Hope is an Empty Word

Hope is an Empty Word was inspired by an old SNES game that recently got a fan translation. I just happened to stumble over it while surfing random bookmarks and figured "Hey, let's give this a shot". And a shot I did give.

Nikketsu Tairiku: Burning Heroes was the name of the game and I quite enjoyed it - so much so that it inspired this project. At least in the battle sense of things.

See, the interesting thing about Burning Heroes is that you have control over one character - your own. The other characters work based on AI and will choose from their skill list (or attacks) what to do. Another aspect is that of a party-wide Limit Break, which fills slowly over damage taken by the whole team. When it is full it can be used to utterly destroy any non-boss enemy... and the limit break changes based on your party level. One last aspect that inspired me was that of having different layouts during battle (think Romancing Saga series or Breath of Fire II) which offer different bonuses. Except, instead of just a bonus to defence or attack, there are also enemy drop bonuses, magic cost bonuses, experience and gold bonuses, hit percent chance bonuses... and so forth. I really liked this idea.

Now, while I like these parts of the battle system, there are some bits which can cause issues if balance isn't spot on. Burning Heroes did a good job in making your hits (when you did hit) mean something and having each part balanced to work with the other. I'm not quite as great at making battles, but I'm going to give it my best shot.

That said, some parts will not be doable for me without the help of scripting and even then some parts might not be viable, so I've worked through the ideas and come up with these fundamentals.

Battle Layouts
Burning Heroes had a very large list of layouts you could try in battle, and they were interchangable during battle, too, which made them quite useful. Instead of that exactly, I figure bonuses based on the type of party you have will be best. During the progress of the game you will have access to 3 'types' of classes - Rogue, Warrior, Mage. Having all Warriors will give you a boost to attack, having all Mages will give a boost to Magic, and all Rogues will have a boost to speed. There will be other boosts to go along with them, but I'm still designing those ideas and trying to balance them out.

Party Limit Break
Burning Heroes has it that certain levels will give you certain attacks, and I'm still tossing over that idea. I do like the idea that levelling up will give you access to more things, but we already have that with levels and skills. The second thought I have is based on the story of the game, having you win certain boss battles giving you the ability to choose your limit break from ones that you've won from the bosses in question. This way I can have a good reason for hidden, optional bosses as well as the main storyline. I like that idea~

Character Control
I'm actually going to try and stick with the idea that Burning Heroes did in this case - have only the main character be controllable and the rest of your party work based on their own characterisation and skillsets. Some characters are more likely to go berserk and use everything on an enemy, while others are a bit more slow-paced and less likely to cast spells willy-nilly. The way I'm thinking is less random chance and more if/when cases. It'll be a lot of work to get it all set up and there's a lot of playtesting in the future but I'm optimistic I can get it working.


Characters
In Burning Heroes you choose from eight starting characters (some you have to unlock before you can pick) then run around in their respective stories, gathering allies to help with your battles. You can have up to five characters at a time which is great - as is the amount of characters you can recruit.

I tried to emulate this by allowing 9 characters to choose from to join your party. Varying your team is simple and you can remove people and recruit them just by talking to them. Of the three races, each is proficient in a set class.



You also have your own character to create - the race, class, gender, name and appearance of them is your choice and depending on those choices you will learn different skills, stats and equipment choices.

Anyway, I'll end this here but in the future I'll go into depth a bit more about the systems, how they work and the different bits and bobs to do with the characters, story and the like. Hope this was an interesting read! If you have any questions, ask away~