MARREND'S PROFILE

December's coming up. What's cool and chill to feature?

Look, all I'm saying is that it's 2023 and people are still surprised about the limitations and poor design decisions of a custom built website from, like, 2009 that hasn't been meaningfully updated since about 2014.

XD

author=Xenomic
Huh. Odd, when I clicked the link you put, the vid wasn't there because it said the YT channel was terminated lol. Maybe I just assumed it was yours for some reason. ^^;

What are you even talking about? I linked to a gamepage.

Does adding the skill to the specified character only allow them to use that skill if everyone had a Collab command (so if everyone had at least 1 Collab on, they'd all have access to the Collab command)? The reason I'm tying it into the Limit system is so if you have enough for both a Limit or the Collab, the player would have to choose which would be better for the situation (even moreso if they have effectively dual Limits with other player characters.

With Unites, I absolutely used a function call to add both the "Unite" skill category, and relevant skill, to each of the involved members when a Unite's conditions were fulfilled. This was to allow for flexibility on the player's end. Of course, I also had to make sure that the Unite-related objects were taken away when their conditions were no longer met, which was probably it's own function call.

The most infuriating part, though, was, the debugging process. Ensuring that the action input skipped over involved actors when a Unite skill was on the stack, and also making sure the cancel button would skip over actors that were involved in a Unite, but also-also detecting it wasn't the initial actor that put the Unite on the stack, and to proceed with the action selection cancellation as normal?

Bleh. My head aches already.

As for the very specific Collab, that one has a normal one if the requirements aren't meant, and the special if it is, and that one is an endgame superboss. Would this mechanic also apply to party-unique team Limits?

The idea that now comes to mind regarding a party-wide Limit Break is an idea I borrowed/stole from Suikoden 4 in regards to Baclyae Revolution. So, there's a menu in combat that has "Fight" and "Run" as possible options. I inserted a command between them called "Rush", which is only available if your party is full, and you have at least 60 of an in-battle-only resource to spend. You start the game with 0, and generate 1 per turn, and also generate 10 with each victory. The execution of Rush was a bit simpler, because the actual party makeup doesn't technically matter. I still needed to loop through the party members to add their ATK together for the damage formula, of course. The Rush skill also had a super-high SPD modifier (+2000?), so it acts first, and also effectively applied an invisible stun state on the enemy party so enemies don't act on the turn you use it. The purpose of doing that was to emulate Suikoden 4 as much as possible in this regard, but, I thought sharing this tidbit might be of interest.

I'm having a very hard time parsing what you're saying about Collabs/Summons, but, some of what I can parse sounds strangely familiar to Unites in this game.

So, with that system, very specific characters have to be in the party for the "Unite" spell category to even show up, not to mention adding the appropriate skill those characters have access to. Skipping over inputs for characters involved in an "active" Unite was a thing I looked into, and succeeded in. However, I also had the benefit of leaving the combat in a standard turn based system, rather than use an active turn based system. It wasn't a small bit of hell to get everything to work the way it should, but, it did. Though, saying that, I never want to have to do that again, nor would want anybody to go through what I did.

You might consider reading over the "Series Master" articles written by sbester on this point. Though, those were written almost 10 years ago, the interview style and insights provided therein about developing a series might be useful/interesting.

For full disclosure, I participated in one of those interviews. However, the games mentioned were certainly among the earlier games I've made, before I really got my footing as a game developer. The gamedev journey of one of my showcase games might be more interesting.