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Character spotlight: Fallon



Fallon is a researcher from the Gerudo clan. When she returned home from a scholastic journey, she fell into the role of schoolteacher for the clan's children. Aubrey, who'd been involved with the kids since before then, helped Fallon with keeping an eye on them during field trips about Hyrule and such...and eventually she asked the shy bard to marry her. *n.n* They have a daughter named Naomi, but I'm figuring on setting the story of Forgotten Gates in the time before she came along. It'd be a bit irresponsible for both parents at once to flit off on an extended adventure, after all. ;)

In Forgotten Gates, Fallon is a well-rounded character with a slight boost in speed and physical attack power. Her element is Water, making her strong against Fire and Spirit, but weak against Light and Forest. She has a variety of ocean-themed spells, from a Tsunami to wash away foes to a Riptide for doubling agility.

Fallon's special ability is Geomancy. It works similarly to the Geomancy of the Final Fantasy series -- perform a spell at no mana cost based on the location the fight is taking place in -- but since terrain is more varied and prominent in FG than in most RPGs, Geomancy should be more interesting. Originally this was just going to be physically taking advantage of the environment, as an expression of Fallon's character as a researcher; being knowledgable about the world, she is able to trigger advantageous effects from her surroundings. I couldn't think of a good name for such an ability though (Geology was the best I could come up with), and it's going to be difficult enough to come up with an effect for each terrain type on which a battle could take place without restricting it to purely physical manipulations. X) So I decided, what the hey, Fallon has magical terrain-influencing abilities in this game. Most of the magic in FG is stuff the characters don't have in the actual MUCK anyway.

This ability is a bit worrisome from a development perspective, though, since I'll have to design and implement (including animations) dozens, quite possibly over a hundred effects to cover all the terrain types the game will have. Hopefully a fair few of them will double as monster skills, but it's still quite a scope bomb. If anybody has any other ideas for a Gerudo researcher's special ability, I'm all ears. I haven't done any real work implementing Geomancy yet, just came up with the general concept.

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Hmmm... I dunno how it would be implemented in engine, but maybe you could make her abilities region based and call her a chorographer ? like each major region you travel to has a set of skills based on some defining features individual areas in the region. For example:

Let's say that the eastern of Hyrule has a creepy forest with super poisonous bushes and a snow village with non-melt-able ice; if she used 'choromancy', she would have a 50/50 chance to either tap into magic power from the ice village for an ice attack/move involving some of the non-melt-able ice or into the magic power of the creepy forest to use a nature move/attack that involves the poisonous bushes.

Again, this is probably a bit too hard and weird to implement, but if you could, It would let you give her unique abilities in every location without having to account for every single different type of terrain you use within those locations. It'd also be easy geological world-building.
That actually sounds very much, on a mechanical level, like the Geomancy ability in Final Fantasy 3. It would randomly pick from two or three possible spells based on the current terrain, which was always essentially the same within a given dungeon. Doing that would certainly cut down on the total number of effects, but I think I'd rather go with an individual effect for each terrain (which in this game would translate to six per dungeon) or come up with something entirely different. Thanks for the suggestion though. :)
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