Game Mechanics Profs Rework - Gathering Deckbuilding System

**NOTE: Any details in this rework, especially numbers, would need to be severely tuned during playtesting, as they are mostly estimates for what would work best rather than finalized concepts.


I’m going to skip all of the preamble about where and how the current professions system fails (you already know that) and open by outlining my goals in this rework:

1. Make crafting accessible and viable to casual players throughout progression
2. Reduce the currently extreme barrier to entry for high level gathering
3. Make gathering at least as interesting as grinding combat xp currently is, without removing its relaxing nature

Band-Aid changes
The real meat of this rework will be the overhaul to gathering, but there are additionally a few small tweaks I want to add. Some of these changes patch issues with the current system, and others are important to support the reworked system but would not make sense if implemented on their own.

First of all, crafting levels are no longer required to use a certain material. The level of the resulting item, however, will be in between the level of the player and the level of the material (leaning towards that of the material, with some randomness). The idea is that anyone can craft an item with purchased goods, but specialized or high quality crafteds should still require leveling. Additionally, there should be a “practice mode” option in crafting, where players can quickly spend a large bulk of materials to make a single item, and earn a relatively large sum of XP from it. Because of this change, crafting XP largely costs materials rather than time, which helps reduce the time spent on clicking and waiting in order to level up and maintain the value of materials. The use of ingredients for levelling would remain important in this mode.

On the gathering side, I’m also adding “multitools” that can gather all four resource types, but have less durability than a main tool. The idea is that players can carry tools on them to engage with professions related content when passing by, as opposed to having to return to a bank to grab the particular tool. Multitools also allow for grind spots that include multiple resource types, and for other content which will be described later.

Two changes that don’t make sense in the current system but are necessary for this rework: One, gathering nodes will no longer be hard-locked by the player level, but tools will be. This means that gathering while underlevelled is technically possible, but not viable or easy. Two, node cooldowns will be as short as possible while still giving the player the feedback of having harvested that node (~3-5 seconds, decided in playtesting).


Gathering Gameplay Loop
Overview
The core of the gathering rework centers around a card system, where players choose temporary buffs as they gather. While doing this, they must actively manage the durability of their tools, which is now the equivalent to combat’s HP. Durability loss (among other stats) is impacted by minigames performed at the harvesting of each node.

Durability
Currently, tool durability mostly just forces players to run to a city and spend a few emeralds every so often. In this rework, I’m repurposing it to become an active mechanic that adds resource management and risk/reward to professions. As stated above, the goal here is for it to fill the role that HP holds in combat.

Durability decreasing does not decrease luck like in the current system, but it does increase the difficulty of minigames (more on how that works later). Since poor minigame performance leads to much higher durability loss, this leads to remaining at a low durability being fairly risky.

During gathering sessions, tool durability is maintained through certain cards. It can still be repaired at a blacksmith, but all cards are reset when this is done. When a tool reaches zero durability, it must be repaired before being used again (this is the “death” condition).

Cards
Each gathering node has an attached card, such that players choose their next card by choosing what node to gather from. Each card lasts for a specified number of following gathers, with a rough range of 1-20. Players can make and maintain their deck to optimize for certain stats (material bulk, XP gain, survivability, etc.). Most cards either improve aforementioned stats at the cost of durability (whether through directly costing durability or making durability harder to maintain), or grant durability at the cost of those stats. Whenever a card is collected, every other node in the grind spot has a 50/50 chance of gaining a new, randomized card.

Card examples:

• Slightly increased luck for material quality (Duration: 11 nodes)
• Double XP, -30 durability (Duration: 10 nodes)
• Decreased luck for material quality, +35 durability (Duration: 8 nodes)
• 10% chance to get double yield, but minigames windows are tighter (Duration: 16 nodes)
• Minigames go 70% faster (Duration: 18 nodes)
• Minigames go 30% slower (Duration: 14 nodes)
• Gathered materials are lost to repair the tool (Duration: 4 nodes)
• The cards collected are 50% more effective (Duration: 1 node)
• Gathering is done with an AOE sweep, allowing for the collection of multiple nodes at once -- both materials and cards are gained (Duration: 4 nodes)
• If tool durability is below 30%, 20% chance to get double yield (duration: 9 nodes)

As players level up, the pool of available cards grows to include increasingly complex and interesting cards. The first 10 levels, for example, would be mostly limited to the more basic stat focused cards like the first two listed above.

Minigames
Players must perform a short timing based minigame when harvesting each node, where their performance determines the durability loss, material quality(also impacted by RNG), and XP gain. Failing a minigame results in the material being lost, and a substantial hit to tool durability. The difficulty increases gradually with the level of the resource, but becomes drastically more difficult as players use underlevelled gear (similar to how it is possible but very difficult to grind mobs when underlevelled).

Each resource type has a distinct minigame that revolves around left and right clicks.

• Fishing: An amount of time passes (varying somewhat with RNG), then a left/right click combo appears on screen. Player performance is measured by how quickly it can be done, and the minigame is failed if too much time passes or there is an incorrect input. As the difficulty increases, click combos get longer (length ranges from 2-20 clicks), the time limit becomes less forgiving, and the minigame must be performed additional times (max 6 times).

• Woodcutting: A horizontal bar appears onscreen with several stationary zones that each represent a right or left click. A point sweeps across the bar, and players must time right/left clicks when the point is within one of the zones. Player performance is measured by how good the timing of each input is, and the minigame is failed when there are too many missed or false inputs. As the difficulty increases, the sweeping point moves faster, and it goes back and forth additional times with more click zones being added on each sweep.

• Farming: The Feather’s Fly plant growth minigame. Player performance is judged by how quickly they can react to each input, and the minigame is failed when too many inputs are incorrect or missed (missing hurts less than getting it wrong). As the difficulty increases, the minigame gets longer, and less time is allowed for each input.

• Mining: On-screen icons representing left and right clicks each independently switch between held and released states, and players must match it as closely as possible with their mouse. Player performance is measured by how closely they match, and the minigame is failed when too many inputs are too far off.

I want to clarify that the role of these minigames is not to be the main gameplay feature; players should be focused on choosing cards. Their real purpose is to add more variability to durability loss, so that players have to adapt to unexpected situations rather than always being perfectly in control. To this end, there is also a degree of randomness in minigame difficulty, to give the potential for an unexpected large hit to durability.

Content
Bosses
For each resource tier every 10 levels, there is a boss altar that is entered with ~20 of each resource (later ones may also require materials of a certain quality). Each boss is themed after the four resources required to fight it.

Unlike normal combat, these bosses follow a turn-based structure, where the boss takes an action every time the player does (“actions” consist of harvesting nodes and attacking the opponent). Arenas include various gathering nodes scattered throughout, which both the player and the boss can use to gain cards helpful to them for the fight (this makes using a multitool important, as otherwise you’d be locked out of collecting most cards). Nodes in the arena each include two cards -- one that the player would gain, and one that the boss would gain. This forces the player to consider not only which cards would help them the most, but also which cards they want to prevent the boss from taking by harvesting their nodes. Nodes collected during bosses would not give materials, only cards.

Aside from gathering cards, players and bosses can also directly interact with their opponent, inciting a wario-ware like sequence of more unique and elaborate minigames, where the player performance determines the damage to either their tool or the boss, depending on who incited it. I won’t go into examples of minigames because I know very little about the technological constraints, but there is a recent forum post titled "Progressive Warioware Prof" which provides a great base for what I’m thinking of (I cannot link it because I don't have 10 posts). These minigames would be individually quick and simple, but players would have to execute a chain of several randomly selected ones in quick succession.

Alongside the expected rewards of materials, ingredients, and XP, each of these bosses have a small unique loot pool of cards in item form that can permanently be applied to tools similarly to powders. Alongside these, bosses can drop gear that is useful for gathering or crafting, and drop higher level tools as an alternative to grinding dungeons.

World Events
Professions world events are split into two types -- gathering challenges and miniboss encounters.

Gathering challenges would give players a limited amount of time to reach a certain condition, such as gaining bulk materials, gaining high quality materials, or fully repairing a damaged tool. They force players to choose cards optimally, in order to reach the quota in time (a robust pity system would be required to make this function fairly).

Miniboss encounters are similar to boss encounters, but simpler, and bosses are themed after a particular resource rather than four. The events would open with a short time period (~1 minute) to gather cards, before the miniboss spawns. After this, nodes are no longer interactable, and the player and miniboss exchange turns. The player damages the boss by doing the gathering minigame of the profession, and the boss damages the player’s tool with the same minigame sequence as the full bosses.

Most of these world events (particularly the bosses) would need to be filled out in subsequent updates rather than the main one due to the dev time they’d require.

Miniquests
Gathering miniquests will be mostly the same as they are now, but will often have more difficult requirements (ex: certain quality, higher bulk) to account for the buffs that cards give. Miniquests should generally be a calmer version of the Gathering Challenge world events.


Other Notes
Thank you for reading all that! I know that “professions should get reworked” isn’t the most original idea, but the concept of adding a deckbuilding element felt fresh and fitting enough to be worth sharing, and everything else grew out of that. I am by no means an experienced game designer, so any and all feedback would be very much appreciated. And if anything was worded unclearly, I’d be happy to clarify in the comments.