Today’s blog post is a bit “nerd” ๐ I’ve been a long time RPG player, even if recently I don’t have much time, in the past I played a good amount of RPGs.
The new battle layout of Queen Of Thieves is shaping up nicely
As you know, amongst the other things, I’m currently designing/coding my upcoming RPG “Queen Of Thieves” (don’t ask for release date, I don’t know when will be out).
The main focus was on making a more “casual” experience compared to Seasons Of The Wolf, both in interface, layout, rules, etc. This is a specific choice because I can’t really afford to make a big/complex RPG again, considering there will be Roger Steel and Loren 2 in the upcoming years to do as well.
And one of the most noticeable differences between the two titles will be the importance of the skillpoints and the skills themselves. Even if there are only 3 playable characters in your party, each one has a good variety of skills (12 skills with 3 level-up each). However, differently from SOTW, your SP (skill points to use skills in battle) will be very limited, and you won’t have any easy way to recover them during the battle.
This was initially done to make the battles shorter, since I didn’t want to make a game with long battles anymore. But in the end is turning out to be an interesting idea also from the rules/game mechanics point of view: yes because I also limited the HP and healing, so instead of “spamming skills” trying to kill enemies faster and healing/buffing your party to survive, each time you make a choice will have a bigger weight, so you’ll need to plan carefully.
For example, since I’ve eliminated theย front/back row, I changed also Kira’s Strikethrough skill:
As told before, in this game the defense is the armor: if the attack value is lower than defense, you will do only 1 damage, but every time a character is hit, the defense/armor value decreases by 1 point. This way even a boss enemy with a starting high 25 defense would get down to zero after it’s hit 25 times.
The skill above though lets the attack ignore armor completely. So even if does 50% base attack (higher version will reach up to 100% base attack) you might want to use that against a specific enemy. For example:
You have 2hp and 4 attack. The only enemy remaining is an armored skeleton with 2 HP and 10 attack and defense.
If you attack with a normal attack, you damage the skeleton for 1 point, and lower his defense to 9. Next turn, he kills you ๐
If you attack with Kira’s Strikethrough, you’ll ignore his defense and effectively kill him with one strike! (4 attack = 2 damage)
So as you can see there’s need of more thinking/planning. SOTW was a different approach: in that game you needed to “own” the enemy, by using a lot of skills, potions, both to do damage/debuff enemies and to reduce damage/heal. Is a common system in MMORPG and games with a big party. But in this case, being forced to use a smaller party for story reasons, I’ve discovered a new interesting way to design the RPG battles ๐