Coming Soon to HL and the HL-engine...

I still have a lot to add body-wise before I'll be ready for a character creation system, but I'd like to get that together soon. (I'm not sure yet if it will be the old or new UI branch that gets character-creation initially, it will depend on which is ready for it first.)

I'm working to add difficulty selection to both branches now, it's actually pretty straightforward- all I need is a level-constant divisor (~3 for HardLife difficulty, ~1 for EasyLife). That divisor would be applied against base-level, growth rate, and search/loot chances, among other things.

I've already started retuning how energy and karma are calculated, and I've worked out a cleaner set of scaling soft-caps for stats, powers, skills, shards, etc. Karma is moving into a light/dark shard format, and elemental shards are in planning, along with a systemic approach to handling shards- seeing them in your resources/inventory area, and being able to spend them to upgrade powers, metrics, skills, stats, etc, as well as trading them with some NPCs, generating/finding them, and looting them off some opponents. Not to mention some spells, powers, and techniques may require shards to activate... and eventually you may even be able to use them in an engineering capacity to build fun gadgets. ;)

Capacity is getting adjusted from Caliber*Magnitude to Caliber+Magnitude, and everything that uses it now benefits from the overcharge formula allowing up-to Capacity*Magnitude. While this does mean permanent stat modifiers have a lower soft-cap, I am adding a lot more stackable group IDs for them, looking to double or even triple the number of things you can do to cumulative train your stats up, before you have to raise base levels again. (like how exercise, fighting, draining, and surges work, along with spending karma on stats again- but without the neigh-exponential cost curve)

Because of this, I've worked out how many power and skill points you can have at a given level, as well as how high individual powers and skills can be raised at that level. The per-power cap is raising from Caliber to Capacity, and the max number of points in powers will be Capacity*Magnitude. (allowing Magnitude # of maxed out powers, or a more diverse mix of low-level powers)

Skills are pretty similar, but I want more available, so they are getting Capacity+Level, and the max is still x Magnitude. Further, for skills I'm planning to add an application/action unlock at each triangular/stack level. (so a new ability unlocks at skill levels: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, ...) You'll be allowed to choose which ability for that skill-tree, so long as you meet whatever prereqs it has (might require another ability, or related skill reach a certain level first... such as Physics requiring some knowledge of Mathematics to build on).

Skills will modify outcomes of various actions (such as Proper Form allowing you lift more weight without injury), and unlock new interactions with objects and entities in the world. They will also help related job performance, and are planned to be added alongside the jobs-system. (perhaps sooner as unlike jobs, they aren't dependent on the new-UI/passive-time-system change... but the unlocked ability/actions would still require the new action system for the new-UI)

On the subject of the new-UI and actions system, I am very much looking forward to being able to implement grappling in combat. The old-UI doesn't have room to add combat-actions, and they are all hard-coded at the moment... the new-UI will group them into sub-actions with categories like Strikes, Grapples, Taunts, Use-X[Item/Environment/Power/Skill/etc.], ...

Back over to powers, the Goddess Mode cheat will be getting a special menu to customize power-levels, rather than only being allowed to be "All-Powerful". (seriously, how can you be all-powerful if you don't even have the power to control how powerful you are ;p)

Also, Powers are getting a universal scaling rate (along with a slight per-power soft-cap increase). Powers will scale up 10% at each rank/power-level, using the formula 1.1^Rank for compounded gains. This means that instead of adding +1 to the multiplier, for some powers, and some arbitrary scaling for others, we will instead have a smoother growth experience that doubles every 7 power-levels, triples every 12, and grows by an order of magnitude every 24 power-levels/ranks.