Author：Fearless Sunshine Tanjirou (Ziming Wang)

Contents

1. Highlights Design

1.1 Designing Systems Around Vampires

1.1.1 Diurnal System

Vampires are set up to fear the sun, and in this game, this setting has been made into a mechanic: during the night, vampires' movements are not restricted; during the day, vampires in the sunlight will be quickly burned to death by the sun. This fits in well with the game’s “survival + combat” gameplay: players go out hunting during the night to raid enemies and unlock new buildings and recipes, while gathering resources and building homes during the day when the sun doesn’t shine, in preparation for the battle of the night.

1.1.2 Blood System

Vampires can’t afford to suck blood. In this game, the player can suck the blood of a dying lifeform, and a successful spell will kill that enemy and transform their blood type and blood quality into that of the enemy they sucked.

The value of the blood quality determines how many additional attributes the blood system rewards the player with: the higher the blood quality, the more attributes are granted to the player. Players can learn the blood quality of their enemies before drawing blood and decide who they want to suck from.

Whenever a player takes damage, some blood is deducted from the blood pool to slowly recover, and players can also share their high-quality blood among themselves to maximize their combat power at the moment, thus making it less difficult to defeat the boss.

1.2 Form

Defeat the boss in the game to unlock the form.

• Wolf form: movement speed increase (running map opening)
• Mouse form: stealthy, not easily detected by enemies (sneak)
• Human form: humans do not attack players and can trade with merchants (sneak + trade function)

There are also late forms such as bats and toads, all of which provide players with different ideas for action and a different gameplay experience.

2. Improvement Scenarios (for PVE only)

2.1 Servant System Optimization

The thing I look forward to most about playing as a vampire is being able to infect other people and make them my servants. The experience I was looking forward to was playing as the Ghost King and infecting powerful humans to become my servants one by one (just like the Upper and Lower Strings Ghosts in the anime work Demon Slayer) to take over the city for me, infecting and slaughtering my enemies.

Unfortunately, the game’s powerful V-blooded human bosses cannot be taken as my servants; the player can only take their chances in one stronghold after another, looking for newly generated high blood quality enemies (meaning enemies with higher blood quality percentages; the higher the blood quality of the same type of enemy, the stronger he is) and infecting them as player’s servants. The process of transforming into a servant takes an hour and a half (purely online time, offline time does not count), and the successfully transformed minion has the same equipment slots as the player, requiring the player to build equipment for them.

It takes a lot of time and effort to take on servants, so what can they do? Before the “Castle Throne” is built, servants can only patrol around the castle; they can be sent to raid strongholds after the throne is built. The success of raiding strongholds depends entirely on the combat power of the servants. The combat power of a servant is determined by both its equipment level and the concentration of the servant’s blood. The higher the combat power of the servant, the higher the success rate of raiding strongholds, but raiding strongholds will only reward the player with some resources, which is of minimal help to the player. Moreover, this gameplay goes against the game’s setting: servants are no longer human, they are already vampires and cannot raid strongholds during the day.

I have two current ideas for improvement.

• Remove the mechanic of dispatching raiding strongholds and keep the current servant combat power mechanic, allowing servants to follow the player into battle and resurrect servants when defeated, but burning servants during the day permanently dies.

This improvement can significantly improve the combat experience of small groups of players and lone wolves in PVE and can promote the pursuit of high-quality servants and equipment of the same level as the player. It also ensures that players' progress is healthy by limiting the speed of raiding through the “servants who are burned during the day permanently die” rule.

• Retain the mechanic of dispatching raiding strongholds, remove the current servant combat power mechanic and replace it with a servant exclusive leveling system, gaining experience points by killing other enemies and increasing combat power, servants also have the probability of infecting stronghold enemies and can eventually take control of the stronghold and permanently produce resources from that stronghold. The initial level of a servant is determined by its bloodline and pre-infection level, with vampires infected by servants having a lower initial level. Servants are not allowed to follow the player into battle, and direct servants can be resurrected after being defeated.

This improved idea allows for a mid to late game style of gameplay that changes into a strategy game, allowing the player to grow their vampire army and control stronghold after stronghold, gaining more resources to arm themselves and eventually complete their revenge on the humans. This idea requires the NPC camp to be able to resist the vampires' actions and be able to strike at vampire castles in the dark, leaving the player to think about how to allocate the number of servants to guard their homes and raid their strongholds.

Of course, the improvement idea I’m proposing is a very subjective view that only applies to PVE and can not apply to PVP at all. if the game’s system needs to cater to both PVP and PVE, I think the current mechanic is a very safe solution.

2.2 Knowledge Unlocking

The number of “paper” and “scrolls” used to unlock knowledge in the game is not too much if you are not a player who deliberately brushes materials. However, unlocking knowledge requires players to consume a lot of “paper” and “scrolls”, and a large part of the knowledge is household, which is usually only decorative and cannot provide more help to players in battle or survival, while the unlocking of equipment knowledge can often improve the player’s equipment level and reduce the difficulty of the player’s raid on the boss. Because the game ties the unlocking of mechanics and recipes to boss raiding, if the player is unable to raid the bosses, the game will be stuck in progress.

I think players should be allowed to choose the type of knowledge they want to unlock, with different types of knowledge consuming different amounts of unlockable props. Each time you unlock a random knowledge from the chosen knowledge type. This would ensure the player’s combat experience in the first to mid game, and also allow them to unlock a variety of decorative furniture for survival building needs in the mid to late game when props are plentiful. Of course, this design will also lead to a wider power gap between players in PVP play and can only be applied in PVE games.

2.3 Formulation

For a survival builder game, functional buildings that give access to unlocked recipes are less than logical designs. Take the blood builder for example the only way for players to get high-quality life essence in the first to mid-game is to synthesize it using pure hearts. The only way to get high-quality blood essence is to synthesize them using pure hearts, which only drop in bosses (repeated kills do not drop them) and a small chance of dropping them from high-level elite monsters. This results in a low number of pure hearts, but a high demand for quality blood essence (which is required for functional buildings and equipment). Once the player has killed Tristan the Vampire Slayer, the recipe for synthesizing blood essence into high-quality blood essence will be unlocked. There is no threshold for obtaining blood essence (you can get it by killing any creatures), which makes players regret their earlier use of pure hearts to synthesize high-quality blood essence, but there is nothing they can do about it - the only way to level up their equipment and unlock the recipe for mid and later stages.

I think that unlocked recipes should be hidden in functional buildings and that killing bosses in mid to late games would unlock upgrade blueprints for the corresponding functional buildings, allowing players to upgrade functional buildings. The upgrades would allow the newly unlocked recipes to be viewed while reducing the synthesis requirements for the originally unlocked recipes. This makes the unlocking of new recipes more in line with the worldview (it doesn’t look like the boolean value changes from 0 to 1) and reduces player dissatisfaction with what could be called “wasteful synthesis” in the early stages.

2.4 Equipment

Where the gear disappointed me was in the attribute design of the gathering weapons (ax, wolfsbane, sword). I do understand the starting point of the current design: players can build higher-level weapons and level up their gear while retaining the resource gathering efficiency word to gather materials faster. But this design ignores one thing: players spend the first to mid-game fighting in the wilderness more often with spears (bonus to creature damage), scythes (bonus to undead damage), and crossbows (long-range weapons). As the game progresses, higher-level gathering weapons become more expensive to craft, but they provide the same gathering bonuses as lower-level gathering weapons, leading players to choose to forgo crafting higher-level gathering weapons and use combat weapons instead when they encounter resources that require higher-level weapons to gather.

The solution is simple: reduce the crafting cost of crafting gathering weapons (reduce the number of materials needed), while reducing the attack power of gathering weapons and increasing the gathering bonus of high-quality gathering weapons.