Ghosts of the Arcanum

I'm pretty excited about the potential of this system, so I thought it was worth blogging about it. The battle system rebuild has given me room to toss in a new targeting system. In a way its an enhanced version of a targeting system I used for the custom battle system in the RPG Maker '95 version of the project.

What this system does is give meaning to the positions of the enemies on the battle field. For example, if enemy A is infront of enemy B, and you attempt to attack enemy B, then enemy A will intercept your attack. That won't be just it, at least so far. Things like area-of-effect skills and other abilities that target entire enemy groups will be affected by the targeting system. The way that area-of-effect abilities currently work is that they don't automatically target all enemies, but instead the player still targets a single enemy, and the surrounding enemies receive splash damage. How this will come into play with the new targeting system, if the surrounding enemies are outside the area-of-effect radius of the attack, they won't receive any damage. This may also bring new abilities into play, such as those that target enemies in a straight line, and abilities that alter the field position of enemies. A new Temporal ability has already been created that will allow the player to target any enemy regardless of their position on the field.

So.. yeah, I don't think the basic concept of the system itself is anything new in the world of RPGs, but it's something I haven't seen done, if just to this extent, in any other RM game, particularly RM2k3 and the DBS. This is the last feature I'll be adding to the battle system, since I feel like anything additional would throw off the balance that's been established in the system, and anything more would also over-complicate things.

Aside from that, I'm trying to decide whether I should keep the Damage Condition/Chain Guard System, or drop it. To those of you that don't know, the Damage Condition System is a system that, only when Hard Mode is active, prevents the player from inflicting damage on the enemy until certain conditions are met, which at one point varied from Chain Count, to Momentum, and even the target's AP. I think recently reduced the conditions to just the Chain Count, henceforth the system being renamed Chain Guard. The thing is, there seems to already be a number of defense modifiers in place for the enemy, and I'm scared the player may be overwhelmed by the number of things they have to get around in order to damage the enemy even just a little.. eh.. Feedback would help out a lot.