Description

The submission period for the contest is now over, but the discussion has just begun!

Forum thread here.

The results are in:

Gold - Azalathemad
Silver - Aegix_Drakan
Bronze - NeverSilent

Congratulations to them and to everyone who took part in the contest!





This is a Community episode a contest and an experiment in game design prompted by Sviel's suggestion among the many thought-provoking comments to that article. If you don't take part in the contest for fun, fame and prizes, do it for SCIENCE.

The individual goal of the contest is to design a RPG battle system and showcase it in one or a few battles, while avoiding the usual clutter of mechanisms that is a staple of the genre, with the help of some guidelines given below.

The collective goal is to search together for the essential principles of the RPG battle - the skeleton of decisions that gives them their flavor and depth.

This is more challenging than a normal contest because it rewards creative and analytical thinking rather than just good craftsmanship. On the other hand, I believe the results could greatly improve the future games produced by the community - both in terms of unexplored strategic potential, and of streamlining battle design to make game-wide balancing (which is one of the worst problems in RPGs) considerably easier.



The three elements listed below are the fundamental aspects of RPG battling. (Explanatory figures and details hidden in spoiler tags.)

They are often obscured by overly complex systems and tons of genre conventions. The purpose of this contest to see what happens when you lay them bare. I am convinced that tons of strategic possibilities have been overlooked so far, simply because they were hard to perceive under the layers of fluff.


1) All RPG systems have a common ground: damage per turn, with the goal of killing before you are killed.

Of course, in this mock-up battle with only Attacks, 1) the hero dies first, and 2) the player is bored to tears. So we must add skills and stuff. (Randomness creates variation that you have no control over, so I won't mention it here).


2) All skills/spells/buffs/items are ways of dealing or receiving that damage faster or slower, more continuously or in bursts. They control the way that damage is concentrated or diluted over time, like pushing and pulling on a rubber band. (The basic, fully stretched state is "spamming attack" as above: not exciting but it gets you there eventually).



Problems:
- the picture above suggests that countless possibilities have never been used (there are many other ways to position and combine these arrows). The most frequent improvement is agility buffs or gaining/losing turns, i.e. ways to do more complicated actions by employing multiple skills at once. But there are lots of other ways to expand on it (see Tips & Inspirations below for ideas).

- usually, healing simply erases some of the enemy's actions in an irrecoverable way. You attack n times, I heal, you attack again, I heal => no net effect, boring. Hence the huge asymmetry in RPG battles: heroes can always heal, most enemies cannot, because there's nothing more infuriating than seeing the enemy heal and erase all your efforts.
It would be more interesting to rethink healing so that the effect of an action was never canceled, but for instance delayed, or spread over X turns, or converted into something else - still there in some form, ready to be reused by future skills.



3) MP, Limit Breaks, status conditions, multiple characters and classes are ways of allowing the player variable access to the skills over time. That's because strategy is not about the winning move, it's about progressively setting up the conditions which allow that move.



Problem: in RPGs you generally have extremely basic (un)locking conditions within the battle:
- "if I have a lot of MP, I can use all my powerful spells"
- "if this character dies/sleeps/is berserk, I lose access to their skills"
- (occasionally) "if I use a weak skill I will be able to use a stronger one next"

I think this is the aspect of RPGs that leaves the largest room for improvement by far. For a battle to have more strategy, every action you take should allow new moves and block other ones, potentially for the rest of the fight. What you can do at any given moment should be the logical product of your past actions and your enemy's, if possible in more evolved ways that a binary question like "out of mana?" or "silenced?".




This all boils down to a simple idea: if you want to encapsulate the feeling of combat, what you need is
- balance of power, represented by any gauge or number (and its evolution in time),
- seizing opportunities, represented by the diversity of available options and how you get or lose access to them.
Everything else is decorative, and there is much more freedom in how you could translate this into a system than what has ever been explored in any game so far.




- Rules with "must" are requirements.

- Rules with "should" can be transgressed at your own risk, if you think your interpretation is more clever than the original rule (feel free to contact me to talk about it).


1) Game:

- The game can be made using any software, but it must contain everything it requires to run on its own.

- You can reuse the Default Battle System in clever ways, use scripts, or make a custom system of any degree of sophistication. You won't be judged on the prettiness of the implementation, only on the strategic depth of the principles beneath.

- The entry can be a single or multiple battles long (but we will judge at most 4 or 5 battles, not 40). It should not contain any cutscene or exploration phase, unless they are entirely skippable.
=> You can make an entire game out of your system, just give the judges a way to play only the 1 to 5 battles you want to showcase.

- There can be as many or as few characters & enemies as you wish. The rules suggested here should make a 1-character 1-enemy duel as complex as a full-scale battle.

2) Skill design:

- The only gauge must be HP. You can work around this rule and make MP/AP/Limit Break equivalents using the rules below, but tons of extra points will be given to contestants who instead try to do something really new.

- There must be no randomness in the effect of an attack or skill. This contest is just an experiment in RPG tactics, so the player should be able to make elaborate plans without computing conditional probabilities in their head.

- Skills should be designed to reflect principle 2) in the Rationale section above as clearly as possible
i.e. skills are ways to change the repartition of damage over time. The effect of any skill in those terms should be very clear, to let players compare skills and conceive strategies more easily. For instance, instead of directly dealing damage, skills could change the number of times a character attacks in a turn (it's easier to compare "1 attack" with "3 attacks" than to have to chose between spells that inflict 70HP on one enemy or 10HP/turn for 4 turns on 2 enemies).


- For more points, every skill should bring something new to the table. No skill should be "the same but stronger". Each skill should provide a different way of manipulating the repartition of damage over time, that cannot be produced by using other skills.

3) Skill unlocking:

- There must be rules to determine when you can or cannot use a given skill. We are trying here not to default to a simple gauge like MP: expending mana/drinking ethers is a very binary way of implementing actions that (un)lock other actions. Ideally, every action could have:
* multiple effects in unlocking other actions (e.g. a feint opens up various attacks)
* multiple conditions for its own unlocking (e.g. an attack requires the right posture, the right distance, and the right weakness in the enemy's defense)
* multiple ways to fulfill these conditions

- As much as possible, the rules for locking/unlocking should not be special cases (e.g. Fire Sword unlocks Mega-Smash), but more general logical principles. Even better if they apply similarly to the enemies' skills!

- As much as possible, locking/unlocking should be long lasting, i.e. not only dependent on the current state of the characters, but also on past actions both by them and by their enemies.

Counter-example to these 3 points: Being "out of mana" is a locking effect that
- depends only on your current state (no matter how you reached it or what the enemy has been doing)
- affects all skills at the same time
- has no real trade-off: more mana always equals more good
- and can be canceled with a single action (drinking an Ether).
By contrast, in a typical strategy game, every time you move a piece, you are closing off some possibilities and opening new ones by combination with the positions of all other pieces, so every move along the way can play some role in your victory.


- You are free to invent the detail of these locking rules, but more points will be given if they are simple and intuitive.
Example: in board games, it's simple geometry that creates these rules (a piece/unit contributes to your tactics by blocking a line of sight, or flanking an enemy...). Here you could use some sort of spatial logic as well, or all sorts of different principles (see Tips & Inspirations below for examples).


- If you have multiple battles, there can be permanent effects transferred from one battle to the next.
i.e. "items" are skills following all the rules above, except their locking/unlocking effects are not limited to one battle (e.g. a consumable item simply locks itself permanently once used, but there could be more elaborate patterns).




General tips and suggestions:

- Anyone who has trouble with the rules can ask questions in a comment or PM. I can help with things such as checking that skills are not reducible to one another, if you want to do it the mathy way.

- "one goal=one action" is the antithesis of strategy. Every action should serve multiple goals and every goal require multiple actions. Real creativity appears when you start finding ways to control the breadth of actions at your and your enemy's disposal, trapping them into predictable moves while extending your own possibilities.

- you can draw some inspiration from CCGs like Magic the Gathering. They are in fact very close to the concepts exposed here for RPG battles: the "skill unlocking" revolves partly around drawing the cards from your deck, with special effects such as reshuffling the deck or drawing more often. Notice that most CCGs contain effects that allow to bring back cards that have already been used/discarded, which is a way of making even past actions relevant to your current tactical options.

- It could be great to have a visual aid for damage repartition/displacement over turns (perhaps a graph of damage over time, in the spirit of what I did in the Rationale section) or some other way to make the effect of any skill perfectly clear and analyzable by the player.

- A suggestion: skills could displace either the same quantity of damage (e.g. 1HP if you're going the small-numbers route), or all the damage dealt in the target turn(s) (including contributions from other skills). This will make elaborate tactics much easier to figure than having a lot of different quantities or percentages. The less math the player needs to do, the more they can make clever plans.

- How much damage is moved around by a skill should not depend on some intrinsic property of the character or the enemy (e.g. elemental weakness). We want strategies to be effective because of what the enemies have done, not because of what they are (i.e. strategy rather than a puzzle that can be solved once and for all). What will differentiate them is their inventory of skills and how they use them.

- You are allowed to "disguise" to some extent the mechanical aspects detailed above to make the game more appealing or closer in appearance to traditional RPGs, as long as damage-moving and locking rules are clearly stated in-game or in a design document included with the game.

Don't go too fancy though: the goal is to expose the skeleton of RPG battles, not bury it under fluff.


Some random starting ideas:

* Why not boil it down to a single HP bar and have each group try to push it in a different direction? (somewhat like Last Word)

* What if a single attack could kill, and the whole battle is a game of counters and feints to try to get that attack in before the enemy does? (Bushido Blade style)

* What if the "rubber band" of damage is elastic, and tends to come back to its natural state over time (so that both bursts of damage and healing progressively come undone)

* Why not use many more status conditions than usual, each one affecting some fraction of the skills (like Silence prevents Magic, but less generic), or even interacting with each other.

* For instance, why not call status conditions "stances" and use concepts from martial arts or fencing to create the skill unlocking logic? (depending on your distance, your weapon, your stance and the enemy's, you can use ground fighting, feints, throws, locks and so on)

* What if there were more categories than just allies and enemies with which to interact through the skills? (for instance neutral resources in the environment)

* For a simple extension of the DBS, you could have a number of different characters with a system for switching them in battle, then group skills that should be locked or unlocked together by giving them to the same character (or make them combos requiring multiple characters), then add conditions to access/summon that character.

* A limited component of TRPG-like motion is not forbidden (think The Reconstruction), although I'd like to see contestants tread newer ground as well.

* For multiple battles, how about having enemies who have the same brute force as you, but are programmed to have an increasingly broad range of tactical possibilities? Every encounter would actually serve the overall gameplay by teaching you how to deal with them in more and more elaborate settings, instead of being its own beast that loses all purpose once mastered.



Recommendations given in the comments section:
An episode of Retronauts literally just came out that discusses RPG battle systems.

http://www.retronauts.com/?p=846.





Anyone who wants to help me judge can let me know here or by PM, I will require their help depending on how many submissions we get. I will ask the judges to read this conversation if they haven't already, so as to have an idea of what we are looking for here.

Tentative criteria for judging:


Originality (20pts): How much does the system contribute to pushing the boundaries of the genre?

Example: Can you find ways to expand on the JRPG system that are not just adding one more gauge, or one more way to get a stat bonus?

Elegance (25pts): Is the system using as few ingredients as possible to achieve its goals in a precise way?

Example: Is each skill truly different from the others? Have you found a simpler way to achieve what usually requires 3 gauges, 10 stats and 100 different items?

Clarity (20pts): How well can the player understand the system, its strategic stakes, and the reason their actions succeed or fail?

Example: Are the effects of each action clearly labeled? Does the system avoid having the player do mental calculus to evaluate the result of their actions? Is the skill unlocking logic consistent and predictable?

Depth (25pts): How much does the system allow and reward elaborate plans, creativity and tactical intuition?

Example: Can we predict how our actions will guide the enemies' reactions, allowing us to manipulate them? Is the game more than pure HP/MP/Item attrition?

Bonus (10pts): Anything a judge finds especially worthy of praise.




I don't expect that making the game will take more than a couple of days at most; however for the sake of all people with a busy schedule, the contest will run from July 27 to August 27 23:59 EST. (however I won't mind if people get the time zone wrong)




The top 3 contestants will get to choose one of the following prizes:

(x1) Any game under 20 USD on Steam or the Humble store, because I might as well make it rain, FOR SCIENCE.

(x3) A (reasonable) drawing by yours truly. Preferably characters (fanart or original, any style), possibly simple environment shots or short multipanel gag in sketchy style. You can do whatever you want with it, use it as title screen or make a tattoo or sell it on eBay.

(x1) A cameo in my future game (hey, that works for Kickstarters. NB: I'm not really expecting anyone to pick this, but I'll give details if a winner is actually interested.)

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NS> No worries, NeverSilent! I'm working on it (lol ;p)

As with that, I am almost done! Yes, I know I said that already maybe a week or two ago but this time, it's real! Just gotta finish up the final enemy and the secret enemy. They're essentially the same; theoretically at least. My goal is to make these girls be able to inflict a single state to all weak gamers (no offense), that will instantly blast them off like team rocket. A state that I'd like to call "Rage Quit" XD

Of course, I have to stay unfair to the players, so the balancing bit may take some time. A few hours to a day, at most.

I just hope that dem judges would still be willing to finish the AFK Game highly serious battle system I made; given the dominance presence of easter eggs, lulz, self-adverts, and unrelated extras in the game.*

So yeah. If you guys would play it, you can confidently state that I really had fun making my entry; despite the cramming.

Have a good one y'all! :D



*No worries, really. I managed to contain the lulz in two areas: the beginning area, and the DeBug map.**

**Yes, the DeBug map will be available to the player (My first time to do so). This is mostly to facilitate those people that do not have Ace. It contains a majority of the acual 'tools' that I used to create the game.
But really; it could be an Event Command tester, a System DeBugger, Teleporters, Variable and Switch modifiers, or even simply me venting out/swimming in pride/horsing around.
Alright, I've finished character skillset planning. I'm onto setting up enemy AI. After that, I put together the final piece: The "calculation" part, where it calculates influence, and displays what's happening and plays out all the actions of the enemy and player. That's when I can start testing... I think there's nothing to worry about? Hmmm... we'll see.
author=outcry312
Alright, I've finished character skillset planning. I'm onto setting up enemy AI. After that, I put together the final piece: The "calculation" part, where it calculates influence, and displays what's happening and plays out all the actions of the enemy and player. That's when I can start testing... I think there's nothing to worry about? Hmmm... we'll see.


;) Make sure you remove that developer info before uploading, eh?

I made that mistake with my first build. It was kinda embarrassing. XD
And what sort of developer info did you have there?
author=outcry312
And what sort of developer info did you have there?


1) Every time he used a skill, a text box would pop up notifying the player of exactly what skills he had just unlocked by doing the skill.

2) Every turn, it showed how many conditions were triggering for his various stances (like "3 wary, 5 aggressive"), to indicate which stance he would go into and how many factors were playing into that.

...Having those show up kiiiinda would give away about half the battle system. XD
Hah, that's why I use comments, not message boxes!
I use comments too. I just needed in-game feedback to show me that everything was unlocking properly. XD
Haha well actually I have already taken a look at some of the already released systems, and while I won't comment in detail for the sake of fairness, I have to say I was both
- impressed by some of the ideas involved
- occasionally at a total loss on how to use them (strategically or at all, though in the latter case I suspect a few implementation bugs :P)

So perhaps having some dev info floating around wouldn't be so bad :P More seriously, people who already have their game out there needn't feel unduly concerned, but I am thinking that it might become a common issue in this contest, so I probably should give a general friendly suggestion to all contestants:

Communicating the logic of your system and making it sufficiently easy to use creatively is also an important part of the contest Edit: but this comment shouldn't prevent you from releasing your game!

(I am not talking about fancy GUI, but more in terms of "what you tell the player and what you don't, how much the player needs to memorize/analyze/calculate before being able to do anything...")
Of course I will do my best to try to understand it in any case.


Anyway I'm already very excited to see some creative formulas around, and I'm really looking forward to find more of those in other entries!
I have to dumb down the skillsets, they are way too complicated for the demo. They're the sorts of skills I'd add in later on, after this system is set-up. I have to make it more basic, or the technical stuff is just gonna overwhelm me, and I'm moving back into a dorm this weekend so I don't want too much stress, hah.

Edit: On second thought, I'm gonna have to drop this entirely. Now a lot was done, so I can submit unfinished stuff, but the battle system isn't playable so I don't know what to do. I wish I could finish it, but that will have to be another time.
Well despite my previous message, I prefer an overcomplicated system to no system at all! ;)

Plus no system will be perfect. As in any contest, you just have to do at least as well as the other entries, and it's not only a contest but also a collective research effort so sharing things, even a bit rough, is important. In any case it's up to you!
Well I have most of it set-up, it's just that there are technical things with skills that I can't get into right now. I realize, seeing as how this is minimalistic, I can definitely have my system without skills and still test out the system with stances and stuff. I can even keep stances and keep the influence system. Skills would instead be more... minimalistic. I'll figure something out.
author=Hasvers
- occasionally at a total loss on how to use them (strategically or at all, though in the latter case I suspect a few implementation bugs :P)


Somehow I felt into that group (probably because I recieved a similar comment from the friendly Marrend) so I made a new version (v1.3) for my entry. I just added a few lines in Chryst&Pry and Almadana EASY battles, to clarify the system behind the battles.

That may probably mean "giving away" the system (as Aegix said) but probably be useful to develop a proper strategy.

Link again here for the game, just in case you missed it: 3xT - Three Treason Theories

The deadline is just 7 days ahead! What will happen next? :3
author=outcry312
I'll figure something out.


Please do! The heart of the contest is in checking out these different ideas; leaving yours out would be a loss, for sure. Even if you have to develop it later I'd like to see what you've come up with under the stipulations of the contest.

author=Treason89
Somehow I felt into that group (probably because I recieved a similar comment from the friendly Marrend) so I made a new version (v1.3) for my entry. I just added a few lines in Chryst&Pry and Almadana EASY battles, to clarify the system behind the battles.


I still haven't tested this out for lots of reasons, but I'm glad the game is getting a good chance to be tested and developed before the time I actually have to judge it. I'll definitely give it my full attention, and I'm excited to try it out!
Yellow Magic
Could I BE any more Chandler Bing from Friends (TM)?
3154
Okay, so with, like, eight days remaining and no flash of brilliance, I'm gonna have to sit this one out. :(

The good news is I have plenty of time to play through the entries and give some feedback! I'll try and organise everything into one post somewhere.
Guess who's done :D
I'll wait for the game page to go up, then I'll add a link here.
Congrats soulkeeper, and thanks Treason for caring about us :P

Concerning "giving the system away", please note that building-up suspense is great for players in the final version of your game, but it's counter-productive for judges in a contest or coworkers in a research effort (but don't worry, even researchers get it wrong; I've sat through countless seminars where people tried to keep their brilliance for the last slide, while everyone stops caring after the third)

If the deadline is a real problem, we could have a kind of vote about extending it (I don't mind personally, not certain about my co-judges). I'm just not sure whether people would do more with a longer deadline, and I don't want people to spend insane amounts of time on this contest nor forget it altogether.

In any case, I'm thinking that after the end of the contest we should have a forum thread where everyone can discuss everyone else's ideas and we try to synthesize some of the best things to come out of it all. That way, even people who drop out of the contest can contribute by telling us what they would have done or making suggestions for other people.
I think I'll end up with something containing this?:

  • A document of the planned skillsets + explanations
  • A document of my plans of the overall system and each mechanic
  • A list of all things needed to finish the battle system's implementation, along with checkmarks of what's already done.
  • The actual demo open for viewing. Perhaps it would be playable in that you could explore it like I intended, but the battles would be replaced by a single one, running you through how it would go down, but not actually let you play since, you know, it's not done.

I think it would be a good, detailed way to explain my system even if it's not finished.
It's kinda frustrating, to watch so many awesome ideas and to feel unable to do it before the deadline... I'd need some kind of technical support to manage it, with the current deadline >.<

But I'm so glad I've entered the community for this contest - the amount of things I've seen here has taught me tons *.*
Come on guys! Six days left! If I did it, then why cant you? Up and at it! ;)


Thank you Hasvers!

I was about to suggest a forum thread too. I think it's a great idea since it's not as intimidating as joining a contest :P

Dare I say, part two? :D
Double post. Sorry.