Help with making a combat system

Question

I'm hoping someone will see this among all the spam but-

I am having a hard time finding a current combat system to bounce off of (as I have no idea what I'm doing). The expectation is to go through a dungeon and randomly encounter enemies (if it helps, I'm using the info from the cookbook about moving around through a dungeon ).

Basically, what I'm going for.

1. set up several types of enemies (goblins, kolbolds, whatever) at differing level (so, you might encounter one that's lvl 1, another that's lvl 2, etc).

2. have a random attack stat based on weapon. Say I have a rusty sword. Maybe it does 2 damage on attack, and 5 the next.

3. Attack rising with leveling up.

 

How do I go about setting stuff like this up? I can't seem to find anything up to date, and nothing about differing attack damage with the same weapon. I'm just at a complete loss. I'd really appreciate it if someone can at the very least send me in the right direction.

Answer 1

The problem is that there is literally an infinite number of ways to implement a combat system, and which ways would be good for you not only depend on your game and coding skills, but are also highly subjective.

Thus there's no good way to answer your question.

You'd be better off Googling for discussions of how good JRPG or tabletop combat systems work or looking at the combat systems of other existing games that you think would work for you, and then taking the best bits and building a combat system from that.

Good luck and have fun!

Answer 2

A grad student at CMU called Chris Martens wrote a couple of blog posts in 2015 that include a tutorial for creating a turn-based combat system. The tutorial uses Harlowe, not Sugarcube, but the design principles are explained well, so if you can figure out the equivalent Sugarcube syntax, this should get you started. Check out:

http://lambdamaphone.blogspot.com/2015/02/using-twine-for-games-research-part-ii.html

and 

http://lambdamaphone.blogspot.com/2015/03/using-twine-for-games-research-part-iii.html

(Part I provides background for the research that led to the tutorial being created; interesting, but not essential).