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Myth Hunters are groups of adventurers who seek out rumours of mystical places and items. They search for the magical and prove or disprove the truths of what exists. For a price.

Neis, Eln, Dayn and Mitel form a small team of Myth Hunters who are hired to check out a small village's local legend of a possible Fountain of Youth, when they stumble apon the find of a life-time - a portal to what seems to be the Path to Icara, long believed to be a myth and the bane of many a Myth Hunter.

But it is nothing like the legends tell and together they must find their way back to their own world or face the fate of those who found this road before them - death.

Latest Blog

Battles, Runes and Character Roles

I decided to do something a little different with this game. My weak points in the past have been shown to be the gameplay aspects of a game, in particular, battles. Thus, I decided to challenge myself with Myth Hunters by making a game that focuses on well-balanced battles. It's proving to be an interesting and difficult challenge.

The first thing I did was decide that I would have no healing items what-so-ever. So at no point will you have any reason to use the Item command. In fact, it's gone (though it's not shown in the current images). The thing is, if you're going to get rid of healing items in a game you have to make sure that something or someone can handle the healing.

In this case, my second decision came in to play. Dedicated roles for each character. The characters in MH are a team and have been one for a few years before this game starts. They know each others' skills and abilities quite well and thus, they each have a dedicated role in battle.

Neis is our damager, and uses swords imbued with both elemental energies and ailments. I'll get into that in more detail a little later, but suffice it to say, there's a bit of flexibility and customisation when it comes to your characters.

Eln is our defence expert and it is up to her to keep the group alive - she should never be attacking except if everyone else is protected. Sadly, my original design for her abilities was put paid due to the game being in 2k, meaning that certain aspects that are in later engines aren't in this one. Mainly, buff statuses.


Eln's protection is very important. This is after one round - she keeps the squishies alive.


Dayn is our magical damage dealer and I'll get more into his skills a bit later on as they tie directly to the runes.

Lastly is Mitel, our healer, and it is he who carries the brunt of healing for the team. Mitel is a weak, defenceless healer who needs Eln's protection to survive. He and Dayn have the least defence of the four, and his doesn't upgrade by equipping new armour. Instead, his armour increases his ailment and elemental defences.

In addition to that, he learns skills by equipping bags. He starts with a basic Healing Pack which allows him access to one rune slot and the skills Bandaid (low health heal) and Ether (low energy heal). He later upgrades to better kits, replacing his old skills with better ones. The skills are tied to the kits, as shown below.



The starter skills are basic but they do get the job done.


Equip a better kit...


...to learn better skills. The new skills consist of both a better healing spell and a sorely needed revive spell.



Each person has their own way of learning skills or affecting their abilities using the power of runes.

Runes are magical items that can be equipped to weapon slots in order to affect their abilities in some ways. Each weapon has either one or two slots, and each piece of armour has one, too. You can only equip as many runes to a weapon as there are slots on it.

Runes have many effects, each depending on the wielder.

Neis's runes give an elemental affinity to her attacks, allowing her to deal bigger damage to enemies based on their weaknesses. Her second rune slot opens up the ability to add status effects along-side the elemental attacks, so she is quite capable of blinding a foe while hitting for triple damage due to their elemental weakness.

Eln's runes give her the ability to protect against certain things, whether it be body-based ailments, mind-based ailments, elemental spells or critical hits. She can mix and match her runes so that she can be protected from elements and mind-based ailments or critical hits and body-based ailments. It's basic but it works to keep her alive longer.


Eln's runes will help her stay alive longer, in order to keep the others alive longer too.


Dayn's runes dictate the skills he has at his command, and when he gets a second rune slot his skill list really opens up. Initially, one rune will give him a single spell based on the element of the rune equipped. When a second rune is equipped, the two open not only the elemental spells for those runes, but another spell that combines the two runes' elements. For example, two fire runes will produce a normal fire spell and a larger fire spell that does more damage, but mixing earth and air runes will open the normal earth and air spells, as well as Sandstorm, a combined spell for those elements.

Mitel's skills are based on his weapon, but those skills can be affected by the runes that are equipped. MP Cutter will halve the cost of spells, while Split Heal will apply a target-all effect instead. Speed Heal will always let you got first in battle, allowing for no more guessing when it comes to whether your spells will land first and Broken Terrain protects the party from terrain damage on the map.


Live runes are special and will only equip to armour.


Lastly, there are the Live Charged runes, a special type of rune that will either enable an increase in basic stats, protect from certain ailments or, most importantly, allow characters to learn certain spells that they otherwise wouldn't be able to.

Live Charged runes came about due to the realisation that once Mitel died, there was no way to heal or revive. Thus, I needed to come up with a way to allow other members of the party access to certain skills - and thus, Live Charged runes were born.

Another thing I had to think about when it came to difficulty was the amount of Health and Energy the crew went through each battle. With the removal of healing items, there was no out-of-battle fall-back, so I decided to restore the averaged Health and Energy of the characters after each battle, as well as reviving the characters if they die. It's my hope that this will offset the more challenging battles after the first dungeon, but whether it works or not will be another thing coming.

All that I've mentioned is currently implemented in the game itself. The runes are working perfectly (thanks to Ziggy for helping me spot an issue with Neis' rune equips) and spells are learned/forgotten just as they should be. Now it's just a matter of making the rest of the game and keeping it all in balance.

^.^
  • Production
  • Liberty
  • RPG Maker 2000
  • RPG
  • 05/07/2015 10:06 PM
  • 08/26/2015 04:57 AM
  • N/A
  • 11505
  • 7
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