I wanted to make the first blog about the first thing I usually do before starting a game.

Creating a core system to build the game and story around, usually a battle system.

I created the core system of this game which is a battle system as a sort of joke for a competition held by the official English RPG Maker site.

The competition was about making a cutscene and no battle systems which require input were allowed, so I spent a while thinking how I could get past that and how could I create a battle system which required no command input at all...

And then I remembered the "Half minute hero" series and how their battle systems are automated completely but very fun to play, and more importantly they require no input at all!

With that I started to research what I would need to build the battle system and created the first "Wire Frame" image to work with.



Yes, that is how a battle system is born when you can't draw. This is what I use to start creating any kind of core system.

After knowing how the battle system was going to look and where things were heading, I started to research one of the most important aspects of the battle system which is the "Bumping Attacks" when two sprites collide with each other.



Knowing that no one on their sane mind was going to make me large sized sprites for testing (Tired of begging), I settled for just having them zoomed in for size changes.

The red boxes represent the hit area of the sprite and the numbers are just random numbers that appear whenever two sprites collide.

At first I was very worried this would not work due to having to handle so many sprites at once along with the damage, but it turned out that as long as there were not more than 10 sprites on the screen it would work fine.

I also had to limit how much damage could appear on screen, by limiting it to 40 sprites per battler in order to keep the frame rate up.

And of course there were many problems I had no foreseen such as what would happen when a very fast sprite bumped into a slower one, this changed the design of the battle system from single attacks to simultaneous attacks where sprites would attack each other if they bumped where as before the fastest one would be the one to land the attack.

This led to a design rule for battles. "Normal battles should not last longer than 30 seconds" without someone dying. Also, "Use small numbers and make 1 feel like a threat to the player"

After working out the "Bumping", I started to work on the battle "HUD", which where character stats would be displayed.

Since this was meant to last less than 30 seconds and most of the focus would be in the sprites themselves, I decided to just make something compact and simple.



I looked at a TON of HP/MP bars to see which ones were the most easy to identify and follow.

The main idea was to create a tiny hud that would move around a bar to display where the sprite was in battle, but with all the focus on the main screen, it seemed pointless.

While working on the HUD I realized that there was a lot of empty space left and I had no idea what to fill it with.



After a while of thinking of what I could possibly fill it with and replaying "Half minute hero", I realized what I could fill it with, but I did not want to do it.

The original game allowed you to sacrifice your HP in order to boost your speed and power. I wanted to do something similar, but if I used HP then HUD would still be half empty.

That is when I added the "Battle rush" input:



It fit within the limits of the competition, since it was not technically a command input and you just pressed enter to speed up the battle. This also allowed me to fill that void in the HUD.

I also toyed with the idea of quick items and adding a menu and a battle end menu, but that would not work for the competition, so I just put that in the ideas drawer.





After the main components were done, I just refined it bit by bit until it was ready for the competition.

Many of the refinements included ways to make the battle system seem faster while not actually being any faster (Creating a map transition that seemed to reveal something that is hidden behind it)

Leaving the debug letters at the bottom as a distraction, this also worked to show how fast the battles were going and could momentarily distract them from any slowness.

And here is the result, the cutscene I submitted for the competition.



Jump to 1:20 if you just want to see the battle and skip my cheesy writing.

Seeing as this was an experiment in basically bending rules, I added resources from ACE in order to make sure it disqualified as I did not want to affect the chances of anyone who might have written a really good cutscene.

I also uploaded a video to make sure that nail hit the coffin (Remember that my goal was to create a battle system that require no input therefore bypassing that rule)

It turned out that it was liked, and the battle system itself was no problem. Of course the graphics would end up disqualifying it.

I was happy that I realized my goal (I'm easy to please), but then I found myself reading PM's from people who wanted to see more of it.

Of course after a week, I thought the battle system looked like crap and I wanted to completely redo it.

I started by changing the resolution to 640 x 416. After that I decided to see how I could improve the HUD and how the player saw information.

Using the ideas from before to build the menu, I decided to try and fit faces somehow instead of sprites.

Also I wanted to somehow fit items into the mix and have them be limited.



As you can see I changed how bars looked from horizontal to vertical, I found that I could follow the bars more easily if they were going down. The second bar in case I have not explained it is for skills.

This design ended up not working very well, if items were added they would have had to heal everyone at once or have their effects be global to fit under a single timer. This killed off that idea off and I had to find another way to fit items into the mix.

Then I noticed there was some space to the right that looked a bit off... But it was just enough to fit another bar!



Now that characters had their own Item time bars it was time to design a menu to go along with them...

And that will be next time!

Thank you very much for reading on my ramblings and have a nice day!

If you have any questions or thoughts or want me to explain something in more detail, do let me know.