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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Posts

author=Avee
Anyway, what I'm saying is that I felt like the rules were limiting and I just want to make sure they may not be interpreted that way. Maybe just change that line about "must" and "should" rules.

Thanks for the input, I promise I will think about it. It's not a catastrophic change for sure, but for now I really believe it would do more harm than good if contestants didn't have a strong incentive to push themselves outside the box (if only by trawling the comments for suggestions on how to go around the rules - I mean, the fact that you can circumvent it creatively is actually written right next to the rule! ;) ). It's a thirty years old box we're talking here, so it takes some effort to unbox ourselves.

Edit: On a fundamental level I would just like, as much as possible, to prevent contestants from spending time and effort to produce a battle system that will very probably not fit the spirit of the contest. If that means raising a couple alarm flags with apparently arbitrary rules, I'm fine with it, although I will rethink it if I'm given strong enough arguments.
An episode of Retronauts literally just came out that discusses RPG battle systems. Specifically, JRPG battle systems which it seems this contest is focused on. It covers the early Dragon Quest games and goes up to modern RPGs. Might help get your creative juices flowing hearing more about the combat systems that are already out there.

http://www.retronauts.com/?p=846
Is this contest specifically for turn-based systems?

I think Pokemon, from Gen 3 onwards, is a decent series to look at as afar as interesting moves go. There's basic stuff like how Overheat does a lot of damage, but cuts your Sp. Attack power, but there's also a lot of really weird stuff like Trick Room, which reverses turn orders. Even the older games have a few interesting moves like Substitute, which makes a "shield" out of a quarter of your health. It protects you from status ailments, and stays in place when you switch pokemon (I think... its been a while).

A few other things about Pokemon is that stat-buffs stay until you switch out or you're hit with an opposing debuff (which is very rare in the competitive scene). Since these are more long-term than usual, the process of building these up and keeping them becomes a huge strategic element, which is heavily reliant on guessing when the opponent will use an attack you can live or use an non-offensive attack (like recover or their own stat-buff). Of course, its still guessing, but guessing the behavior of other people is a lot more fun than trying to predict what a machine is going to do.

Something else to think about is the behaviors of the enemies themselves. Most RPG enemies just randomly do one of three attacks while taking hits to the face until they die two turns later. They don't really react to your attacks or other actions in any way.
You get the occasional enemy with a memorable gimmick, like Final Fantasy's Bombs or Tonberries, but these are painfully few and far between.

To comment on the whole "healing" thing, I think the fact that healing is often cheap, done by one character who's got nothing else to do, and can get the whole party at once is where the real imbalance is. Other than MP/items, there's also often not much in terms of long-term or permanent advantages to be gained.
If a boss heals themself, its actually worse than just undoing your progress, as all the resources you blew damaging him are still gone. In a worst-case scenario, winning might end up just being up to RNG!
(Sorry if this has been covered already, but I don't feel like reading all of this and the linked topics right now)
author=turkeyDawg
Is this contest specifically for turn-based systems?
Let's say anything where there is no time pressure on the player, since it's about thinking your tactics through. You might come up with something more clever than turns, but I got nothing. It's perfectly possible to have things like simultaneous turns, though (a la Vandal Hearts, every time an ally does something, an enemy acts at the same instant), or planning for multiple turns at once as in certain board games.

Concerning the "AI": if the actions at the enemy's disposal obey the same locking/unlocking pattern as the heroes', it will necessarily make them more interesting than the usual RPG opponents (even if the AI is terrible and only picks randomly, at least the range of what it can choose will evolve in time). This is something that I should have stressed more in the rules.

Apart from that, thanks to both of you for the inspirations! I think I'll update the Inspirations section on the contest page regularly with suggestions made here in the comments.
Hi again, I have three questions more:

- The game can only have one battle?

- The graphics have any incidency in the chances of winning the contest?

- How do you submit a download to the Event Locker? Because in the Submit section I didn't found it...
You can have one, or four or five, but not, like, fourty, as the contest description says. The event is more about the design then the graphics, I would say no. As for the third question, when I click submit I see the option.
Beaten to it by outcry, who pretty much nailed it.
The only incidence visuals could possibly have on the contest is if the interface significantly helps to understand how the system works, and even then it will be bonus points.
How is that? Because when I select Submit, I only see the options of Select Team, Select Download, and the button of Submit Entry.
LouisCyphre
can't make a bad game if you don't finish any games
4523
When you set a limit on battles, you're clearly only referring to the ones mandatory for completion, surely. It seems wasteful to design a compelling game and then not give the opportunity to stretch it if the player so chooses.
Ack! Where'd all these people come from?!

A-anyways, I'd just like to ask: Do you have a tabulated criteria available? Not that it's a necessity, but it will help us (or maybe just me) know which points I should focus on, which points I can afford to sacrifice, and the like.

If you do, but won't/can'tshow it until after the contest period, then okay :D
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
OK I think I am going to win I just need to know one thing how to battle
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
Hey guys can someone please help me on how to battle or create battle I've tried time and time again but it won't work pm me if u know how
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
Hey guys can someone pls pm me the file on how to create battle system please I am in dire need of immediate assistance anything would be appreciate
ilan> erm I will have to ask kentona for details about the event locker.

author=LouisCyphre
When you set a limit on battles, you're clearly only referring to the ones mandatory for completion, surely. It seems wasteful to design a compelling game and then not give the opportunity to stretch it if the player so chooses.
Sure, if you want to make an actual game from it, be my guest! Just do not expect the judges to play through more than a few battles before making a decision, so it seems reasonable to submit here a demonstration of the system rather than the entire game.

author=karins_soulkeeper
Do you have a tabulated criteria available?
Not really, because to be honest I have no idea what people are going to come up with. This event is at once very constrained and very freeform, so it's hard to guess. The one thing I can say for sure is that we will only evaluate your ideas and how well they translate into tactical decisions from the player's perspective.

Everything is a means to an end here, even a text-based game in html would stand a chance (provided the interface clearly and readily conveys all the necessary information).

But I will give a thought about how to grade ideas. Perhaps I could break down the score into various aspects such as: originality, elegance (no wasted effort), accessibility (clarity and interface) and tactical depth.


CashmereCat> I laughed, but if you do it one more time I will use my ban cannon! Well I don't have one, so I will ask kentona. Note that the ban cannon should be a thing.
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
Oh I forgot to say also can someone teach me how to make level and xp i have created world map but my characters aren't sideview I know everything else but I would appreciate if some won would help me this
LouisCyphre
can't make a bad game if you don't finish any games
4523
author=Hasvers
author=LouisCyphre
When you set a limit on battles, you're clearly only referring to the ones mandatory for completion, surely. It seems wasteful to design a compelling game and then not give the opportunity to stretch it if the player so chooses.
Sure, if you want to make an actual game from it, be my guest! Just do not expect the judges to play through more than a few battles before making a decision, so it seems reasonable to submit here a demonstration of the system rather than the entire game.


So a simple battle-gauntlet option from the title scene. This is acceptable!
By the way, if there must be no randomness, I guess that the enemies must have a set attack pattern, am I correct?

P.S. : There isn't a chance to add achievements to the contest, right?
For achievements, I guess that'll be kentona's choice. Since he is participating, we might have a chance ;)

Concerning the enemies, here's my scale of values:
full AI (i.e. giving the enemies a way to choose actions because they are optimal) > minimal AI with randomization (some actions are more probable in some cases) > completely set patterns > completely random actions

I am willing to accept a measure of randomness in enemy behavior as a cop out from real AI, because AI is hard.
The problem with completely set patterns is that it turns battles into a puzzle of "guess the pattern", which is rather different from strategic planning.