DEVLOG 1: COMBAT
An outdated shot, but it'll do for now
Combat. Fightin’ stuff. Swords and sorcery. In Oathborn, combat shares an equal burden with army management as the central components of gameplay. If this game’s going to work at all, the combat really has to grab people. So today, we’re going to talk about how Oathborn achieves that goal.
We’re about to get a little into the weeds here, so if you’d rather watch a video, rest assured that I’ll get a more visual demonstration together soon.
DESIGN GOALS
While Oathborn’s battle system follows the general framework of traditional JRPGs, my overarching goal with the combat has been to make something with strategic depth more akin to an SRPG such as Final Fantasy Tactics. Their combination of class systems, positioning, and environmental elements has always provided me with a richer gameplay experience than traditional JRPGs that, even when they do incorporate some degree of these elements, tend to focus on the patterns and baked-in weaknesses (or gimmicks) of individual enemies
The bullet points below aren’t all-encompassing, but they’re a few of the key ideas that I’ve tried to bear in mind in making a combat system that lives up to those aspirations:
- Classes have roles, and squads have synergy - When everyone can do everything, differences in classes, characters, and abilities are just window dressing. Every class should feel different and have its own niche (or niches), and the array of units that make up a squad should give each squad a different playstyle, purpose, and win condition in battle.
- No filler combat - No brainless battles allowed, no grinding encouraged. Every turn you get should be a potential tactical decision, and every fight you fight should shape the next steps you take outside of combat. That being said, difficulty settings are in place to allow you to adjust how forgiving (or unforgiving) you want combat to be.
- Make every ability useful - Status effects that are actually worth applying! Knights with a Guard skills that you really, truly want to spend a turn on! Varied damage types so you aren’t always just picking the option with the biggest MP-to-Damage ratio! Every skill in the game should be worthy of your consideration.
- Incorporate Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre-style mechanics - Originally less a design goal than an amorphous “taste” goal, this principle ended up completely shaping the other points by inspiring the systems and opening up the avenues for differentiation in characters and classes that lets units work well together and against each other.
That last point brings us to the first big key component of Oathborn’s combat.
THE ELEMENT SYSTEM AND BONUSES
In Oathborn, there are four elements:
Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water.
(A shocking choice of elements, I know.)
Every class in the game has a variety of skills, and (mostly) every skill is aligned with one of the four elements. At any given time in combat, one of the elements is the dominant, or active, element. If you look back at the screenshot at the top of this devlog, you'll see the fire element at the top of the element bar, indicating it as the dominant element.
Use a skill while it’s associated element is dominant, and that skill gets a bonus. Throughout combat, the dominant element periodically changes. Again, looking at the opening screenshot, you see that the current dominant element is fire, and if combat continues the next will be water, and then earth, and then wind. When the dominant element changes, the strength of all elements levels up, increasing the power of the bonus a skill receives.
Let’s look at the mage’s Fireball skill as an example of how element bonuses increase:
With Fireball, it’s easy to understand the effect of elements. A little bit of extra damage, a medium amount of extra damage, a ton of extra damage. However, not all skills can simply increase their numbers. Status effects, for instance, have this problem. You can’t double-silence someone. There’s no such thing as double-sleep.
The solution to this issue is to have four specific element bonuses that tend towards certain types of skills:
- Power: Power skills, like Fireball, receive a linear increase in strength that corresponds with the element level -- +25%, +50%, +75%. Power skills tend to be single-target damage and healing abilities.
- Wisdom: Wisdom skills have their MP cost reduced by 25%/50%/75%. Wisdom skills tend to be expensive, powerful skills and often affect multiple units.
- Finesse: Finesse skills reduce a unit’s delay until its next turn by 25%/37.5%/50%. Finesse skills are generally buffs and debuffs.
- Vitality: Vitality skills restore 20%/35%/50% of a unit’s HP and MP. They’re usually threat-generating/reducing skills and other defensive skills.
The goal here is to provide every skill with strong incentives dependent on circumstances.
Every skill's icon is formatted according to its element and bonus for easier visual reference. Icon art is super, super WIP
Let’s take a look at this in action, using one of the starting classes, the disciple:
The disciple has four skills:
From left to right, Heal, Dispel, Pressure Point, Barrier. Once again, icon art is super WIP
- Heal - Water, Power - Heals a friendly target for a moderate amount of HP
- Dispel - Water, Finesse - Removes all negative status effects from a friendly target
- Pressure Point - Earth, Wisdom - Deals heavy damage to a single enemy target
- Barrier - Earth, Vitality - Provides a friendly target with Barrier status, reducing magical damage received by 50%.
As you can see, the disciple is built around two elements of the four elements - water and earth. Most classes are structured like this, so that half the time all things are equal among all of the skills, and half the time, you get bonuses to multiple -- but not all -- skills that provide you with an interesting decision to make.
If the dominant element in combat is fire or wind, all things are equal between a disciple's skills and there’s no special incentive to choose one of these skills over the other beyond the circumstances of combat. But what if it’s water or earth?
Water - Heal and Dispel are both water skills, and receive Power and Finesse bonuses, respectively. Heal’s Power bonus is straightforward, and when you need a big heal, it gives a big heal. But what if you need a heal and one of your units has a nasty status effect on them, like silence on a mage or blind on a scout? Which do you choose?
Remember what Dispel’s Finesse bonus does:
- Finesse: Finesse skills reduce a unit’s delay until its next turn by 25%/37.5%/50%
It’s at this point, you’d want to survey the battlefield. Utilizing the Finesse buff often enables you to leapfrog enemies that had their turn most recently. Sometimes, it even lets you leapfrog the entire enemy team, and in effect, get a free turn before they get to act again. Even if you can’t leapfrog all of them, if you can jump some of them in the turn order and have your team take care of the others, you’re getting two turns before any enemy has another opportunity. You could Dispel now and Heal next, with zero risk.
Of course, this all depends on the specific circumstances of combat, which you’ll have to evaluate yourself.
Earth - Pressure Point and Barrier are both earth skills, and receive Wisdom and Vitality bonuses, respectively. Pressure Point is a disciple’s primary offensive weapon, and as a healing class, it’s more expensive to use than offensive skills are for damage-oriented classes. However, with the right build, it can be absolutely devastating, especially against Ruin-aligned targets (more on Ruin soon). Disciples and the classes they rank up into are also the best tanks versus magic damage in the game. Barrier is one of the ways in which they accomplish this.
So, it’s your Disciple’s turn, and the dominant element is earth. What do you do?
Well, if you gotta Heal or Dispel, those are both still options. But now, with earth element up, that previously expensive Pressure Point is a much more attractive choice, especially if there’s a potential Ruin-aligned target like a mage, scout, or ninja. Or maybe it’s just late in the fight (or a series of fights) and you’re low on MP, but thedDominant element changed to earth at just the right moment to make Pressure Point just cheap enough for you to use and save the day. It happens all the time.
Alternatively, maybe that mage is in the back row and you know that you’re not going to do enough damage to kill him before he gets his next spell off, which you’re pretty sure is going to knock out some of your units. Instead of having to choose between healing and applying Barrier, Barrier’s Vitality bonus allows you to do both in a single turn, and potentially save multiple units by casting Barrier on an ally while the Disciple reaps the healing benefits. Vitality skills are an excellent way for tanks in Oathborn to remain healthy and utilize buffs without having to sacrifice their turn or that of their allies.
This is a very narrow range of situations for a single class encompassing two of the four elements. Every one of your squads in Oathborn will have five units of a variety of classes constantly thrown into a much, much greater variety of situations. And while I’m sure that it sounds like a lot, rest assured that it’s easy to get familiarized with in the span of a level, and I’m working hard to make everything as concise and visually digestible as possible.
ALIGNMENT: FAITH, RUIN, AND THE DAY/NIGHT CYCLE
In addition to element-based skills, some classes also have access to alignment-based skills. Alignment is a spectrum in Oathborn, with Faith on one end and Ruin on the other. Along the spectrum, there are five degrees of alignment - Strong Faith, Weak Faith, Neutral, Weak Ruin, and Strong Ruin. Alignment-based skills don’t receive the same bonuses as element-based skills. Instead, they receive bonuses when used by a unit of corresponding alignment, at their preferred time in the day/night cycle, and against units of the opposing alignment.
The alignments of Oathborn's six standard starting classes
Take, for example, the valkyrie. The standard valkyrie is a Weak Faith class, and one of her skills is a Faith ability called Faith Bolt. In a vacuum, Faith Bolt does a moderate amount of damage. However, because the valkyrie is a Weak Faith class, it gets a small damage bonus when she uses it. If she uses it during the day, it gets another damage bonus. If she uses it against a Ruin-aligned character, it gets another damage bonus - smaller if the target is Weak Ruin, larger if the target is Strong Ruin. Similarly, while the standard valkyrie is a Weak Faith class, there are ways in the game to modify alignment, and if you worked her into a Strong Faith class, the Faith Bolt would get even more damage. This would come at the cost of her being more vulnerable to Ruin-based attacks.
The advantage of alignment-based skills over element-based skills is that they don’t require the elements to power up to levels 2 and 3 to reach their maximum potential. The second you get into combat, that Faith Bolt is going to be as powerful as it’s going to be. Or as weak as it’s going to be, if it’s at the wrong time of day and without any good targets.
Grouping units with strong Faith or Ruin capabilities together can make powerful teams for wiping out enemy squads of the opposite alignment, so long as you’re careful about the time of day. On the other hand, having a squad of mixed Weak/Neutral alignments can make it so they’ll be ready to fight no matter the time or opposition.
THE THREAT SYSTEM, FORMATION BUFFS, AND VICTORY BONUSES
… Are just some of the things I’m going to talk about in the next combat devlog. Writing this, I can see that it’s already sprawled out quite a bit more than I had originally intended, so I figure it’s a better idea to get your feedback on what’s here rather than jamming in even more to overwhelm.
(Plus, I meant to get this up last night, and as I’m writing this, I still don’t have the art I wanted for it together)
Besides combat devlogs, other subjects in the barrel are unit customization, class details, story and worldbuilding, character profiles, and more. Between these larger “official” devlogs, I’ll also be updating here with smaller, less structured updates on specific progress that I’m making with the game.
Thanks for making it to the bottom, and please, please feel free to give me whatever feedback you want on the devlog, whether that’s about the systems I talked about today or the format of the devlog itself. You can let me know here, on Twitter at @ruinousa, through Kickstarter, or email me directly at ruinousa at gmail.com, which you can also find on the website, oathborngame.com
Till next time