Combat System Idea…Help Needed
I’m currently working on an open-world First Person RPG, but I’m trying to innovate on some of the core concepts you’d expect to find in an RPG. For example the emphasis on items is quite small. Your inventory only allows you to carry a handful of items, potions are a technology way to advanced for this point in the world’s history, and wait for it I’m not planning to add armor. Instead, there is a heavy emphasis on character leveling, abilities, and player skill. The player progress through the world because of what they’ve learned rather than what items they have equipped. And so, now I’m at the difficult part of designing the combat system while still following the philosophy I’ve set in the inventory and leveling system. My solution is this: unarmed magic combat.
Most RPGs I’ve seen separate magic from the main combat system. It’s an auxiliary system that only serves to aid your weapon damage and isn’t usually at the core of combat. But my idea is to integrate the sweet epicness of elemental magic with a unarmed melee martial arts to create a totally different combat design. Then it fits the idea of making the player stronger because instead of finding weapons to do mare damage, your character learns new forms and abilities and becomes more powerful that way. [Note: I do want to add a few weapon classes to give the player some choices, but that’ll be on the back burner until I figure this out and might not make it into this first game] Now, I wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of magic martial arts, Avatar: the Last Airbender did that in a cartoon series back in 2005. However, I haven’t seen any games, specifically RPG’s, to take advantage of that idea yet.
Now here’s the rub. I’ve been doing some research, and there doesn’t seem to be many tutorials about how create a melee combat system. As a novice I’m not sure where begin on this. Should it be animation based, or physics based? What blueprints would you need for that? Is there something on the marketplace that would help this process? I guess what I need is some advice or a tutorial on how to get started, how to set up the framework of a basic combat system and just how to make the basics work. And then once I can get my head around how that works, I can figure out how to add to it and customize it. Sorry for the long post and the ton of questions, but I’d greatly appreciate all the help I can get on this topic:) -TheRealmsMaster
