Warden gains levels, but you can equip an offensive item to push them even higher. These items come in three varieties:
- Prisms improve Spirit and Speed.
- Totems improve Strength and Speed.
- Orbs improve Spirit, Strength, and Speed.
Totems and Prisms don’t offer as many different stat boosts as Orbs, but they tend to have more modifiers. Modifiers produce powerful effects, such as Fire Boost, which improves damage dealt by a Warden’s Fire skills. Rarer items feature more powerful modifiers, such as Cleanse Chance (which offers a chance for the Warden to gain the Cleanse buff when any debuff lands on them).
Every Warden enters combat knowing that they’re exposed to the same dangers as their Solari. To prepare for this, each Warden equips one defensive item to bolster their survivability. Like offensive items, defensive items come in three varieties:
- Chains improve Resist and Health.
- Torcs improve Armor and Health.
- Amulets improve Armor, Resist, and Health.
Defensive items can also provide modifiers, just like offensive items. As with their offensive equivalents, Chains and Torcs tend to provide more modifiers than Amulets in exchange for bolstering fewer stats.
The final gear category includes the elusive Utility items. These offer no stat boosts, but instead are purely about modifiers, with the best of the best reserved for the rarest utility items in the game. We’re talking about stuff like Toxin Immune, which prevents any Toxin debuff from afflicting the Warden, or Destructive Warden, which grants the Warden a small chance with every damaging strike to deal huge extra damage. Modifiers like these can be so powerful that some players build their entire team around the single utility item their Warden equips!
Looking Your Best
Stepping away from stats and skills, Moonrise also features a wide array of clothing and hairstyles for your Warden. Throughout your adventures, you’ll find a huge variety of pieces to try. Fashion in Moonrise is varied, drawn from what’s in vogue in various towns, cities and local cultures. While some locales value traditional garb, high fashion, or practical working gear, others lean toward edgier fare such as mohawks, bright colors, and buckles galore.
On top of all that, you’ll also find various dyes you can apply to your outfits. In certain cases, you’ll be able to dye different materials or elements of your clothing independently, creating a genuinely unique look to help your Warden stand out in a crowd – or blend right in, whichever feels best to you.
Why We Did it This Way
Zooming out from the details of how these systems work, next we’ll talk about why we landed on the system that’s in the game right now.
You’ve probably played plenty of games that use RPG elements such as stats, gear, modifiers, custom looks, and level progression. We’re big fans of how these systems give players a feeling of ever-increasing power while also supplying designers with an infinite supply of rewards to give out. Players can build up their prowess, empowering their Warden to overcome challenges that provide memorable moments of triumph, then move on to even stronger opponents in the next encounter.
With that in mind, designing a robust, “full-assed” RPG-style game for mobile platforms requires us to be honest with ourselves about how games are often played on mobile. You’re on the bus … waiting for a meeting … or even in the restroom. [Editor’s note: EW. — SW] These are situations where people can’t devote all their attention to the game, and that’s okay! This play pattern is part of what makes mobile gaming appealing to a lot of people, and we all win if we build an experience that manages to feel rich and interesting without demanding full immersion for long stretches of time.
For that reason, we settled on a “light but rich” set of equipment for the Warden. We’re not looking at ten slots with seven lines of text and a bunch of stats on each, but we’re also not simplifying to the point of having our gear be meaningless or so simple as to be uninteresting.
We want to give you the tools to build a character and combat strategies that are YOURS, and for you to be able to learn where the strengths and weaknesses of those strategies are, with the power to change things and iterate on your strategies. Moonrise aims to give you the tools to express yourself through the way you play, but in a way that won’t make you miss your bus stop or the fact that class has begun.
We’re having a blast with it so far, and we feel confident you will too.