Jaeger wrote:1. How big can the enemy parties be?
2. Do formations still matter to some degree like SOTW?
I'm just wondering since you will be limited to 3 characters this time around. Also any information you are willing to share on the game's rules can help in eliminating stuff you don't need, especially if you are aiming for a simpler game.
Good questions, while the party is limited to 3 characters, I wanted the enemies to be up to 6. Of course since the battles will be designed to not last long (except some boss battles maybe) if there are 6 enemies they should be weaker than characters.
As for formations, it's part of the engine, though if I eliminate the push/pull skills I can just use the front line for the party, and keep it only for the enemies. Kira has a push to backrow skill for example. But as said I could just keep the front/back row for the enemies only, and make sure enemies can't push/pull the party members.
Regarding other battle mechanics I wanted to try some different things, for example:
1) a "working" aggro system like PS1, so you can have more battle control. In practice you should be able to use Kira's taunt (she is the warrior class) so that enemies attacks her mostly. Not always but in most cases.
2) as said, no healing except for potions and a combo skill of Joanne (the mage) so healing characters would be ultra-rare or limited
3) I'm also implementing a "defense" system. In this game the results will be plain and predictable:
Attacker with attack 10 hits defender with defense 5 = 5 hp dmg
Attacker with attack 6 hits defender with defense 5 = 1 hp dmg
but what happens when attacker has lower attack value than the target's defense? I thought that on each hit, the target defense is lowered. So even if a character has defense 10, and all attacker have attack 1, after 10 times they hit him the defense will go down to 0 and they'll start to do hp damage.
There are skills that can raise defense up again but like for healing are rare.
Limited SP, most skills cost 1 SP, others 2 SP. SP values as you can see are low too. No HP/SP regen value, now I don't remember if I have added some combo skill to refill those, but like with the other things, very rare.
Full heal after each battle of HP/SP. You can carry a limited amount of potions each mission, a low value like 3-4 (need to decide yet).
Ok that's the basics. As you can see should play totally different from Loren/SOTW
Jaeger wrote:
If you want to remove the log, you will probably have to use use more visual aids (special effects, animation, etc) to convey the information. For example, in SOTW, the only way to tell how much damage is taken from DOT is by looking at the log. Having the number pop up on the character portrait and maybe text/symbols to indicate the source of the damage. Same can be said of regenerative effects, except it you can use different colored text to indicate restorative effects.
Yes that's the plan! Also because of low SP the effects on characters won't be many. I want each effect to have a big meaning and not have like Loren/SOTW when was common to see 5-6 effects at once on all characters
Troyen wrote:The sword is kind of hard to see even on the player characters because it's hard to distinguish visually from the blue border.
Hmm maybe I'll ask artist to draw another icon
Troyen wrote:What is the R L S H? I guess L would be "show the log".
Yeah are placeholder buttons, the same that were on previous screen displayed as texts: R=Restart battle, L=log on/off, S=battle speed Slow/Quick, H=Help.
Troyen wrote:The more of this is visible on the UI itself, the better. But it's hard to address QoT specifically without knowledge about combat mechanics, skills, enemy skills, etc. Like are you're planning on including dots and buffs/debuffs? (I see them on the screenshot but they look pretty ugly.)
As replied to Jaeger, I'm planning a very different approach, so that there won't be lots of buffs/debuffs. Of course with 3 characters and maybe 6 enemies, could happen that there are 4-5 on a character in particular situations, but not many.
Yes looks ugly now but if I go with only frontrow for party, or maybe display them top/bottom like in Loren and let's say 4 vs 4 (a bit like PS1) it could be different, there should be enough space to display the icons in a better way.
Troyen wrote:With smaller battles, you could presumably revamp the log so that instead of a giant scrolling text block it is more visual and focuses on just the events since your last turn or the most recent seven events or something. Sort of like how Hearthstone has a display for the past several actions and all the details about what happened are visible there, but you can't look up the history from the start of the fight (which I think is rarely needed anyway).
Yes I already planned it like that, would keep only most recent events (like 15-20, but can tweak the value).
Thanks for the feedback so far, was helpful
An idea could be that you can hit by melee only enemy in front of you, while use ranged/magic to hit anywhere. But this would mean you have to move around the characters a lot and I don't think is fun.
