Jupiter Hell - Character Advancement

The big news today is that D**mRL (or DRL as we may have to start calling it) is now open source! The plan was to release this upon conclusion of the Kickstarter campaign as a thank you to backers, but Zenimax® have pushed our hand.

D**mRL is available on GitHub, with some simple instructions on how to compile. More detailed instructions will come later. The code is in FreePascal, distributed under GPL 2.0. Derek Yu’s original artwork is released with the game under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.

Character Advancement in Jupiter Hell

The following is a current version of the character progression system. This is largely subject to change, however it illustrates nicely our objectives in this topic.

Levels

Characters in Jupiter Hell will feature a somewhat classic leveling system, with a range of levels between 1 and 20. Levels are gained by gathering experience points. XP points are awarded for many tasks, however care is taken to prevent any scummable XP source, as well as keeping the major source of XP from story progress, completed missions and feats of skill.

Classes

Before you venture into the winding corridors of Callisto's Valhalla base, you'll have to pick a name, some cosmetic choices, a class, and an initial perk. Classes determine the perk trees you have access to. In the current design, each class has a set of three primary perk trees (skills) and three secondary skills. Your character can have perks from up to three trees, optionally including a single secondary perk tree, not choosable before level 10.

Some of the skills are shared, yet every class has a unique defining perk tree of their own. Currently we plan to include three basic classes, but further classes might appear at some point (or in stretch goals!). The three basic classes are the ones you might remember from DRL - Marine, Scout and Technician.

Perk trees (aka skills)

You can pick perks from different trees, or focus on a single tree specifically. Each major weapon class has it's perk tree, so you'll see perk trees for Pistols, Shotguns, Rapid fire weapons, Explosive weapons and Energy weapons. Additionally common perk trees include Armor, Hacking and Medical. Perks may have prerequisites, and be leveled.

If you meet the proper prerequisites in a given perk tree, you may choose one of its two Master Perks. These perks have a very significant effect on gameplay -- for instance making you automatically shoot both your pistols at every step, at any pre-targeted enemy, or unlocking the ability to fully takeover large security bots in case of the hacking tree.

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