One of the most critical aspects of a good action RPG has been the looting and somewhat random properties of weapons and equipment that makes you always look for better gear. From Diablo to Borderlands and many other ARPGs, this has been omnipresent.
However, it seems that text-based, browser and idle RPGs got stuck in a boring system of simply upgrading from weapon 1 to weapon 2 to weapon 3 and so on, without any kind of variety, strategy or flavor.
For Razor Trail Survivors we've decided to take a more varied approach. The three categories of equipment - tools, weapons and armor - all have base-types and instances of that base type:
A base-type is a broad group that has the same item name, picture, base stats and special bonuses. For example, a camo helmet is an armor base-type that has a certain amount of armor, evasion and gives an extra bonus to evasion while fighting in a forest or jungle. This is the same for all camo helmets in the game.
However, when a camo helmet is crafted or found by a player, it will have a specific level (randomly generated but influenced and capped by the player's tailoring level) and quality. These two values will determine the number of modifiers to the base stats of the camo helmet. The more modifiers, the more armor/evasion points and other special properties (hitpoints, side-drops, etc) will be added to this instance of a camo helmet.
This means that every piece of equipment in Razor Trail Survivors is a unique item with properties based on its base-type but modified in many different ways. Some properties from the base-type are fixed because they're natural to that item: For example, you'll never have a shotgun with a very long range, even if you happen to get one with a high level and quality, because there are no modifiers to range in shotguns.
Besides modifiers to the base stats of weapons, tools and armor, there are also some special modifiers that can randomly be generated - but we'll leave those to another time!
The exact formulas for equipment generation are not yet final and we'll consider any ideas that come our way. If you have any suggestions, they'll be very welcome - thanks!