Being a creative is a curse, I swear, sometimes.

I was talking with a friend about Witness to Unity, and struggling with some mechanical and structural thoughts I had for it. Specifically around its calendar/day-night system.

I started thinking about it again after watching a little of Metaphor's demo gameplay, and I saw it had a five day calendar system. If I was going to extend WTU's gameplay loop to try and balance out some pacing issues I was worrying about, maybe I didn't have to even have seven days in a week! However this gets into other tricky factors about WTU, and that is by its nature of a world-hopping story.

For a long time now I've wanted to write a big post about the direction Witness to Unity has taken since I previously properly discussed it, sometime in 2016. The problem with this is oh god that's such a long time. So much has changed in its design and code direction. I don't know if I even have it in me to write a proper rundown for each element, so maybe I'll just bullet-point it.

The thing about damage calculation is you kinda have to feel it out by vibes. You want increasing stats by certain amounts to feel like a noticeable difference in your damage output, whether that's +1 or +10, or anything else. But to achieve this, it feels like you need to write damage formula and then shape everything else around it and hope for the best.

Which is a problem if you reach a point or come back to it later and the vibes are off.

I'm presently struggling with looking at Witness To Unity's damage formula and thinking... this thing seems a mess. I'm multiplying or dividing the stats a lot just to get things into the "shape" I want, and maybe that's bad? I'm not sure how to explain this, so I'll start with how the stats and all currently work.