I mentioned earlier that I kept the cast size small in order to facilitate healthy combat. The reasoning behind that is that if there are fewer factors to deal with, balancing and testing them takes exponentially less time. As a result, not only can individual characters be balanced, but interactions between characters can also be fine tuned. This has the effect of shifting turn-based combat into a more strategic realm and offers a multitude of opportunities to link combat and characterization.

In terms of avoiding Spam Attack combat specifically, I made sure to provide the player with non-attack options at all times. There are still instances when using a normal attack is a respectable strategic decision, though, as they are not inherently bad. Each character is individually crafted, and part of the design philosophy was to have a well-defined use-case for normal attacks, but to avoid giving them power in a non-strategic setting, as in, Spam Attack.

There was also a danger of making the game too hard to pick up, so I limited skills to those that had unique use-cases to make sure that the player always knows exactly what they're doing. There are also no Manual Busters; gimmicks that cause an insane difficulty spike unless you know the trick. Any time the player faces a challenge, they are 100% guaranteed to have to tools to best it, no matter what their level is. As a safeguard, I included non-gamers and People Who Don't Read in the testing pool and made sure that they could beat the game. If they had too much trouble at any point, I made changes that would not affect the experience of veteran gamers.

Avoiding Golden Paths was another paramount concern. Any game where a player can do the same thing every time and get the same result will get stale, but combat also needs to be consistent. To achieve this, I gave the player reliable abilities, but a high overall damage rate and high interaction between characters. In any given battle, if a character's combat system freezes, the player must adjust. Chances are, that affected their strategy for the remaining characters rather than just being a Business As Usual -1 situation. Each character can work alone, but can also benefit in at least one significant way from fighting alongside an ally. Thus, they are not forced to work together to be useful, but the player will likely employ a wide range of strategies that encompass more than a single Zoid.

Next time, I'll expand on how combat creates opportunities for characterization.