Fighting in Vessel

Another week, another post! Let’s keep discovering Vessel design. Last week you read about our design principles. If that’s not the case I highly encourage you to do it, you will find the link at the end of this post. In there you will find that the key emotion we want to build in players is tension. Let’s see how our combat and health will work to evoke this feeling.

Perceived sense of danger

Something that I always find very interesting is how players perceive and read mechanics and how we can trick them to feel more endangered than they actually are. In Vessel a big part of this trick starts with the health system. 

Our player will have a dual health bar, in other words there are two damage types. One represents physical health, it allows the player to receive a certain amount of damage before dying. The second one represents character stress. The amount of stress that the character can hold is equal to their physical health. Therefore, if the player has a really low health the stress negative consequences will appear earlier. 

Which are those consequences? If the stress bar fills up and surpasses the player's current physical health our character, Lucas, will have a panic attack. During these episodes the player will partially lose the control of the character, Lucas will start running away from the danger but potentially falling into hazards, the player will be able to avoid those if he is vigilant enough and succeed in some quick time event. 

This system is built to increase the player's feeling of tension due to a worsening situation. While he is right and his character will be in a more delicate position overtime, this allows us to build enemies that deal different damage types, increasing player chances of surviving. This also grants us the chance of lowering the amount and spacing more the cures during gameplay increasing again this feeling of barely surviving.

About melee combat

One of the differentiating points of Vessel gameplay is a satisfactory melee combat. This combat has three main features:

• Simple combo systems: Based on the pacing of the input the player can land a light or a heavy combo inducing states on the enemies and allowing for finisher moves.

• Finisher moves: a special attack that instantly kills an enemy.

• Damage and critical hits increased dynamically: nothing is more satisfactory to kill an enemy with your last bullet in a single shot, or to obliterate them from existence with a massive punch on your last breath. 

The tension in melee combat is built above overwhelming situations. Lucas is a good boxer and he can easily survive a one vs one situation but he will struggle to keep two foes away and almost die against enemies.

Players will need to choose carefully how to engage against every enemy type to make sure they don’t run out of bullets or take more damage than they need.

About gunplay

Guns in Vessel are really powerful and are the optimal way to kill enemies, they allow the player to take distance from the danger and eliminate the menace. But resources don’t allow you to use them on every enemy, finding bullets will be extremely rare and using them will limit player mobility. In order to shoot Lucas will need to stand still making him vulnerable to other enemies that can sneak into him. 

Final thoughts

Combat in Vessel will not be about realism. In fact we will tweak the experience to grant the most satisfactory and tense gameplay that we can deliver to our players. I’m really interested in knowing your thoughts about those systems. Let them in the comments, share the post, and subscribe to keep informed about this project!