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Game Design

Feedback from an LP

SentinelProxima recently completed a Let's Play of this game on Youtube.

Some background information here - at the time he started this LP, the game had been sitting in an incomplete, abandoned state on my hard drive for several years. It's a miracle that I still had the source code, to be honest. Watching through his LP actually was a big factor in me finally resuming work and finishing the game off - particularly of note, only about 20% - 30% of the game actually remained to make at this stage, so more had been done than not. Ironically, the LP itself went through a similar thing - after reaching the final boss, it was left for over a year before SentinelProxima finished it off.

From watching through this LP, there's a few things I picked up on relating to the battle system that I feel need changing for my new project. These are not at all to fault SentinelProxima's playstyle - I can certianly understand why he did things the way he did, and a big part of that is "the game allowed for it", or even in some cases "the game required it". Conversely, there are some things that I feel were underused, and that I should consider either reworking to make them more useful, or outright removing them.

A particular concern for me was that the start of every battle was basically "set up protective statuses and buffs". These things absolutely need to exist, but the problem I see is the "set up once, now you're good for the whole battle" approach. I feel these need to be handled differently. One possible way of doing this is to make sure most bosses (and higher-tier random encounters) have a way of dealing with these. Another is by making them of limited duration (most status effects and all buffs in my game did not expire over time).

Another idea I have had regarding this, specifically with regard to buffs, is to do away with the "two levels of buff", make them more potent so that they're still useful, and slap on a restriction that you may only have one stat buffed at a time - if you buff a different one, the original buff goes away. (Most likely, debuffs would work the same way. One buff and one debuff at the same time, as long as they're on different stats, would be possible.)

In short, I'm wanting these kind of things to be situational rather than an "always do this first". But at the same time, I don't want to make them too minor or too short-duration to be worth using, either.

There will always be some cases where the best approach really is "always try to have it". Haste is an example of such - the advantage of being under Haste is tremendous. This would likely need to be addressed either by bosses removing Haste regularly, or by limited duration and a high cost to cast it.

Finally, another concern relates to sidequests. In the LP, SentinelProxima chose to pursue most sidequests as soon as they became available. This was intended, and taken into account level-wise, for most of the sidequests. The problem arises with one that was specifically intended as post-game, yet SentinelProxima chose to do it before completing the game. In this case, it meant he had a relatively easy time with the final bosses.

I'm not sure how this can be avoided. One option, of course, is to literally block access to such sidequests until after the final boss. But I don't know how I feel about this option. Another could be to give no rewards, not even levelling, from such sidequests - but then this limits the ability to give the player more to work with as they continue through the quest.

I'm really not sure what the answer to this one is. The only way I could see to resolve it is to directly buff up the final bosses if sidequests have been completed, but eh... that doesn't quite feel right either to me.

Game Design

What should change?

So, as I've mentioned around the place several times, I'm wanting to do a new project.

The biggest issue of course with this one, is the near-zero effort on anything outside of the battle system. Even the levelling system, while sufficient and flexible, is not very interesting.

I had entertained ideas of rewriting it while keeping the same overarching ideas, but I'm not even sure about that anymore. If I'm going to essentially be doing an entirely new game that at most draws inspiration from this one, then there's much more room for change - including in the battle system which, while great, still has room for improvement.

The first thing to come to mind is more clarity for the player on how things work. Yes, traditionally, you know you have "50 strength" but trial and error is the only way to see how that translates into actual damage. I'd like to make this more transparent, so the game can focus more on "figure out how to defeat the enemy with what you have available" than "figure out what your attacks and stats actually do".

As you may know, this game is heavily based, battle-system-wise, off Final Fantasy X (aside from being much harder), but some features - most notably summons and overdrives - are not in any way replicated. I'd like to integrate these features somehow, but perhaps not directly in the way FFX does as both are overpowered there.

Then, the next question is of course - how can I replicate some of the existing game's best boss battles under this new system? For example, Dark Transient - often considered the best (and hardest, or at worst second in difficulty only to Corelock) boss in the game - would be rendered far easier by the presence of summons if they worked exactly as in FFX.

I have a lot of ideas, but I'm still figuring out which ones I want to use. Any suggestions are always welcome.
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