Now that I'm back on developing the game I had to adjust all my TODO list for the game. I figured I'd start with the first encounter and the Battle Mechanics.



The Battle Mechanics design are as follows:

• On map encounters so player have a choice of avoiding them

• Player can be chased by the encounter events

• Front View as I have decided before.

• Should not take too long to finish every battle (Comes down to manually designing enemies and troops). Battle is not the focus, only a means to an end (To Level Up). No grinding design.

• Strategic Depth: not too deep where to many things needs to be learned. I'm using Row Formation restrictions for the enemies but not for the heroes. You need to target front row enemies first before the back row but skills will be available that can target the back.

• Skill Cooldowns will add a bit more strategy

Maybe i'll add some little stuff to this later but for now this will make a fast flowing but not too distracting battles (I think). Anyways that's all for me today. Thanks for reading!

- Necther Louie -

Not much has been done this week. Pretty busy with work, I'll keep this short. I started to graph out the flow of the dungeon like what I did on the overall map. I'm showing the very bottom floor of the first dungeon, no legends on what the colors mean because I don't want to reveal the whole dungeon. :)



I was also able to layout the starting area of the dungeon and the mechanics for the puzzles I'm gonna do on this dungeon. I'm on a good start for the first dungeon but I'll find more time to do stuff. Hopefully I will.



It's a rough layout of where to go and what it looks like. That's all for me. Over and out.

- Louie -

It's been about a few weeks since I posted the thread and I finally have a first log. My main task for the past weeks is to layout the critical path of the world map. What this means is that I should be able to walk from point A to the main points in the map, in this case its the main dungeons which includes the Minotaur's Lair.

Before I started mapping, I made a flow graph of the whole map that I can follow as a base for mapping. Here's the graph.



Making graphs is very helpful, it gives some sort of skeletal frame for your maps plus it looks nice. The red ones are the ones I focused on making with some white ones included. The blue shape at the back indicates that it's a group of maps (see image).



Another thing that changed in the past few weeks is the solidification of some features (read features section) and the map design. as a comparison:

OLD


NEW


I changed the design to a more simpler and clearer one. If you compare the two, the path is clearer and the overall feel is better and does not feel cluttered. I wanted it to have the same feel as the maps of Pokemon I used to play. Playing those games felt like it was my choice to go where I want without the game telling me to go there (illusion of choice).

With the first game (Default Fantasy: The Prison), my focus was on the game mechanic that I wanted to implement hence I forgot to focus on the game itself. With this one I'll focus on gameplay and pacing making sure that it has a good mixture of puzzle, exploration, battles and others. That's about all for the first round of my development log.