Alright, since Codename: RPG obviously requires some level of combat, I've decided to go with the trialed and tested turn based system, but if you think it's as simple as that, you're miles off:
Attacks
I'm leaning more towards a Pokemon style system here, with a set number of attacks which you can swap out for more advanced moves later on in the game. The problem is that in Pokemon, you have up to six of these at once, meaning a total of twenty four attacks which can cover a wide variety of angles very easily. In my game, there's only one of you, an d four attacks is very limited. Should I limit the number of typed-enemies within the game in order to counterbalance the number of moves? Or should I simply increase the number of possible attacks to something more reasonable such at eight. I don't want players to feel like they really need to do much micromanaging, and instead try and keep them in the action as much as possible.
Other options such as the Final Fantasy styled 'Any attack is possible', limited via Mana is obviously viable, I'm just not sure we want another FF knockoff.
Innovation is also welcomed here, I was thinking about a system in which the players had some kind of 'Spell book' which could be read outside of battle, the spell book would allow players to swap out their moves before going into battle, meaning if they had a little foresight they could plan accordingly, but again I'm not sure if this means too much micromanagement.
Stats
I'm 90% confident I again want to go with a more Pokemon themed system than Final Fantasy. Currently I have four stats:
Defense: This will reduce all physical damage taken.
Strength: This will increase all physical damage dealt.
Health: Self explanatory.
Skill: This will handle both increased magic defense and power.
This keeps the game very simple, and makes it easy for a single character to specialize. Oh right about specialization. Currently, the game is horribly unbalanced, you receive ten in every stat you have per level, in addition to that you receive an extra one per stat point you have distributed to that skill. Stat points are earned once every three levels, meaning that there's a total of a possible thirty three stat points to be distributed before you reach level one hundred. This means if you were to pour all your points into a single stat, you could have somewhere within the region of five thousand available power in that stat. Of course this would leave your other stats all dwindling at a small one thousand, which judging by my current system would yield a very 'Hit or die' situation based combat, either you hit and kill the enemy in one shot, or you die.
Obviously this system is very incomplete and has multiple issues I need to attend to, which is why I'm making this blog post asking for help before I proceed much further, I want to get these things out of the way before I start adding oodles of mobs to the game which will otherwise need extensive balancing later on. One thing I've neglected is a 'Speed' stat, it's not for lack of understanding as much as I just don't think people would put points into it when the game is heavily turn based anyway. I'd love some feedback on that subject specifically, since I have honestly no clue as to what players prefer. I personally always left Speed in the dust when EV/IV training on Pokemon.
Typing
I'd love to have this feature in my game (Regardless of how many multidimensional lists it'll result in me requiring in order to gather available power, type and move name.) but as said previously having a low attack count would result in many situations, I would guess, in which you're unprepared for the fight ahead, not because of your own stupidity, but because of me, the game developer's. This obviously isn't kosher, so I need to figure this out.
Obviously in relation to the monsters, my attacks will have typing. Currently I'm looking (Surprise surprise) at a more Pokemon styled system, leading with:
Water (>Fire)
Thunder (>Water)
Fire (>Grass)
Grass (>Rock)
Rock (>Thunder)
With Undead and Divine being a few-and-far typing which is standard to all, but weak to each other.
Oh one thing I forgot to mention is the player type, this will be explained in the equipment portion of this wall of text.
Equipment
Here's where I deviate from Pokemon quite a bit, I'd really like a nice equipment system (Think Ultima and you're thinking right), something in which I have specific slots for all areas of the body, and each piece individually will have its own Skill, Strength, Defense, Health and Typing. All of this will be in direct reflection on the player, I.e if they have 'Magic Glove of the Jackson' with +40 Health, +20 Skill, -10 Strength, -10 Defense, Divine type, the player will have those stat distributions placed upon them, with the typing going towards a tally. Whichever type the player is wearing the most of will result in their type being that. In the case of ties, the player will be able to select which type they prefer from a menu.
I really like this system, because as I said, whilst I dislike loads of micromanagement, this system is simple enough that you can have it all sorted out in a few mere seconds of acquiring new loot, but it's also complicated enough that the player can prepare for all kinds of different events. About to face off with an army of fire-based-physical-monsters? Better up your defense/strength and set your type to water! Just because I say this doesn't mean that I don't want feedback, good ideas are a must if I want this project to go anywhere.
Another picky situation with Equipment is what route to take when deciding on a system similar to World of Warcraft (All the equipment is pre-defined) or Diablo where you can find items of a near infinite variety. Whilst I like the Diablo style, it really kills the metagame, and I love me some metagame, whilst the Warcraft system can seem almost boring at times. I love the idea of not just being able to find 'Epic Stick of the War veteran Walrus', but also being able to program that too!
Last thing with equipment, it will be permanent. I'm dead set on this. No crappy durability to worry about, once you have some equipment, it's yours until you decide to lose it.
And finally...
Random Encounters
As an avid Pokemon-er (You hadn't guessed), I love me some random encounters. Knowing what to find in certain areas then being able to stick around there and grind up is the backbone of any RPG, and something I wish to keep incorporated, but not make it boring. To handle this I hope to make the games story scale very well with what your perceived level is. Having areas which are difficult, but only require a few minutes grinding in order to be a far fairer fight. Of course there will be exceptions to this, Boss battles will always scale to be hard and set game-events will do the same, but many optional post-game things, such as specific armor sets, will require a lot more patience to acquire.
The only real question here is, what system do I go for? Do I have RDEs everywhere aside from small sections of the game (Final Fantasy) or do I go for a far more narrow area of battles which are almost avoidable (Pokemon). Honestly it makes no difference programming wise, so I guess it's just down to personal opinion. But I'd still like to see what everyone likes.
/Wall
ID:118437
 Sep 11 2011, 7:18 pm (Edited on Sep 11 2011, 7:40 pm)
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Robertbanks2 wrote:
My personal favorite of the skillset options, and one that I was considering for yet another of my theoretical projects that will never see the light of day. It's not all that micromanagement heavy as long as you give a halfway decent cue for what they'll be facing next. If there's an ice cavern coming up, it's a safe bet fire will be useful and you should pack at least 1 decent fire skill. Ugh this means I'm going to need to add an Ice type now ;p On your stats... That seems mighty overcomplicated. It also forces players to do their homework BEFORE playing the game if they want to make a good character(especially for PvP, should you choose to incorporate it), as your stats are increasing over time. This means that stat points are much more valuable early game and nearly useless end game, which leads to new players wasting them on something they don't really need, and then realizing later that they botched it and being forced to start over or grind a bunch to make up the difference. You make a very good point regarding my current system being more important at the start of the game- when players are less understanding- as opposed to the end- where players can guess roughly based on previous encounters. The problem is finding any middle ground, all I can suggest is having a way (A high expense way) of re-stating everything at certain key points in the game, which I guess would work well if I made the game seem almost entirely segmented on these points. For example, The world is split into three islands, (Cue Avatar) The fire nation, water nation and earth nation. Now obviously you can expect more physical attacks in the earth nation, so before the game allows you to access this area it asks if you would like to re-stat (Maybe after a brief introduction to the earth nation). Of course that was all hypothetical, but it's at least one way I could go about this. I'm not a huge fan of random encounters in general, but if you're going to go for it, allow for a reliable way to prevent them, especially if the encounters would be insignificant compared to your level(like fighting a bunch of pidgeys at level 80). Something like a specific skill that takes up a slot in your spells, but reduces your chance to get into encounters by 10*(player.level-encounter.level)%, with anything negative just defaulting to no change. This way players could more easily traverse areas that would otherwise be dealt with via 1 hit kill spamming another monster every 20 steps. I disagree with you here, the problem isn't running into lower leveled monster as much as it is making sure the character doesn't ever need to backtrack into those areas. I'm sure I'll add some post game content, specifically a playthrough 2.5 in which you retain all your current skills and levels and abilities, but everything is incredibly harder to kill, and by that time you'll of reached the level cap and it'll be far more tactical as opposed to just grind till you're strong enough to win. Great comment though, gave me quite a bit to think about. | |
tl;dr Epic.
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El Wookie wrote:
Ugh this means I'm going to need to add an Ice type now ;p Obviously, what game doesn't have ice? But to expand on this, you could also throw in the occasional rock type, in addition to the ice monsters. Then, have the crippled ex-soldier in the bar tell the player that he was jumped by a rock golem trying to do whatever you need to go into the cave for, wasn't prepared because he had assumed that it would be just ice monsters, and barely made it out alive. The player still knows what's going on if they explore the towns a bit, and chances are they could manage if they didn't(though things would be a bit harder). It also makes exploring the towns and talking to people become a more interesting and helpful task. You make a very good point regarding my current system being more important at the start of the game- when players are less understanding- as opposed to the end- where players can guess roughly based on previous encounters. That would be rather difficult to emulate accurately unless you counted up all of their stats and removed the starting amounts, then just allowed them full rein over where everything goes. The biggest problem with this is that if you actually get a decent number of players, there WILL be a "best" build for each reset, and while the players may not know about it right away, chances are they'll have heard about it by the time they get to the first redistribution. I disagree with you here, the problem isn't running into lower leveled monster as much as it is making sure the character doesn't ever need to backtrack into those areas. I'm sure I'll add some post game content, specifically a playthrough 2.5 in which you retain all your current skills and levels and abilities, but everything is incredibly harder to kill, and by that time you'll of reached the level cap and it'll be far more tactical as opposed to just grind till you're strong enough to win. While this is an option, it makes the world seem pretty linear. I suppose it all depends upon how grandiose you want your world to be. If you're just going for simple linear progression it works, but it makes the world sort of seem like one big path made to be traveled one way from start to finish, rather than a living, coherent world. I've never enjoyed when a fictional world felt like it existed to be the setting for a story. I feel like a game's setting should be where the game just so happens to take place, instead of being tailor made for that particular game. There should be places that you never need to go to, yet are still there because they existed before the storyline, and will continue on after it, provided the world isn't destroyed. | |
I would read more if the text was actual size rather than one step smaller. It hurts my eyes if I focus on the text too long. ):
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Why is water weaker than fire and stronger than nothing? Fayul.
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Avainer1 wrote:
Why is water weaker than fire and stronger than nothing? Fayul. Water (>Fire) Thunder (>Water) Water is greater than fire, thunder is greater than water. Notice the greater than signs(that would be these ">"). | |
Are you by any chance making a pokemon game? I mean a non pokemon game that's just like pokemon with the names of stuff changed?
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My personal favorite of the skillset options, and one that I was considering for yet another of my theoretical projects that will never see the light of day. It's not all that micromanagement heavy as long as you give a halfway decent cue for what they'll be facing next. If there's an ice cavern coming up, it's a safe bet fire will be useful and you should pack at least 1 decent fire skill.
On your stats... That seems mighty overcomplicated. It also forces players to do their homework BEFORE playing the game if they want to make a good character(especially for PvP, should you choose to incorporate it), as your stats are increasing over time. This means that stat points are much more valuable early game and nearly useless end game, which leads to new players wasting them on something they don't really need, and then realizing later that they botched it and being forced to start over or grind a bunch to make up the difference.
I'm not a huge fan of random encounters in general, but if you're going to go for it, allow for a reliable way to prevent them, especially if the encounters would be insignificant compared to your level(like fighting a bunch of pidgeys at level 80). Something like a specific skill that takes up a slot in your spells, but reduces your chance to get into encounters by 10*(player.level-encounter.level)%, with anything negative just defaulting to no change. This way players could more easily traverse areas that would otherwise be dealt with via 1 hit kill spamming another monster every 20 steps.