Game Design pt.2

Game Design for Physical vs. Magical damage and  Bricks vs. Enemies:

Physical damage encompasses all damage that is directly directly from one object to another, whereas magic damage is all types of damage that are dealt in an area of affect.   The ball inherently always deals both types of damage, first in the form of physical damage to the object it hits, and then also in the form of a magic explosion that occurs at the collision point further damaging the same brick and all bricks within the blast radius which means that at all times the player will at least have access to the ability to deal both types of damage.  

There are also two types of things you need to destroy, bricks and enemies.  Anything that deals damage can have a unique base damage for both enemies and bricks.  In most situations this means that physical damage is better suited towards a small number of strong bricks/enemies and magic is better suited for a large number of weaker enemies.  Taking this further, physical damage is generally preferable to killing enemies where as Magic damage is generally better against bricks.  Taking this all into account, Physical is strong against enemies and fewer numbers of strong bricks whereas Magic is strong against large amounts of bricks.  

Game Design for Defense and Resistance:

Defense and resistance needs to be utilized it in a way that does not negate the inherent strengths of each type of damage.  By adding various defense scores and resistance scores to monsters, I feel like it will muddy the waters enough that it no longer becomes particularly relevant which 3 characters you bring to a map.  For this reason I have all of the monsters base defense set to 0 as  the player should reliably know that bringing physical damage is a good option against enemies.     The monsters that do have defense will be clearly marked and have a high level of defense, ranging anywhere from 50%-100% damage reduction.   The defense score should be enough that the player has to re-evaluate if physical damage really is the best option for them but should not be the norm.  Since physical damage is ideologically weaker against bricks, most physical weapon damage deals a lower amount of damage to a brick than it would an enemy.

Resistance on monsters could be a more common feature as magic generally accels at clearing bricks but im not sure exactly how this will be utilized in practice.  When monsters have defense or resistance it should be easily identifiable that it is present, and at a high enough level that it actually has an impact on the game play.  I think that using percentages is the best way to go here as it will help the power level scaling over multimap levels and with character growth and having 100% defense or resistance on enemies is allowed in this model as the player will always have access to the type of damage that can deal damage to it regardless of their choices of characters.