Another big step ahead today, the circle of life for my game is finally complete. Birth, life, death, rebirth.

The game simulation (Life) has been working for a long time. Next up was entity creation (Birth) since if you're going to be killin', you really need an easy way to make things to kill. Back in April I added lasers and fiery Death. The final element I was missing was rebirth. Or as we in the games business like to call it - Loot.

Eric over at Elder Game was kind enough to write up his thoughts on random loot which was really helpful when I was trying to figure out the loot system for my game. It's almost like having a game designer on the team!

The fifty-thousand foot view of the new loot system is that everybody who takes part in a battle has a shot at getting some loot, but if you leave too soon before the killin' is done - no loot for you. Also, killing a unit of a higher level yields a better chance to get loot, and if you're killing newbs you have way less chance of it being profitable.

The loot system gives out three types of rewards: cash, unit components, and complete units made up of a bunch of components. I decided against completely random loot stats, so instead, it selects your prizes from a list of loot items. That list should be long enough to be interesting by launch and there are some very expensive, very fancy, completely exclusive items on it. To help players pick out the good stuff, I put in a color coding system:

• Grey - sell it fast.
• White - normal loot.
• Green - uncommon loot.
• Blue - rare loot.
• Purple - epic items.
• Orange - legendary items.
• Dark Red - one of a kind, wipe-the-field-with-em items.

The amount of loot you take home from a battle is based on the value of the units killed, but there are some big multipliers in there for the lucky.

Getting this thing balanced is going to require a huge amount of tweaking.

Here's the new loot screen: