This month, I worked on the prototype... Well, kind of. This devlog I'll talk about the prototype and the death of my computer.
Basic Concept
I've explained the basic concepts before, but here they are again:
- The game is divided into two phases, a weak phase and a power phase.
- There will be a few "boss" monsters wandering around the map, who you can only hurt during the power phase. You goal is to gather strength during the weak phase and defeat the boss monsters during the power phase.
- You can only activate the power phase a certain number of times. Once they've run out, it's game over.
- In the weak phase, you have a certain amount of seconds to collect a set amount of souls. If you fail to do that, it's also game over.
- People will die at random around the map, and to collect their souls you'll have to defeat their "guardian".
- In the weak phase, you can also face normal monsters. Once defeated, these monsters will give you two corrupted souls. You can use corrupted souls for powerful attacks and techniques.
- Once you've collected enough normal souls, you can enter the power phase when you please by returning to the Fountain of Life. The length of the power phase is determined by how many normal souls you collected.
- During the power phase, you can damage the boss monsters as much as you want. Once the timer reaches 0, you enter the weak phase again.
The Battle System
I had already done a paper prototype (quick board game version) of this concept and I liked it, so I went ahead with programming a proper prototype. One question quickly surged, though: how will the battle system be like? My original plan was a standard action rpg, but for the sake of prototyping I had gone with dice. I really liked the pacing and randomness of dice, so in the end I decided to do a traditional turn based system. My first attempt was a Active Time Battle system, where each person fighting has to recharge before being able to realize another move. It generally adds more action to the otherwise slow paced turn based system. But once it was done, I quickly realized I was wrong; the wait was an annoyance because it you were losing seconds (aka dying) and couldn't do anything about it.
In that case, a standard turn based system would work, right? The player is encouraged to go quick because he's constantly losing health. I decided to try it out, but I wasn't so satisfied with the results, although I fear it's because I didn't flesh it out well enough. I feel the idea of a timed turn based rpg is really cool though, so I will be coming back to this. For now, I went with another idea that was running around in my head, something with a bit more of action. The current ver
sion is something like this:
The basic system is inspired in the action commands of the Mario rpgs. You have to realize different little minigames to attack and dodge enemies. Once you start attacking an enemy you can go on comboing, with the minigame getting slowly harder, until you fail the minigame, stop the combo or the enemy counterattacks. It is important to note that enemies can only attack you as a counterattack or while you're in the menu. This is because one of the things that annoyed about the standard turn rpg was waiting for the enemy to finish attacking, so I decided to make the attacks irregular but give the player the chance to dodge them.
The most interesting change though is how you take damage: you don't take damage per se. If you get hit by an enemy, you become unable to do anything for a while. I feel like this is a cool way to make the player lose health (seconds in this case) because that way the player actually feels it; counting off a few seconds doesn't feel much, but waiting them out does. It'll definitely be annoying, but that might just be the point. You can still button mash to speed up the process, don't want it to be boring.
These are just the base elements though, there are two more important mechanics I intend to add: corrupted soul management, and knockdown.
Corrupted souls are used for special moves, right? I find that kind of plain in itself. I decided to add more of a use to them, then. My current idea is a kind of management system. Souls can be set to different stat boosts, like Attack+, Speed+, etc. When I say set I mean that you do not lose the corrupted soul and get to keep it and change it's bonus as long as much as you want. The idea is to use smart enemy design to push the usage of this system; quick enemies will require you to add speed boosts if you don't want to be missing all the time, while you may want to set a high attack bonus if you want to avoid taking forever against an enemy with high defense. This is somewhat inspired by the djinn system in Golden Sun, where djinns give stats bonuses and skills, but need to recharge when used.
The other mechanic is knockdown, and is notably simpler (can't let the game get too complex!). By playing well (dealing perfect attacks, dodging enemies), you can "weaken" the enemy. The weaker the enemy is, the higher the chance of him doing a bad move. And when the enemy does a bad move, it's your chance to knock him down. Once down, you can do a knockdown combo: a string of different attacks that have a powerful effect. This sounds like a nice way of adding variety and a certain amount of experimentation (player has to find out what different combos do what). Yet again, this mechanic is somewhat inspired by another RPG: Persona 4's "all out attack" (pictured above). It's similar to my idea, albeit it's simpler ( in P4 once all enemies are down you have to press a button to deal an attack to all the enemies).
I'm a copycat, amn't I...?
Dead Computer?
It all started when I was writing my 1000th tweet (really, that's why I remember). The computer suddenly restarted without any explanation. It worked fine after that, so it was quickly forgotten... except that the computer started freezing. On startup. It eventually reached the point where I couldn't even see that, just a "Windows StartUp Repair" (which froze too).
There were some attempts to isolate the problem but in the end I couldn't. The computer was pretty old anyways and I've been driving it hard for all this time too, so in the end I just called it a unrepairable hardware error. So, it was time to upgrade! Yay! Well, couldn't get anything too fancy but it's an improvement. Got a new motherboard, RAM and CPU, since they're likely to be the ones causing the problems. It was good learning experience too, since I don't have much experience with computer interiors ("wait... so that fan on top of the motherboard isn't actually for the motherboard?"). Installed Windows 7 , had some problems with the videocard, but now it's working fine! I'm currently in the slow process of setting everything up again, but I hope to get a prototype in two weeks.
