Intros and Greetings
Hi!! I'm Daniel Fernandes the lead programmer at Manalchemy. As was said in the previous article, we are going to be talking about our combat system today,
This post will focus on the design and current progress of the system, maybe at a later date, if the team lets me out of the basement, I'll talk about the tools and frameworks I developed for the game. Hey, if you're interested in that, leave a comment.
Combat System - Fighting a Rat for your Amusement
Our game features a Turn Based combat system. Some of our references include Shin Megami Tensei and Trails in the Sky.
We start outside the combat in our dungeon MokOhkWells. Here the player (the blue pawn emitting light) can walk around and encounter enemies (red pawn). The enemies spawn in fixed positions and only respawn after the player leaves the dungeon.
Oh!! We entered a battle.
Look at that! Two fire rats. Prime targets for a little killing.
This is our battle HUD. Here is a diagram:
Don't worry to much, I will explain everything as the battle develops.
As you can see, it is currently the player's turn. We could use the button to "Attack" which would give some damage to the enemy, but we don't want to be boring so we click on skills.
Now, we have two choices. Ignore Obliteraro though, that's just a dev skill. So we choose Tsunami. You can look at the notification bar. There you can see some information about the attack. It affects all enemies, it does 10 base damage and has the Water element.
We used it and... Wow... a lot of things happened. First let's talk press turns. If you are familiar with Shin Megami Tensei you probably have seen this system before. Take a look at the blue squares at the top. You can see that, before we had 4 full squares, and now we have 3 and a half.
These squares represent the amount of turns you have. Each one represents a turn. If you use an action, for example, a Basic Attack, you lose 1 square. It's your phase as long as you have squares. So you can see that the player can, normally, use 4 Basic attacks before it switches to the enemy's phase.
In this scenario however, something different happened. Sometimes, instead of losing a square, the player only loses half, this basically gives them an extra turn. For each square there's an opportunity to get an half, so 8 turns if the player plays perfectly.
The player only loses an half if:
- They get a Critical Hit
- They Pass. This will let the next character use their moves but loses half a turn.
- They use an attack the enemy is weak to.
In this case the last thing happened. Tsunami is a water attack and the fire Rats are weak to it.
The more attentive reader might have noticed that another thing unusual happened. The DP bar rose. Let's talk about Drives.
Fortunately, Drives are simpler to explain than Press Turns. You might know them from Trails in the Sky.
These moves are similar to skills, but instead of having to lose SP to use them, you use DP. SP is a valuable resource you can only gain with items or by resting in a town. DP however, you get by taking and inflicting damage.
We lose our turns and the enemies attacks. They also follow the Press Turn rules so be careful. Normally, we get the same amount of Press Turns as the amount of entities in our party. Bosses can have more though.
The rest of the system is straight forward. You have the items you can use during battle, the positions that affect how much times you get attacked, and the ailments that are inflicted upon you (Poison, Atk up, Atk down etc.)
We end the battle -- these pesky rats were getting annoying -- and the End Battle Screen pops up, Here you see the rewards you get for the battle.
After this the party may level up, but that is a story for another time.
Farewells
Well that's it. I hope you liked taking a look at our system. We keep improving the game each week (You may have noticed some graphical improvements already) and we hope we continue to do so in the future.
Next week we will hear from our artist.
Form your Programmer,
Daniel Fernandes
PS: Don't forget the thing about the tools and frameworks, I really want to talk about that.
