Moremi devlog: five elements, 107 powers, and one stamina bar
Time for a proper look under the hood. Here is where Moremi's combat and movement systems currently stand.
Five elements, 107 abilities
Moremi's power set is built from five elements, and each one is a full kit rather than a single spell:
| Element | Abilities |
|---|---|
| Water | 36 |
| Nature | 21 |
| Earth | 20 |
| Fire | 15 |
| Wind | 15 |
Water ended up the deepest branch almost by accident — it started as a handful of projectiles and kept growing. It now runs from simple stuff like Water Lance and Torpedo through to Riptide, Razor Reef, Drown Pool and Tide Gates, and finishes on the big ones: Maelstrom, Split Sea, Tsunami and Leviathan. There is a Mirror Twin that fights alongside you, and a Water Portal that can be escalated into a Portal Barrage.
Earth is the bruiser: Hammer, Spike, Impale, Fault Line, Boulder Rush, plus Bulwark and Sentinels when you would rather turtle. Earth Maw and Eruption are the level-enders.
Nature is the trickiest to play well — Whipvine, Entangle, Ricochet and Leaf Storm are about control rather than raw damage, and Beanstalk and World Tree change the shape of the arena itself. There is also a Stampede with an antelope that is exactly as silly as it sounds, and which we are keeping.
Fire is commitment damage — Bolt, Pyre, Cascade, Cinderfall, Backdraft, a Barrier, and at the top end a Phoenix and a Dragon with its own breath attack.
Wind is movement and disruption: Burst, Boomerang, Vortex, Tornado, Tempest, Trap, and buffs that change how Moremi moves.
One stamina bar for block, roll and dash
This is the part we are happiest with. Blocking, rolling and dashing all draw from a single shared stamina pool rather than having their own cooldowns. In the current build:
- Stamina pool: 100
- Blocking drains 22 per second
- Rolling drains 50 per second
- Dashing drains 140 per second
- Regeneration is 15 per second, and only starts 0.8 seconds after you stop spending
The point is that defence is a budget, not a free action. Holding block is cheap enough to be a real option, but it is not free, so you cannot simply turtle through a fight. A roll costs more than twice as much. A dash is the most expensive thing in the game by a distance — roughly six times the cost of blocking — so escaping a bad position has to be worth it.
Because it is one pool, every defensive choice competes with every other one. Burn your stamina dashing in and you have nothing left to block with when the counter-attack lands. That single decision did more for the feel of combat than any individual power did.
These numbers are still being tuned, and the dash cost in particular has moved several times.
You can drown
Water is not just a power set, it is a hazard. Moremi holds her breath for 9 seconds. Once that runs out, drowning damage ticks every second until you surface. Breath refills faster than it drains, so short dives are cheap and long ones are a gamble.
There is a small piece of care in there worth mentioning: bobbing right at the waterline counts as breathing, rather than flickering between drowning and not. Small thing, but it is the kind of bug that makes a game feel broken.
Coyote time
Moremi keeps a brief window where you can still jump just after walking off a ledge. It is invisible when it works, and it is the difference between a platformer that feels responsive and one that feels like it is arguing with you.
Bosses
Three are in the game so far, one per discipline: the Fire Knight, the Ground Monk, and the Wind Hashashin. Each is built to punish a different bad habit — the Ground Monk in particular is very unkind to players who over-dash.
Not alone
Moremi travels with a companion that reacts to what is happening around it, and there are allies in the world who will fight with you for a while. More on that another time.
Everything above is from the current development build, and numbers are still moving. Next up is more work on boss telegraphs. Follow along here or subscribe by RSS.