Hyomoto
Member
So, today was a relatively eventful day. I started out with the desire to start going on the battle system. I haven't put many updates up about this recently and it's probably something I'll discuss in another update sometime. The short of it is there is a particular idea I've had bubbling around in my head for a couple years now. It deals with encounter rates, party leveling, enemy threat levels, equipment limitations, etc... basically it's a beast. For the sake of simplicity here today the idea comes down to how the party loses HP over time. There are a lot of ways to deal with this, but my least favorite (and coincidentally the most popular) method is some sort of hit points that, upon reaching 0, lead to your demise. You simply scale up and away and eventually you hit this sort of invulnerability ceiling. WoW or really any other MMO is a pretty prime example: a level 1 character could never hope to defeat a level 50 character by virtue of the numbers. You attain a sort of casual invincibility and personally: I don't care for this.
So basically I've been toying with the idea of three types of hit points, short term, medium term and long term or Health, Stamina and Injuries. At the end of combat all of your health is restored, this represents your characters sort of natural athleticism and endurance. Stamina on the other hand represents the gradual wearing down of your character over time just due to exertion, it is recovered via resting or some items. Injuries are a long term issue and represent significant afflictions that are not easily remedied without treatment, these can only be healed at clinics or via powerful magics or items. The idea is, when your party leaves town they are fully refreshed and at their peak condition. As they adventure and fight, they wear down, sustain injuries and, if things progress far enough, eventually succumb and die. At a mechanical level when your injuries surpass your health, your character dies. As a character recovers all health at the end of a battle, they can be close to death in one battle, but largely well the next. As injuries mount, that distance between health and injuries narrows and the chance that any given attack could be fatal becomes more and more likely. The other aspect of this is stamina which increases the likelihood of attacks being successful in the first place. The end result is basically that the more injured and worn out your character is, the more likely that future attacks will be damaging, and the more damaging the attacks, the more likely that any of them may be fatal. In the end, the goal is to move away from a system of 'I have X hit points until I die', and have the player consider more strongly their actions in and out of combat, including whether or not they even want to engage in combat. This doesn't fully do away with that 'soft invincibility', but a lucky hit by you or your enemy could cause damage. In the right circumstances it is 'possible' for even a level 1 character to beat Chaos (even if the likelihood is only superficially not zero), or likewise if you party is beaten down and injured, a lowly pack of Imps could do in a seasoned party. Obviously weapons, armor and training make this all less likely but the important part is that combat becomes a situation, something you consider and deal with. There are soft penalties for
As I said, I wanted to work on that today and maybe get some form of it up and running. Unfortunately I did not make it even half as far as I'd hoped due to running into a number of issues with the engine. Namely, I discovered that the method I used to increase FPS during scene compositing meant I'd lose ALL those gains whenever the 'color shift' effect played. Whoops! Fixing that required me to basically do some more layer slicing and change when the scene is colored. This did come at a performance cost but overall the method is still significantly faster than the original engine used. As a side effect I decided to hook it into the screen transition logic which allows me to use it the same way I do wipes and blanks, as well as combine them all together into crazy combinations I'll never use.
This is my attempt to recreate the Super Mario World end of level effect. Just think of the tune while you watch it.After doing that I realized I hadn't built in the ability to handle scene transitions. This is something that a specific object did before, but with the new engine I rolled up quite a bit of functions into what used to be the main render. Now I just refer to it as the 'scene helper' because it handles transitions, camera work and visual effects. The old system was hard-coded, which meant I had to call a specific branch to do something. This meant any time I added something to the game that required a transition, I had to code myself a new one. Naturally some of them could be reused but that's just not powerful enough! So I put together a system by which I can define a series of actions, this includes screen transitions, changing rooms, creating objects, playing music, or even changing variables. This took a few hours to get up and running and eventually revealed several previously hidden bugs. So cool, all that got fixed, new functions got added and finally, FINALLY I could work on the battle system!
Well, not quite. The problem with doing what I'm doing is now I have to look at what I have and decide how that information should be conveyed to the player. At it's core I'd still like the game to look like Final Fantasy and evoke that feeling, even if the underlying systems are extremely different. This requires me to prototype and come up with concepts and iterate and well, that just takes time. Still, I was able to get a rudimentary battle scene up and running and even the basics of the battle logic laid out. As I said, this is hardly final but if you'd like to comment on what you think, do feel free. Anyways, I said I'd try and post something game related (and by association work on something game related) so instead of boring databases and spreadsheets, here's some actual screenshots for you guys. Until next time!
Prototyping a few concepts here. It lacks that 'NES' feel though.
So basically I've been toying with the idea of three types of hit points, short term, medium term and long term or Health, Stamina and Injuries. At the end of combat all of your health is restored, this represents your characters sort of natural athleticism and endurance. Stamina on the other hand represents the gradual wearing down of your character over time just due to exertion, it is recovered via resting or some items. Injuries are a long term issue and represent significant afflictions that are not easily remedied without treatment, these can only be healed at clinics or via powerful magics or items. The idea is, when your party leaves town they are fully refreshed and at their peak condition. As they adventure and fight, they wear down, sustain injuries and, if things progress far enough, eventually succumb and die. At a mechanical level when your injuries surpass your health, your character dies. As a character recovers all health at the end of a battle, they can be close to death in one battle, but largely well the next. As injuries mount, that distance between health and injuries narrows and the chance that any given attack could be fatal becomes more and more likely. The other aspect of this is stamina which increases the likelihood of attacks being successful in the first place. The end result is basically that the more injured and worn out your character is, the more likely that future attacks will be damaging, and the more damaging the attacks, the more likely that any of them may be fatal. In the end, the goal is to move away from a system of 'I have X hit points until I die', and have the player consider more strongly their actions in and out of combat, including whether or not they even want to engage in combat. This doesn't fully do away with that 'soft invincibility', but a lucky hit by you or your enemy could cause damage. In the right circumstances it is 'possible' for even a level 1 character to beat Chaos (even if the likelihood is only superficially not zero), or likewise if you party is beaten down and injured, a lowly pack of Imps could do in a seasoned party. Obviously weapons, armor and training make this all less likely but the important part is that combat becomes a situation, something you consider and deal with. There are soft penalties for
As I said, I wanted to work on that today and maybe get some form of it up and running. Unfortunately I did not make it even half as far as I'd hoped due to running into a number of issues with the engine. Namely, I discovered that the method I used to increase FPS during scene compositing meant I'd lose ALL those gains whenever the 'color shift' effect played. Whoops! Fixing that required me to basically do some more layer slicing and change when the scene is colored. This did come at a performance cost but overall the method is still significantly faster than the original engine used. As a side effect I decided to hook it into the screen transition logic which allows me to use it the same way I do wipes and blanks, as well as combine them all together into crazy combinations I'll never use.
This is my attempt to recreate the Super Mario World end of level effect. Just think of the tune while you watch it.
Well, not quite. The problem with doing what I'm doing is now I have to look at what I have and decide how that information should be conveyed to the player. At it's core I'd still like the game to look like Final Fantasy and evoke that feeling, even if the underlying systems are extremely different. This requires me to prototype and come up with concepts and iterate and well, that just takes time. Still, I was able to get a rudimentary battle scene up and running and even the basics of the battle logic laid out. As I said, this is hardly final but if you'd like to comment on what you think, do feel free. Anyways, I said I'd try and post something game related (and by association work on something game related) so instead of boring databases and spreadsheets, here's some actual screenshots for you guys. Until next time!
Prototyping a few concepts here. It lacks that 'NES' feel though.
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