Okay so it’s once again been quite a while since my last post, but I have a good excuse for it:
I started making the town and started the shops and the shopping system, which led me to setting up the pause menu for the items and equipment which led me to overhauling my combat system, which took time…
So let’s start with the shopping system:
I started building it as a basic buy - sell type store front you see in… practically all games, but then I started thinking about how much I always hate it when I first have to sell something then buy new equipment - equip it and then sell the old equipment… I mean, why not just do it all at the same time?
This idea led me to making a trader’s store system where instead strictly buying or selling, you are actually trading, so both selling and buying at the same time. (I also figured I could use this with some characters that only want to trade certain items for certain other items, not accepting pure life force as is).
Next the pause menu item handling:
Here, the most important aspects are the “add life”, “enchant” and “divide” functions.
The add life function (still trying to come up with a better name for it in the menu) allows the player to infuse the vessels with life, strengthening their effects and making them more useful.
Enchanting should be fairly self-explanatory, the player enchants the vessels with a spell thus giving the vessel the effects of that spell, thus making the vessels even stronger, and possibly even making the spell itself stronger through the vessel.
The divide function shouldn’t be too difficult to understand either, it essentially divides item groups. While at first it may seem a bit unnecessary (at least according to my brother) it does have a purpose. Since the adding of life is done to all items in the group as is enchanting, you might want to divide your items so that they may for example have different enchantments per group and/or you might want to also divide them by strength, i.e. having a few items with more life added that you save for harder enemies and some items with less that you use for easier enemies.
There is also a quickslot which is for battle and break/discard which, well, destroy the item and return any life force added to it back to the player.
and lastly combat:
So I decided to fully commit to the consumable battle system, where you mainly fight by using items and casting spells. The style is inspired partly by Rin Tohsaka from Fate/Stay Night who uses crystals imbued with magic to fight and half by my own hoarder tendencies as I avoid using consumable items in games as much as possible and figured I’d make a battle system built entirely for hoarders just to spite myself. It’s also good to note that while all other items and equipment, or “vessels”, are used as consumables in battle, equipped equipment isn’t and they can be used as many times as needed, but they also weaken with each use, meaning that all their effects on you grow weaker the more you use them offensively.
Firstly there’s the quickslot, which essentially functions as the basic attack command so you don’t always have to go through an extra menu window or two just to attack (this was inspired by my brother).
And lastly there is the overhauled magic casting system, which I decided to turn into a memory/password type casting instead of just picking a spell from the list. The reason for this (and quite frankly the reason for the whole revamp) was that the original battle system as is, felt boring. The first thing I started focusing on making more interesting was the magic system and the first thing the popped into my head as I was thinking about cool magic attacks was actually the finishers from DBZ Budokai 3 which have you choose a button to that your opponent has to guess, if they fail three times you finisher lands with a really cool animation and everything. So at first I thought maybe adding in a QTE where you would essentially have to cast the spell correctly before the opponent attacks, failing to do so would mean failing the spell. My brother however vetoed the idea saying that one of the main reasons people (like myself) play turn-based RPGs is that they do not require quick reflexes, instead relying on thinking and planning. And I agreed. So I stepped back a bit thinking of other ways to make the spells more interesting to use and remembered the Blitz abilities from Final Fantasy VI, which I quite recently beat, where you have to input a specific button combination after activating the ability to choose which Blitz attack you want the character to use. This also reminded me of Wizardry where you have to manually input the spell you want your characters to use and have to remember each spell by name, much like the blitz attacks.
So I figured “why not try the same?” and now the spells have to be learned not only by the character but by the player too if you want to use them.
sigh
That was a long post, and now that all of that is done, I think mechanically the game should be mostly finished par polishing and adding some exceptions to certain system. Which leads my focus onto art and writing for now, and while the first town’s blueprint is mostly finished, it’s still missing its residents, so I think the next post will be once I gather up some willing souls to inhabit the (literal) ghost town.
