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[JasonPickering]

Since I am stuck on the Map stuff. Still trying lots of stuff I finished the Combat UI



you have both bars, specials, Health Bars, and colors for type. (white being normal, green being Plant) and the Player currently is slowed by the scorpions special attack.

[BlueSweatshirt]

On Android track balls or track pads register as arrow buttons. Plus you should include keyboard controls for Android users who have keyboards, anyway. 

[vinheim3]

2. What are these game I would like to take a look at them.

Haven't had time to search for it, but one was a game where the battle had you walk left to right on a horizontal field as a samurai, you slashed enemies by drawing lines on the screen and you can pick up arrows and shoot using those too.

The second was an RPG where you can pick between warrior, archer and mage and when you got into dungeons, it is similar to the map system of the samurai game and yours. Some enemies drop souls which you can fuse onto your weapons.

[JasonPickering]

I found that Samurai one but couldn't find the other one.

Still working on the Combat engine. right now we have

Types - Normal, Fire, Water, Plant
Demeanor - Wild, Daring, Normal, Cautious (these set how far a enemy lets the bar go)
Speed - how fast the Bar goes
Health

the only thing missing is adding the Specials and then I can plug it in to the game. I will be on vacation for the next week, so I will be back on this as soon as I get back.

I have been thinking about Player Characters lately. I was wondering if I should do stuff like fighter, mage, thief or go a more general way of just having an adventurer and the player can spend points to make them as they see fit (speed, Health), and instead of starting with specials the special is decided by gear they pick up. just a thought we will have to see. the second idea would limit the number of players I would have to make and allow me to spend time making enemies and locations instead.

New enemy Ideas:
Bombs (or the equivilent) they have a slow bar and go for special their special being detonate which deals you massive damage so you have to kill them before they get their bar filled. also I am thinking about one enemy that switches Elements every attack.

Right now stats are a bit of a problem for the player. an enemy has
1. Element
2. Demeanor
3. Health
4. Speed
5. Special

but a player can only have Health and speed, as Element and Special might be decided by gear you find. any other ideas of stats that could effect battle?

[gimymblert]

Don't add to many things for the sake of adding things!

Ask your self what is the main resource management challenge, is it in battle only (health, special, stat, status) or out of battle too (buying potion, equipping appropriate gear, etc...)? Maybe both (health carrying on many battle before the next shop/church/health resource)?

For exemple, there was a simple rpgmaker game called mystery of heaven, it only used the basic battle system, but add a twist with battle management AND level design).

Good equipment give strength and defense, but reduce magic and agility. You can turn a mage or a healer into a medium fighter but magic won't work as well as without equipment, also enemy might attack first and escape might not work, it's a trade off.

It happen that the game feature a field to traverse where there is no inn/shop/health loot and the healer is removed from the party, you still have plenty ether for your mage to have strong magic attack.

You can see that there is many way to approach this problem, you either try to brute force with agility and magic to be the first to strike and annihilate  enemy before they move but with an exposed mage that is nearly naked to attack. Or you try to keep your mage for more difficult situation later by protecting him and playing the fight with average brute force, or you could go naked to favor agility and escape any battle that fire without taking a hit!

The interesting things is that field is long to traverse but only have one type of weak enemy, weaker than the first field you traversed at the beginning of the game (which had tougher enemy but also plenty health drop and was short to traverse). But with no way to refill health the stake goes higher and higher at each battle (less energy, need to protect the mage which is naked, etc...) and it force a strategy change over the course of the field which mean the same battle set up but not exactly the same "game".

The first time I got there I was too much sure of my superior fire power I can tell you at the end I was running like a coward whenever possible and the experience felt great, it made think instead of spamming attack all the time. It's an good example of resource management in and out of battle and how it impact the experience, no need to have fancy stat.

You can't have interesting battle if you can't create interesting situation, think of various situation before trying to shoehorn mechanics and stat that goes nowhere, use mechanics to express those situation, mechanics by themselves are not interesting. Your game look great! make it greater!

[vinheim3]

Just by reading Gimmy TILBERT's first line, I'd agree. You have a good system going on with the basic battle system of speed, attack and low HP's and the map system is good too. It's really just about level design now, customizing monsters to have attacks that makes the battle system and game fun. Perfect your current game mechanics cause I see a lot of potential in em.

Then consider adding new things, but keep your old version around to come back to when the new things don't turn out as fun as you wanted.

[JasonPickering]

So been on vacation for a bit with the Wife and now I am back and ready to burn through this.

I agree with Gimmy Tilbert and Vinheim so I have placed all that extra stuff in a box marked later. so the current plans are to build the Map system now, then add the combat in and then work from there.

on situations I wont be doing specific level design because the world will be randomly generated. I am hoping the game will create its own situations by using Enemy AI, like enemies coming right at you, some just camping out like walls, and some running and stealing treasures. Also using the battles themselves with different enemies having a variety of Specials, and AI tendancies.

EDIT:

So here is a much better map Mockup. the map is based off of the idea of Shogi, specifically
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C5%8Dbutsu_sh%C5%8Dgi



The monsters will be limited in their movement allowing you to dodge them. some will only move diagonally, some will move in the cardinal directions, and some only move left and right.

[gimymblert]

Okay but you still need to plan the possible combinatoric situation along the progression.

[JasonPickering]

do you mean matching together sets of enemies? i have never heard combinatoric before and after reading through the wikipedia article it made a lot of sense.

[gimymblert]

do you mean matching together sets of enemies? i have never heard combinatoric before and after reading through the wikipedia article it made a lot of sense.

 

Er ... wait, it's the word processing auto correction who put this! lol! 
I will check that too on wikipedia.

But you understand what I meant. You must anticipate on gameplay situation.

[JasonPickering]

Oh man really. I thought you were talking about building a set of data structures that would choose good combinations of enemies to put together..

[Inanimate]

Oh man really. I thought you were talking about building a set of data structures that would choose good combinations of enemies to put together..

...Which actually sounds pretty cool. Most RPGs just have pre-set groups of enemies, but strategic variations (that perhaps ADAPT to you!) would be really neat!

Perhaps it creates all random combinations, and then, depending on how easily you beat them (time, damage taken, some equation involving those and a few other variables), it 'rates' that group. The higher rated it is, the more likely it will be picked. However, unrated groups would be preferred, that way it gets most combinations out for testing.

[BlueSweatshirt]

Maybe you could just record data like the hp the group managed to take off, in how many turns the player defeated them, and if they managed to kill the group.

Then you evaluate all the groups and spit the one at the player which seems most difficult. 

[JasonPickering]

Alright so still moving ahead with this, haven't had much done in the past few days. I have been working on 3D animation again. I am a little stuck on the Map at the moment as I am trying to figure out how the player and enemies should look.

- should the player know what each enemy is?
- should the player know how the enemy moves?
- should the player know what element the enemy is?
- should each enemy just be a simple skull
- what symbol for the player

[BlueSweatshirt]

I would make all those decisions based on the resolution you had to work with.(I'm not sure exactly what you have)

If it's so small that communicating some basic details might be hard, then perhaps utmost minimalism might be the best route. In other words, I wouldn't bother struggling to communicate the detail at that resolution if it proves a challenge.

In general, I try not to restrict information from the player unless there's a specific game-driven reason to.

[JasonPickering]

yeah my main problem is trying to show all this information in the resolution is kind of a pain. basically each token needs to be 16 x 16. so I basically have drawing after drawing of 16 x 16 blocks trying everything out.

Edit:

This is what I have so far. you can see the hero (sword), enemies (skulls one being fire based), and Item (a bag).



I dont like the red skull. maybe a different color would be better. and I think I will have arrows pop up before an enemy moves to show how it moves.

[BlueSweatshirt]

Try changing the color of the tile, and not the icon, to reflect the element.

I.E. the presumably "fire" element skeleton would have a red background against the white skull.

[JasonPickering]

I had tried that, but worried about readability. cause most likely the place to encounter a fire enemy will be in the red fire area. below you can see what i mean with the green on green.

[BlueSweatshirt]

But, that looks fine to me. 
I'm not having and readability issues.

[JasonPickering]

really? I have a few friends who are color blind so I always worry about people denoting colors.