• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS

The Delicate Art of Murder: Stamina

  • Red_Nova
  • 09/10/2015 06:20 PM
  • 2912 views
Sometimes it takes a little time away from a project to break your mind out of a routine that you settled in, you know?. Sorry for not being as active on here as I used to. I don't really want to go into details; Suffice to say I've been ... out of it... for a few days. I know, I know: don't go saying things haven't been going well without talking about it or else you'll look like one of those Facebook attention seekers. Well, I feel it's important to be as open and honest as I can with you about what's going on behind the scenes, especially since it directly impacts the development of this game. The good news is, though, that my little funk is over and done with. I'm really pumped to come back to this project! Now that I've opened PotF for the first time in almost a month, I feel refreshed, energized, and ready to get going again.

Right then, back to being fun.


It's been requested that I talk about the battle mechanics next, so that's what I'm gonna do. One of my main goals with the battle system in PotF is to place the emphasis on player skill over levels. If anyone hasn't seen Egoraptor's Sequelitis, go watch that now. It's a series I highly recommend if you want to learn more about game design. Anyway, a short statement that he made in the Castlevania episode stuck with me: Do you really feel accomplished by grinding and getting the best weapons/spells that boosts your damage output? Or do you feel accomplished by using your intellect as a player and work with the game's mechanics to overcome a challenge? And you know what? I agree with the latter. If you have the right strategy, but didn't spend enough time killing the same mobs over and over again just to boost your numbers, then don't you feel even slightly cheated or that you're wasting your time? I know I do.

So how does one emphasize player skill in a turn-based RPG? Well, my solution revolves adding more functionality to each character's SP.



Just like in Soul Sunder, every action you take, with the exception of using items, has an SP cost. Yes, even your basic attack. Basic attacks will cost just 1 SP, but all your abilities will cost 2 SP or higher. This limits your damage output and prevents you from spamming strong abilities.

As of right now, there are no items that recover your SP. To regain lost SP, you use the Focus command. This costs you one of your three precious moves you get during your turn in battle, but it restores the character's SP by 50%. Since every enemy has a relatively high attack and magic attack stat, you will get punished if you waste too much time making your characters Focus over and over again. And since there's no real healing spells in the game you can access easily, it makes every point of damage the characters incur have much more impact. This is why you're encouraged to spread out actions among the party instead of making a single character act solo.

However, there's another reason you'll want to keep your SP high. In addition to being required to attack the enemy, each character's SP factors into their defense. So whatever damage the enemies do to you will not only be reduced by your physical defense stat, but also your SP. Oh, and many enemies have SP as well. And since 90% of your attacks are physical based, that's gonna be a problem. You'll have to reduce the enemy's SP by using a character's Guard Break abilities. But wait! That costs extra SP on your side!

The balance of reducing the enemy's SP to damage them while keeping your own high to protect yourself is determined by player skill. You can fight an early game mob with mid game equipment, and still have the potential to sustain heavy damage if you're not paying attention. If all goes well, the game will be rather easy as long as you know what you're doing and pay attention to the attributes of the enemy you're trying to kill.

At the end of every battle, the characters will restore all of their SP, but not their HP. So not only do you not need to waste time making every character Focus multiple times before ending a battle, but you can turn up the heat and use more powerful attacks to end a battle quickly. The idea is to finish battles as quickly as possible to avoid enemy's attacking any more than necessary.


Thanks for reading this text wall! Next blog, I plan on talking about equipment and how that factors in to the emphasis on player skill.

Posts

Pages: 1
NeverSilent
Got any Dexreth amulets?
6280
There's not a lot of meaningful things I can say about this, because I already knew about it. I still like the idea a lot, but I'm also still a bit sceptical since from what I've seen I'm not sure if the mechanic will provide the experience you hope to achieve. But I would need to see more of it really in action to give actually useful feedback on this. Until then, just know that I'm watching this project closely.
(Whether you interpret that as a promise or as a threat is up to you.)
nhubi
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
11099
We're ALL watching it closely.

(see NeSi's disclaimer above)
Interesting system. The idea of SP factoring into one's defence in particular is certainly something I don't recall seeing before. It makes sense for sure (you have more energy to dodge and such when you are not tired). One problem I can see with it, though, is that it could just encourage the player to attack normally for most of the battle to keep their SP (and, consequently, defence, high) before finishing enemies off with the most powerful skill on the last turn, and do that for every battle.
nhubi
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
11099
Basic attack costs SP too, it's only item use that doesn't. It's the same system that was used in Soul Sunder.
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
Interesting. I had MP energy factor into the combat math in Myriad Cypher, but, the way it worked in that game is that it affected how effective one's MDF shield was.
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
author=NeverSilent
There's not a lot of meaningful things I can say about this, because I already knew about it. I still like the idea a lot, but I'm also still a bit sceptical since from what I've seen I'm not sure if the mechanic will provide the experience you hope to achieve. But I would need to see more of it really in action to give actually useful feedback on this. Until then, just know that I'm watching this project closely.
(Whether you interpret that as a promise or as a threat is up to you.)


I took your feedback from the RSW prototype to heart. The SP restoration was implemented in direct response to the problem you reported about spamming Focus at the end of every battle. The other big complaint was much more difficult to solve: overreliance on a single character. That would be very hard, if not impossible, to fix with the battle mechanics alone, so the solution was the diversify the enemy types in each encounter. This way, players would have to use each character's skill sets to exploit enemy weaknesses and inflict buffs, debuffs, ailments, etc.

author=nhubi
We're ALL watching it closely.

(see NeSi's disclaimer above)


*Nervous squirming*

author=NTC3
Interesting system. The idea of SP factoring into one's defence in particular is certainly something I don't recall seeing before. It makes sense for sure (you have more energy to dodge and such when you are not tired). One problem I can see with it, though, is that it could just encourage the player to attack normally for most of the battle to keep their SP (and, consequently, defence, high) before finishing enemies off with the most powerful skill on the last turn, and do that for every battle.


Yeah, that's definitely a possibility, but not a very good one. 90% of the game's combat is physical, and 90% of enemies have SP that reduces your attack damage to virtually nothing. Spamming basic attacks and Focus will more than likely get the party killed after a long, drawn out fight. Plus, there are ways to completely bypass enemy SP. Many characters have magical skills which drawn upon magic attack and defense, which is generally a lower number for enemies with high SP.

In addition, attack items will also ignore SP. So they not only don't cost character's SP to use, but they can deal serious damage to enemies without having to wear them down first. If you use an attack item who's element that some enemies are weak against, you can possibly straight up kill them before they even act.

author=Marrend
Interesting. I had MP energy factor into the combat math in Myriad Cypher, but, the way it worked in that game is that it affected how effective one's MDF shield was.


That's cool! Now I really need to play that to see how you handled it.
@RedNova: Late reply, I know but something about this system just crossed my mind. When you say "90% of enemies have SP that reduces your attack damage to virtually nothing." does it mean that the other 10% have no SP at all, or just that their SP is too low to have much influence on their defence? (I obviously hope it's the latter.)

Moreover, SP is consumed by the enemies' own attacks, right? If so, it would be cool if, for instance, the player was discouraged from attacking the healer/buffer type enemy physically first by their high SP, and instead could find success by attacking/weakening the others while letting them cast more and more spells to expose themselves even more. And if all enemies can also use Focus when needed, that makes things even more unpredictable (and ensures attack items remain valuable even under this scenario.)
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
Haha that's fine. Better late than never!

For your first question, it's not an either/or scenario. Not every battler on the field behaves like an enemy. Eventually, perhaps it may. But sometimes you can target things on the field that isn't necessarily an enemy. Of course, whether or not it stays that way is still up for debate.

I'll be honest: I haven't really answered your second question myself yet. As of right now, no, enemy actions do not cost SP. However, there are multiple options they have to recover their SP. Some enemies Focus if you let their SP get too low, most enemies have a Miasma Charge ability which regenerates SP over time as well as boosting their attack power, among others. I've been playing around with making their attacks cost SP, but I was afraid to manipulate SP so much that players spend more time reducing it instead of HP.

The idea is still on the radar, though! So, depending on the feedback the first demo gets, that might change.

For the scenario you described, there's actually a few more variables unrelated to SP that factor in to battle tactics: Ailments, limb injuries, etc. I actually disagree with the idea of weakening other enemies while a healer opens itself up by burning through their SP, as that feels more like a more passive solution to a battle. While it's a technically sound strategy for many other games, battles in PotF are planned to be less about attrition and more about aggression by encourage proactive and offensive strategies. The limited healing resources players get also discourages a passive approach.
OK, firstly, the idea of targeting non-enemy objects on field (I guess it's scenery things like debuff crystals that need to be shattered, or support beams that can break and fall onto the enemy, correct?) is awesome, and I suggest keeping that.

Having that said, I'm also strongly in favour retaining SP cost for enemy actions, as for me, enemies "cheating" on the rules you have to obey (or vice versa) without a good justification for it is a pretty significant immersion breaker, far more than the otherwise fine combat style not fully fitting in.
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
Yeah, you've got a point. I'll tweak the battles and see how it turns out.
Pages: 1