Hey guys! Today I’m going to talk about status effects! I’ve got them all working how I want now, so it seems apt to talk about them.

Tephra has four different status effects; Poison, Stun, Berserk and Curse. Let’s run through them.

Poison
Okay, so in case you’ve never played an RPG before(go play one right now), Poison deals a bit of damage every turn. In Tephra, it lasts for five turns. Nothing majorly innovative here, except for the fact that this Poison isn’t percentage-based. Instead, it deals a set amount of damage, depending on the strength of the poisoning(more on this later). This means that it’s a fairly balanced option on normal enemies and bosses alike, which means I don’t have to make many(or possibly any) enemies immune to it.

Stun
Stun in Tephra stops you from attacking for 1 or 2 turns(how many turns depends on whether you’ve already attacked the turn you get Stunned). Why (basically) two turns? So the player has a chance to act while the opponent is paralysed. Stopping an action isn’t much use in a single-character RPG otherwise! For the most part, Stun will either be avoidable, or only used by the player.

Berserk
Berserk(which I will forever be writing as Beserk) is probably the most unique status effect in my game(even though it is obviously based on the Final Fantasy model of what Berserk is). Berserk causes an enemy(always an enemy; Landis can’t become Berserk) to always use one skill. Which skill? That’s the major difference. It’s different for each enemy. One enemy might use a powerful attack, while another will start adding negative status effects to its allies. As unpredictable as this sounds, once you know what skill an enemy will use, it allows you to block or absorb it very easily. And sometimes you’ll get lucky and your enemies will start killing themselves!

Curse
Curse is Zombie under a different name. For those unfamiliar(honestly, play more games if this is you!), Zombie (and thus Curse) turns healing into damage. “Ouch”, I hear you say. Curse is cruel. Curse works very interestingly alongside shields; damage turns to healing, and then turns back to damage. The obvious point of Curse is to stop turtling(constantly staying on the defensive until a convenient chance to attack appears) in certain situations, to help the player around enemies that use blocking moves, and just generally to mix things up a bit.

Cruel, but fair
In a lot of games, status effects are almost entirely luck-based, over-powered when used against you, and completely useless when used by you. This is just frustrating; this sort of thing can cause the player to lose when they aren’t doing anything wrong, which isn’t any fun for anyone. In Tephra, status effects are still lethal; Poison can take big chunks out of your health, Stun completely incapacitates you, and Curse stops your ability to heal, and can damage you on top of that. But I like to keep things even, and this is how I do it;

1. If a statuis effect is going to work, it’ll work the first time. You either have a 100% or a 0% chance of success, so there’s no messy random chance.

2. If a status effect is tied to a certain type of damage, shields and helmets are able to block that status. So even if an enemy can Stun you, you can simply use a helmet and block it. This means that the player is actively involved in keeping themselves healthy, rather than just praying that they won’t get Cursed next turn.



So if you’re dying of a status effect, it’s probably your fault.

But I can totally see a problem with how you do Poison-
There is more than one strength of each status effect. In fact, there are three strengths: normal, strong and super strength(if you can think of better names, please tell me!). Each status changes in a different way as they get stronger;

Poison will deal more damage. This is the main reason for having up-scaling If Poison deals a static amount, then by the end of the game, Poison will be useless. Because of this, it needs to be able to deal an amount proportionate to the enemy’s health. The obvious way to do this without percentage-based status effects is through different strengths of Poison.

Stun will affect more enemies at higher strengths. This is simply because by the end of the game, you will probably have a ridiculous amount of weak Stunning items, which would normally allow you to stall out battles as long as you like. This way, you can add Stun to most enemies without being able to abuse it.

Beserk and Curse will last longer. This gives you more opportunities to synergise the effects of these statuses.

For the curious, the player will use status effects by shooting arrows. More on this when I get to talking about crafting, which is probably months off. Next week I’ll probably do something on difficulty settings, dying, and how I plan to handle heal-spots, simply because I’ve become inspired on how to handle some of these things recently.

Hey guys! I think I’ve got my window skin sorted now, but I could still use help from a scripter(although I think that’s almost worked out too!). Everything else is going abnormally well for this game, and it’s almost concerning, considering how dragged out production normally is for me. Well, let’s hope I can keep this up!

Today I want to talk about armour! So, as I explained in my blog about items, you use items and equipment as skills in my game. Which raises the question: how do shields and helmets work? The answer, of course, is very well, thank you!

Healing without potions
Healing in games is an odd issue. If you have it, it has a tendency to warp battles into something different to what you want them to be; it’s very easy for battles to turn into “heal, attack, heal, attack”, which doesn’t stay interesting for long. But without healing, battle balance can become very difficult, and will either be a cake walk or an impossible ordeal(unless you balance really, really well).

The issue becomes greater with free healing, which is so powerful that I very rarely used in RPGs, and is always a very watered-down version of real healing.

So, how do I get around this? Shields. Each type of shield blocks and absorbs a different kind of attack(there are three shields, and five types of attacks, with the two you can’t block being rarer than the ones you can; I may or may not cover this in another blog). Shields only work for one turn, so there’s very much a risk-and-return thing going on; if you work out what attack your opponent will use next, you not only stop them for a turn, but get a good chunk of health back; guess wrong, and you lose a turn AND the health. This gives you powerful healing, while only letting you “abuse” it if you fully understand your opponent(and even then, if there’s more than one enemy, or an enemy that doesn’t follow a pattern, you can’t abuse the shields at all). I hesitate to call it “abuse” when understanding your enemy is a large focus of the game.

Shields are given to you free, and can’t be bought or sold.



But what about helmets?

Helmets will save your life
So, with shields being such a powerful tool, what could helmets do to compete with that? Helmets don’t absorb damage like shields; they only block it, although unlike shields there is a helmet for every type of damage. The advantage of helmets is that they last for three turns instead of one. This allows you to avoid damage while still dealing damage yourself; the importance of which I discuss in my second blog. So, while the benefits of shields are greater, helmets are far more flexible and allow you to keep up your damage output.

Unlike shields, helmets have to be bought. You can stack the effects of helmets, too.

Thanks for reading this blog! Next time I’ll be talking about... weapons, perhaps? Or status effects? Perhaps stats and the types of damage. Time will tell, I suppose. Cya next time!

Hey guys! Sorry I haven’t blogged in a few weeks; I’ve been busy. Today I’m going to talk about items in my game; or, as they’re called, Tools.

Items are skills, skills are skills, abilities are passives
I’ve gone for a very non-standard approach with items in my game; for one, there is no “equipment” in the game. You don’t equip anything in the normal sense. However, that does not mean that there are no weapons or armour. Bare with me here. Instead, your weapons are items which you use in place of skills. Really bare with me here.

Throughout the game, you receive weapons and armour, such as swords and shields. These will go into the “Tools” menu in battle; and so instead of equipping them, you choose one to use in combat each turn, much like you would with a skill in an ordinary RPG. From there, they will do damage or provide some other benefit to the player. So really, the weapons are used as skills.


But, of course, there are some big differences between items and skills; you can buy items, you can sell items, items don’t use MP, and (some) items are consumable. These are the basic reasons why I chose items over skills(well, close enough, anyway).



What this means is that instead of equipping a shield to reduce damage, you use a shield to block an attack during battle. You don’t use “slice”, you use a sword. Each tool will also have separate properties. An axe, for instance, may hit last in the turn, while a sword is much faster. A boomerang will hit all enemies, and a fire staff will do fire damage. The way the weapon is used will even make a difference; shuriken deal ranged damage, knives deal pierce damage. You can use a whip as many times as you like, but each time you use an arrow, it’s gone forever. Although tools are very similar to skills, there are some crucial differences that make tools more appropriate for this game.

Fantasy shops: fair and portable
Well, with items being so important in this game, it’s obvious that shops will have a pretty critical role to play. They’re where you will gain and lose “skills”, after all! But my shops will be a little different to normal, to make them even more important.

One, shops have a 100% pay-back rate. That is, you sell things for the same price you buy them for. This is so you can easily exchange weapons throughout the game – there’s no point having options if you’re going to make the player too scared to use them.

Two, shops will be accessed through the menu. As with all good systems, I plan to explain this away quickly and using fairies. The benefits of this should be obvious; if you lose against a boss and think, “I could really use a rapier for this!”, then all you need to do is go into the menu and do a bit of switching. I think most people would prefer this to trekking back to the shop each time you have a change of heart.

Three, the shop will be complete. Well, kind of, anyway. Whenever you obtain a new weapon, it will be added to the shop(a cool guy called Gubid is doing a video on how to do this for me and I will be sure to link him when it’s released). You will also find recipes that add items to the shop that you don’t yet own. There’s no point having a shop with nothing in it, after all!

And, finally, the shop will only trade in non-consumable items. For reasons best known only to me, I don’t want any money leaks in this game. So everything you buy and sell to and from the shop will be non-consumable. That means by the end of the game, you’ll always be worth more than you were at the start.

Shops will be very important in my game. Never be afraid to buy and sell weapons!

Anyway, that’s the general overview of items in my game. I’ll talk in specific about different types of items, like poisons and shield, later. Thanks for reading!

I have an awful lot to blog about. What I really want to do is make sure that everything I say has some sort of context to you guys. So to that end, I’m starting with what I feel is the most basic difference between Tephra and most other RPGs here; the fact that Tephra only has one playable character.

Single guys have it tough
Each time you add another character to the party, things get a bit easier for the player. Your moves per turn, your damage output and total health pool all increase. New skills are brought to the table, and the chance of any individual team member being hurt decreases. If one character dies, the other characters can pick up the slack and even revive the dead character. A team of four is better than a team of three, which is better than a team of two.

But now, consider a “team” of one.

You get a total of one move per turn. If you attack, 100% of your turn will be attacking. If you heal, then you won’t be dealing any damage. When your character gets hit by a strong attack and goes down, there’s no-one to get them back up again. If you get stunned, you do nothing(don’t worry you won’t be getting stunned in any game of mine) until the stun naturally wears off. There’s no dividing up damage either; every attack will land on the same character.

Basically, a single-character RPG is absolute. Everything is in ones and nothing can be wasted. A single-character RPG is, by nature, ruthless and cruel. If done incorrectly, it is frustrating and difficult. If done correctly, it means that every move is critical.



Offensive vs. Defensive
In normal RPG play, using a good mix of offensive (damaging) and defensive (buffing/debuffing/healing/blocking) moves during battle is essential. This is because separate characters can perform separate roles, achieving multiple tasks in the one turn. This means you can build up your character’s strength and keep them healthy without compromising damage output; and outputting enough damage to kill your opponent before they kill you is the goal of every RPG battle.

Now, keeping that goal in mind, consider a single-player RPG again. With only one move, 90% of the time the player will want to dedicate it to dealing damage. After all, if you don’t deal any damage, then you’ll never win the battle. A good example of this difference in play-style is with a spell that blocks all damage to your party for a turn.

In a multi-character RPG, the cost of this spell would need to be very high to stop it from being overpowered. Imagine; every turn you cast this blocking spell and attack with your other characters. You would never take any damage, while still dealing damage to the opponent. Unless there was some large cost to this spell, it would become a dominant tactic very quickly.

But imagine the same spell, with only one character; when you cast the spell, you may not take any damage, but you also deal no damage, gain no buffs, and give your opponents a free turn to power up. The only possible use for the skill would be to block monsters that attack in patterns(like a monster that uses a big attack every third turn).

So, by taking the number of party members to one, an over-powered spell becomes nothing more than a rarely useful novelty. Single player RPGs are games that follow a ruleset separate to any other RPG.

In summary
What sets a single-character RPG apart is that:
-There is no way to be revived upon death; death is an instant game over
-There is only one move per turn
-Certain moves that would be useful in multi-character RPGs become useless when their ability to synergize with other moves in the same turn is removed
-Offensive moves become more useful than defensive/support ones when you only choose one move per turn

So what am I gonna do about it?
In order to keep all sorts of moves useful:
-Non-damaging moves must have potent and worthwhile effects
-Some moves must provide multiple types of effects
-Some moves must provide effects that span multiple turns, allowing the player to act as if they have multiple actions

I plan to explain how I will do these things in my following blogs(although there will probably be a blog on my item system first since it is pretty essential to not completely getting boggled).

I hope this wasn’t too confusing, and thanks for reading!