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I thought I would post an update on my game design. Its been a long time since I've posted anything about it. I've taken a couple long-term hiati (is there a plural to "hiatus"?), and effectively arrived at a design that I think will work. Sorry for the wall of text about to follow.

The basics: The game was originally going to be done in 3D. I've stepped back from this approach and opted instead for 2D. I'll also be designing the game using vector graphics, and adding a couple layers for graphical effects to keep things interesting. I haven't narrrowed down which graphics engine I'll be utilizing yet. I'm not sure how well they handle vector graphics, and its something I still need to research.

Background Story: Not much has changed for this. The game is inspired by the War of the Magi from Final Fantasy VI. Just after the war, the world is struggling to rebuild. Aftershocks from the cataclysmic struggle stymie further development - local warlords seizing power, leftover relics of destruction unleashing themselves on innocents. For the survivors, this is a terrifically dangerous time.

There are a couple important points to make here. First off, it is NOT a retelling of the War of the Magi. Its a wholly separate world, with a different history. I have no idea what actually happened in the War of the Magi, this is just inspired by it.

Character System: Again, this isn't much different from how I had envisioned the game to begin with. Similar to Suikoden or Romance of the Three Kingdoms (more specifically Destiny of an Emperor), the game focuses heavily on character recruitment, each with a different collection of stats and abilities to utilize. While levelling up will always be a priority, newer characters might have new abilities that they can utilize, or new combinations of abilities that might be useful for fights.

Abilities: All of the recruitable characters in the game are magically augmented Magi Knights. As such, they have a wide range of capabilities - from healing to damage dealing, special fighting arts, or defensive maneuvers. Unlike Final Fantasy games, elemental spells don't come in tiers of power, instead they are all roughly the same power, but differentiate themselves into HOW they deal damage - so instead of simply using the most powerful spell you need at a given time, you would want to choose the one that maximizes the damage for your situation, something that might not always be immediately obvious.

Battle System: The battle system has given me so much grief! I think I finally came up with a solution that I like however. I've decided to lean towards a tactics game - its the best balance between my ability to design character animation as an artist and my desire for a more free-form type game. Its also a relatively cheap way to get a LOT of strategy for not a lot of development. A difficult boss fight can easily take half an hour in a tactical style game.

Encounters are broken up into three main types:

Random Encounters. Simple, short. These encounters are designed to stress the party as they explore, to keep them on their toes before encountering the fearsome bosses. The difficulty and duration of these battles should be on par with most Final Fantasy games - particularly FFVI, FFVII and FFX.

Main Encounters. Complex, long. The battles will frequently contain more enemies, harder enemies, and situational difficulties such as movement obstruction.

Wildland Encounters. Variable difficulty and duration. Wildlands occur in only a handful of places throughout the world. The terrain map there is a fair bit larger and generally more open than random or main encounters. Battles there are never-ending, until one of the characters reaches an exit tile. During the encounter, the characters will encounter a wide range of enemies from pitifully easy to tear-sheddingly hard. It is also a test of endurance, since I plan to code more of the sought-after encounters to be available only after defeating x number of enemies consecutively.

The player will have the option of keeping the game turn-based or using a continuous timing system. The turn-based system would resemble FFX's side-bar showing the order of attacks, while the continuous system would be more in line with the ATB Final Fantasy titles (FFIV through FFIX).

Equipment: Equipment is designed to be highly variable, again forcing the player to tailor their choices to the situation(s) at hand. Equipment also has a durability parameter, inspired by Final Fantasy Legend II. Typically, there is a trade-off between the availability/durability of a piece of equipment and its strength. Thus, high-strength weapons might have a very low durability (such as the glass sword).

Anyhow, I think I have a pretty solid game design here. I'm keeping all of these elements fixed, mostly just so that I can actually complete the project. I have a lot of work ahead of me, particularly since I've never done animation before.

I've been working on some dungeon design. Im a big fan of puzzling dungeons, and also random dungeon generators. I would love to hear what you think about the game design, particularly if you have some concerns or pieces of advice from your own game design.

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Oh sure, I don't have to get kicked in the junk to activate it, but I like it anyway. -- Thief commenting on the difference between Throw and Blue Magic.

Ahhh... glad to see this thing's still alive.

Vector graphics can easily be simulated with any 3D engine capable of rendering lines (since both D3D and GL can, I don't see why this would be an issue.) Unless you meant vectorial images like what Flash has - that's a platform worth considering for a small-ish project, if that's what you're aiming for.

Two things you want to keep an eye out for: the cliché "Your beginning guys suck because the end guys have uber skills" and its counterpart, "zomg the new guys suck because your first guys had massive developement." The difficulty when introducing new characters is keeping your game environment in tune with what the character brings. If you never had a spell-caster, why should you start using one now? Maybe enemies have started being resistant to physical attacks and exhibiting obvious elemental weaknesses lately, and are about to grow even more magic-friendly. But then why bother with your uber-fighter? Maybe he can equip elemental weapons. Ah, but what's the use of wasting MP when a physical attack now does the same? And if you have to pick, which will end up more versatile in the end? (Hint: your answer should be neither.)

A little further down, though, you seem to be hinting at a different system than what we're used to. So the above example may not apply anymore, but the fact remains it's easy to make later characters vastly unequal to the current party the further in the game you get them.

I like your idea for wilderness encounters. I hope, though, they'll be optional outside of storyline events - the worst thing about Tactics was trying to get to a town but running into a 45-minute encounter before getting there. Cause enough to restart the game, reload, and try again...

On the other hand, I'm lukewarm about giving multiple timing systems in battle. This almost creates two different battle systems. Especially if one of them is the ATB system - how that would work in a tactics-like game, I'd like to know. It sounds weird having a tactics system where you have to make split-second decisions while everything attacks without pause.

Have you ever played Riviera (GBA)? In this game, items have a durability that decreases by 1 each use. Some (very few) items have infinit durability. Most of the better items have a very low durability (often 1, or 5). It actually works out well enough though. The usual durability is 50 and you can easily find a replacement within 50 uses. Often you're just throwing aay old junk.

I mentionned characters earlier on, and this is mainly due to problems I ran into with some test Endless Saga cases. The first point where you'll find yourself having to swap out a party member is probably going to be when you obtain the token thief character. Until that point, your party consists of two fighter-type characters and two healer types (one of which specialises in stat affecting spells.) The general strategy involves using Lyris to boost your fighters' stats while they deal out damage and your other healer keeps everyone alive. Since you're often up against really overpowered bosses, you can't afford to let up the damage-dealing, the stat-boosting, or the healing.

Once you get the thief, though, you have a character that deals less damage than your two fighters and can't heal your other members. Why would anyone want to use her? No real reason, other than diversity - it's disadvantageous.

I made her much more useful by giving enemies, and especially bosses, VERY good stealable items for a little bit, giving the player a reason to change their strategy to incorporate her. Add an ability to detect traps that only works when she's in the active party, be a little generous with traps (without going overboard), and suddently she makes up for being less useful than one of the two fighter-types in battle, but can potentially save you plenty of trouble by stealing better equipment and avoiding a few traps that could sap your generally-meager amount of healing items and spells before you even get to a boss.

Throw in some developement early on to give the player a reason to grow attached to the character, and she's likely to replace one of your lesser-used fighters sooner or later.

My point is, you can't add a character on a whim and have them be any useful. You need to get a lot of developement, in and out of battle, if you want the player to use them. Give them a reason to go through their party menu, settle on the character, and say something like, "Oh hey, I like this character - she's not too good in battle but I can definately use her to get past a few traps. And I'd love to hear a bit more about her past." (In ES, small, random developement scenes often occure between characters, be it idle chatter or bits and pieces of a character's background.)

I've been hearing about this project for a while, and I look forward to seeing it in action. You mentionned some "field" system that involved moving around in forests to avoid exposure to archers/gunners, or similare things. Will this still be present in the game or did you drop the idea?

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

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Ahhh... glad to see this thing's still alive. smile.gif

Yay! Someone's still interested in my project. Yes, it is very much alive. The Real World (not to be confused with a tv show of the same name) has gotten in the way of much of the potential development, but I've been working on the design in my spare time.

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Vector graphics can easily be simulated with any 3D engine capable of rendering lines (since both D3D and GL can, I don't see why this would be an issue.) Unless you meant vectorial images like what Flash has - that's a platform worth considering for a small-ish project, if that's what you're aiming for.

Actually, I was aiming for vector images, such as what Flash uses. I think it provides a unique, clean style and it can end up looking fairly decent too. It was inspired by an artwork piece I saw regarding the FFV PSX cover art:

Unfortunately, even though this won't be something as epic as a commercial S-E title, I think it still might be too big for Flash. I'm not disinterested in the idea, just concerned.

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Two things you want to keep an eye out for: the cliché "Your beginning guys suck because the end guys have uber skills" and its counterpart, "zomg the new guys suck because your first guys had massive developement." The difficulty when introducing new characters is keeping your game environment in tune with what the character brings. If you never had a spell-caster, why should you start using one now? Maybe enemies have started being resistant to physical attacks and exhibiting obvious elemental weaknesses lately, and are about to grow even more magic-friendly. But then why bother with your uber-fighter? Maybe he can equip elemental weapons. Ah, but what's the use of wasting MP when a physical attack now does the same? And if you have to pick, which will end up more versatile in the end? (Hint: your answer should be neither.)

A little further down, though, you seem to be hinting at a different system than what we're used to. So the above example may not apply anymore, but the fact remains it's easy to make later characters vastly unequal to the current party the further in the game you get them.

That's a very big part of game balancing. My goal, of course, is to ensure that for the most part the beginning characters and the end characters are roughly balanced throughout the game. Balancing will occur through several differences between characters. More abilities generally correspond to lower stats; weak low-level growth is usually compensated by stronger high-level growth and vice-versa.

There are a couple points I want to comment on for this. The first is that the character party is MEANT to be dynamic. Characters fall in and out of favor as you progress through the game. Yes, its a little sad to see your previous front-line star get replaced by an adept newbie, but the world changes, and sometimes these sorts of thing happen. Who knows, may the replacement is temporary, and after a little more training he'll be back at the front lines.

While I will be attempting vigorously to keep the game balanced on all fronts, I can promise you that I will not succeed perfectly. I have two goals with regards to the way that I will be balancing the game. The first is to keep the balance of power between earlier characters and later characters but without making the characters equal. One or the other may get a slight edge in the end. The second is that some characters are going to be better than others. I'm planning on having a lot of recruitable characters, trying to keep them all balanced would be a foolishly impossible challenge.

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I like your idea for wilderness encounters. I hope, though, they'll be optional outside of storyline events - the worst thing about Tactics was trying to get to a town but running into a 45-minute encounter before getting there. Cause enough to restart the game, reload, and try again...

I'm planning on having 4 or 5 different wilderness areas to host the obscenely large encounters. Only one will be required to be traversed through the normal story, and there will be an opportunity to save before entering. It will also be relatively easy to survive in, so long as you aren't spending 45 minutes there...

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On the other hand, I'm lukewarm about giving multiple timing systems in battle. This almost creates two different battle systems. Especially if one of them is the ATB system - how that would work in a tactics-like game, I'd like to know. It sounds weird having a tactics system where you have to make split-second decisions while everything attacks without pause.

The important thing is that the system would not be split-second. It would actually progress relatively slowly, much like a traditional ATB system on the lowest setting. I'm still planning on including it, at least until the beta stage. If it gets very low reactions from players, I'll nix it and stick with the waiting system.

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Have you ever played Riviera (GBA)? In this game, items have a durability that decreases by 1 each use. Some (very few) items have infinit durability. Most of the better items have a very low durability (often 1, or 5). It actually works out well enough though. The usual durability is 50 and you can easily find a replacement within 50 uses. Often you're just throwing aay old junk. smile.gif

I haven't played Riviera, actually, but now you're making me check this thing out. It sounds very similar to the way that Final Fantasy Legend II dealt with durability, except I don't think anything had infinite durability in that game. The best weapon had 7 uses, while one of the better weapons, the Glass Sword, would break after simply 1 use.

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I mentionned characters earlier on, and this is mainly due to problems I ran into with some test Endless Saga cases. The first point where you'll find yourself having to swap out a party member is probably going to be when you obtain the token thief character. Until that point, your party consists of two fighter-type characters and two healer types (one of which specialises in stat affecting spells.) The general strategy involves using Lyris to boost your fighters' stats while they deal out damage and your other healer keeps everyone alive. Since you're often up against really overpowered bosses, you can't afford to let up the damage-dealing, the stat-boosting, or the healing.

Once you get the thief, though, you have a character that deals less damage than your two fighters and can't heal your other members. Why would anyone want to use her? No real reason, other than diversity - it's disadvantageous.

I made her much more useful by giving enemies, and especially bosses, VERY good stealable items for a little bit, giving the player a reason to change their strategy to incorporate her. Add an ability to detect traps that only works when she's in the active party, be a little generous with traps (without going overboard), and suddently she makes up for being less useful than one of the two fighter-types in battle, but can potentially save you plenty of trouble by stealing better equipment and avoiding a few traps that could sap your generally-meager amount of healing items and spells before you even get to a boss.

Throw in some developement early on to give the player a reason to grow attached to the character, and she's likely to replace one of your lesser-used fighters sooner or later.

My point is, you can't add a character on a whim and have them be any useful. You need to get a lot of developement, in and out of battle, if you want the player to use them. Give them a reason to go through their party menu, settle on the character, and say something like, "Oh hey, I like this character - she's not too good in battle but I can definately use her to get past a few traps. And I'd love to hear a bit more about her past." (In ES, small, random developement scenes often occure between characters, be it idle chatter or bits and pieces of a character's background.)

One of the methods my game uses for this sort of situation is balance of abilities. Characters gain abilities by increasing levels, so character abilities at low levels are particularly limited. With a party of five people, the starting party will most likely be two fighters, one offensive mage, one defensive mage, and a wildcard character.

As the game progresses, more diverse characters become available. Initially, you might only have access to a fire mage, but then an air mage becomes available, as well as fighters with a small amount of fire magic, or archers with some wind magic. Now, your team can diversify further. Then the player really needs to make some choices. One of the goals of my game design is to really promote being able to complete a task (whether it be a battle, a puzzle, or the whole game) in a variety of ways. Maybe player A picks the wind mage and the fire fighter (excuse the pun), while player B chooses the fire mage and the wind archer. Both Player A and Player B are successful, but which one made a better choice? Player C picked neither, and instead went with a thief which knew cure and a barrier mage that was pretty handy with an axe. Player C had a much more difficult time without being able to cause as much damage, but also came away with some more loot.

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I've been hearing about this project for a while, and I look forward to seeing it in action. smile.gif You mentionned some "field" system that involved moving around in forests to avoid exposure to archers/gunners, or similare things. Will this still be present in the game or did you drop the idea?

Actually, its more or less been refactored. A lot of terrain is fairly malleable - ground can become covered in spikes or thorny poisonous plants, fires can be lit to cover grassland and spread towards the enemy, and rivers can flood their banks and damage enemies too close to the water.

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Oh sure, I don't have to get kicked in the junk to activate it, but I like it anyway. -- Thief commenting on the difference between Throw and Blue Magic.

Unfortunately I don't know of any libraries that support vectorial images. I'm afraid someone else will have to help you out with that - good luck searching. If you find anything good though, I'm interested.

Don't worry about balance too hard - it's impossible to balance a game perfectly. Someone will always come up with a way of playing that screws up your plans. Could be as bad as the plethora of bugs in FF6 (Genji Glove/Offering, Vanish/Doom...), some of the materia combos in FF7 (KotR + Mimic + W-Summon), or even some minor way of building your party that you overlooked or never imagined that makes getting through a tough fight ridiculously easy. It happens. But glaring holes in the game logic like the above two FFs have should be avoided at all cost. You DON'T want a game where you can beat the last boss in one turn even if it's through clever use of the game mechanics.

My main problem with the whole ATB thing isn't the system so much as the fact you have two different systems. The system itself, it sounds great - I plan on doing something more or less like that with a future project (very future project...) But having two different systems at once means you're doubling the chances a player will find some setting or combination of parameters that'll tear a massive hole through carefully-planned situations. Not to mention implanting these things isn't trivial, code-wise. Still, if it works out in the end, then that'd be great.

Your explanation of how you're handling characters makes it sound more plausible than what I previously had understood. The big difference between your project and mine, character-wise, is that your characters (if I understood properly) are far more diversified in their abilities than mine. Kind like FFV vs FFVI. In my case, a thief wouldn't be able to learn "Cure" so they can't be "salvaged" if their other abilities suck - a thief is really 100% a thief, a mercenary is a mercenary, and a squid-tamer is a squid-tamer. In your case, the extra versatility means you can easily afford to present the player with multiple choices without having to show consideration for your characters. The player adapts to the situation, instead of the opposite.

Overall, I think it could work out quite well. It's hard to tell from a concept alone, though, so hurry up and get coding. (Well, as soon as life permits it, that is.)

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Quote

Unfortunately I don't know of any libraries that support vectorial images. I'm afraid someone else will have to help you out with that - good luck searching. If you find anything good though, I'm interested. smile.gif

As it turns out, you're not the only one who is unaware of such libraries. I've spoken to a couple people who may or may not be experts in the field of graphics, but they certainly were more knowledgable than myself. They both recommended that I use a suitable vector graphics program to design my sprites and then convert them to raster. I can use mipmapping for any zoom effects I plan to include.

I definitely still think 2D is the way to go. I've got some plans for a 3D game that will possibly be a follow-up/sequel. Mostly just some storyboarding of the plot. It may or may not ever reach fruition.

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Don't worry about balance too hard - it's impossible to balance a game perfectly. Someone will always come up with a way of playing that screws up your plans. Could be as bad as the plethora of bugs in FF6 (Genji Glove/Offering, Vanish/Doom...), some of the materia combos in FF7 (KotR + Mimic + W-Summon), or even some minor way of building your party that you overlooked or never imagined that makes getting through a tough fight ridiculously easy. It happens. But glaring holes in the game logic like the above two FFs have should be avoided at all cost. You DON'T want a game where you can beat the last boss in one turn even if it's through clever use of the game mechanics.

To a certain extent, you and I are probably going to disagree about this. I know that its a sore point for you, and I can clearly see why, but at the same time I'm not going to cringe at large damage numbers. I'll try to curb them efficiently, but mostly this is a design choice. If it were not, then FF7 wouldn't have had so many attacks that could deal 9999 damage REPEATEDLY.

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My main problem with the whole ATB thing isn't the system so much as the fact you have two different systems. The system itself, it sounds great - I plan on doing something more or less like that with a future project (very future project...) But having two different systems at once means you're doubling the chances a player will find some setting or combination of parameters that'll tear a massive hole through carefully-planned situations. Not to mention implanting these things isn't trivial, code-wise. wink.gif Still, if it works out in the end, then that'd be great.

This is really just something I'm going to have to test and find out if it works. It might not. C'est la vie.

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Your explanation of how you're handling characters makes it sound more plausible than what I previously had understood. The big difference between your project and mine, character-wise, is that your characters (if I understood properly) are far more diversified in their abilities than mine. Kind like FFV vs FFVI. In my case, a thief wouldn't be able to learn "Cure" so they can't be "salvaged" if their other abilities suck - a thief is really 100% a thief, a mercenary is a mercenary, and a squid-tamer is a squid-tamer. In your case, the extra versatility means you can easily afford to present the player with multiple choices without having to show consideration for your characters. The player adapts to the situation, instead of the opposite.

My game is really all about customizing the player's party to suit their needs and/or whims. I want the game to be challenging, but I also want portions of it to be a little more light and freestyle. I'm going to add quite a few character/party-dependent side quests that will provide more of the situational difficulty.

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Overall, I think it could work out quite well. It's hard to tell from a concept alone, though, so hurry up and get coding. wink.gif (Well, as soon as life permits it, that is.)

I'm workin' on it...

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Oh sure, I don't have to get kicked in the junk to activate it, but I like it anyway. -- Thief commenting on the difference between Throw and Blue Magic.