Battle Skill: Substitute video - Wellspring: Altar of Roots

We've recently implemented new skills for our characters and I wanted to share one of the more interesting ones that we've come up with!

In our tactical, turn-based RPG Wellspring: Altar of Roots, Apolith fulfills the 'tank' role and as such, his job is basically... well, to get the hell beat out of him. He has a number of ways to go about doing this, from taunting enemies to reducing damage inflicted, to charging right into the fray. I wanted to play around with the more 'positional' aspects of Wellspring's combat, so we came up with the Substitute skill.

Essentially, this allows Apolith to swap locations with a targeted ally, thus removing them from the heat of combat. More interestingly, however, Apolith makes himself the target of any skills, damaging or otherwise, that were previously targeted to the ally he's substituting himself with.

In this video, you can see that this nice little lizard is about to put a hurtin' on Bodom, who really has no business being where he is anyhow. Nevertheless, with the Substitute skill, Apolith is able to 'save' Bodom and therefore absorb the blow that otherwise would've given Bodom, at the very least, a noticeable bruise.

We feel that this adds a lot more utility to Apolith, and is pretty unique as far as skills go, in general. Implementation-wise, this skill was pretty simple--we use Unity's navmesh for all of our placement/movement, so having the characters swap positions was a breeze. Changing targets, likewise, was simple, with only a tiny tricky part in that since Apolith is targeting Bodom himself, we don't want to switch Apolith's target to... uh.. himself. Because that would be weird.

Another nice thing about this skill is that it currently doesn't use any sound or particle effects, although I'd be open to adding them if anyone had any suggestions.

Also, for whatever reason, that yellow bush near Apolith decided to start wiggling. Don't look at that.