ANTILURKER77'S PROFILE

What archetypes do you use for the standard mooks in your game? Some examples include:

-Swarmer: Low HP, low damage, but come in large groups
-Fighter: Moderate HP and damage, uses physical attacks with maybe a strong attack occasionally mixed in
-Elemental Mage: Mostly spams spells of a single element, possibly some status magic mixed in there
-Mini-miniboss: High HP and fought alone, they may follow simple patterns or have one single gimmick
-Buffer: Buffs other monsters but has limited damage capabilities

For those of you using touch encounter systems, how do you balance it in regards to player EXP? In one of my previous projects this is something I really struggled with, not knowing how many monsters the player is going to fight. I ended up balancing my EXP curve around the player skipping ~90% of fights which made it really easy to end up over-leveled. It's one of the reasons I went back to random encounters--it's far easier to figure out how much the player will fight as players don't tend to escape battles by default. So how do you guys determine how much the player should fight per map?

So I'm working on a new project and want to create all the art myself. It's a roguelike, so there won't be any animated sprites (mostly for my own sanity).

These are player dolls. I know the legs are terrible, and the arms don't quite look right.




A couple of ability icons.




Any feedback is appreciated.

I'm sure this has happened to all of us before. You're playing a game and start a boss fight. The boss opens with Firagajagajada, so you immediately reload your save file so you can equip your fire resistance gear. Doing this is annoying, especially if it happens with every fight. While your locale can sometimes give hints to what types of monsters you'll be fighting, it isn't always applicable to everything the party can prepare for. For example, the player will know to equip ice resistant gear for the ice cave, but how will they know what status effects the monsters inflict?

The point is that the player has to prepare for fights they know nothing about, and when they do figure out what they need, it often means annoyingly reloading an earlier save file. How could this issue be resolved? Do you just flat-out tell the player what enemies they'll be fighting? Or do you just throw a Game Over screen at them for not properly preparing for the fight?

EDIT: This should be in Game Design & Theory, whoops.

Any players out there? For those who don't know, the game is basically Diablo 2 + FF7's materia system + FF10's sphere grid. It's currently in closed beta, but they give out keys every 5 minutes and there always tons of giveaways going on.

I've been playing the beta. It's enjoyable so far but quite grindy. The amount of character builds you can make though is pretty staggering and I love random drops.