next »

[st33d]

I'm building a roguelike-pokemon game. I'm aiming to auto-generate species and moves. My current focus is the battle moves / actions.

As for my own JRPG experience: I'm a 2-time Pokemon Master (Red & Diamond), I've recently completed Final Fantasy 9 on iOS (recommend), and now I'm working through Final Fantasy 7 on iOS (bit ropey). So my knowledge of JRPGs is fairly limited.

I'm trying to break down a Pokemon Move into its base elements so I can randomly generate it. So far I'm certain of the following properties:

Range: self, enemy, area (both affected)
Type: Ben & Jerry's multiplier (fire weak vs water, chocolate strong vs peanut butter, etc.), I will start with Normal, Fire, Water, Plant to make things easy to understand - then introduce randomly generated types with surprising weak/strong/immune relationships to existing types.
Method: Damage, Status, Buff - I've had it argued to me that damage is a type of buff, but buffs last only for the duration of the battle - this requires a different code path to execute, making damage distinct from a buff.
Repeat: Splitting the effect over several turns, or simply applying a duration. Consider effects like poison or environmental effects like rain.
Stat (Buff only?): Need to know what Stat is targeted.
PP: Power points per Move. I asked on Twitter whether people preferred PP or Magic Points and the former was more popular owing to how it pushed resource management and experimentation.

The stats I've settled on for each 'mon are: HP, ATTACK, DEFENCE, MAGIC_ATTACK, MAGIC_DEFENCE, SPEED, NICE

Having HP as a stat means it can be buffed to raise maximum hit points during a battle (or debuffed). Attack and defence I'm going to use as a multiplier to start with (attack / defence) and then tweak to get it right. Magic attack and defence seem like a necessary addition to distinguish high power attacks and also give the gameplay more longevity.

Speed I think I may implement in an ATB style, allowing faster 'mons to get in multiple attacks and have initiative. I've had it argued to me that a speed debuff is the same as any status attack, but status effects like Sleep require special conditions (like receiving damage) to remove so I disagree with that.

Nice is something I want to experiment with regarding ease of capture and access to mini-games or Zelda moves (unlock map mobility like dig and fly).

-

So, I want to ask what sort of properties am I missing here? Are there any status attacks or actions from JRPGs I've not played that are worth serious consideration? (Even though it's 1 vs 1 battle, I could expand on this later in development with positioning and such.)

Is it really necessary to have magic and normal attacks? Is there a JRPG that did well with just attack & defence? (The singular Special stat in Pokemon Red I have read as causing uninteresting strategies.)

Are there also any resources I should be looking at other than the obvious things like Bulbapedia and so on?

[JWK5]

Transplanting this from another thread, one suggestion I had that might work for you is the following:

More TCG-style conditional effects. Examples:

*If the target is poisoned, inflict 30 damage. If the target is not poisoned, inflict poison.

*This ability can only be used on targets at half health or below. The target recovers 10-20 HP,
        all other enemies suffer double the amount the target recovered as curse damage.

*Inflict 10 fire damage to one target, set them on fire. All enemies currently on fire take
        10 fire damage (including the target).

Most actions in RPGs (JRPG or WRPG) are way too static. There's no real room for strategy you are just working against obsoletism (replacing an attack that does lower damage with one that does higher damage, ad nauseum). I want to see some more strategy required, actions that vary in usefulness based on the situation, not just based on resistances.

You can get a lot of mileage out of a handful of stats just by making things conditional. It also can help cut down on "overkill" actions if the more potent the action is the more specialized its use is.

I highly recommend looking up the rules to card battle games like Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon: TCG, etc. and then examining what their various cards can do (conditionally). You'll find a lot of golden RPG ideas that for whatever reason have not been tapped into.