Devlog #6: Battle system
Hello everyone! In this blog post I wanted to share more details about battle system development of Gedonia, and also explain a little, why I chose to implement this system in the game.
I design fight mechanics for Gedonia to be inspired by older RPGs, which means auto-attacking and using a number of abilities to win. There aren’t much “action”y types of mechanics in the game, however, this doesn’t mean that the fights will be slow and boring. Actually, if you don’t pay attention, you can end up dead extremely fast. You need to use your abilities and items quickly and smart, that’s why there is a battle pause implemented in the game. If you played any Dragon Age or Kotor game previously, this will be very familiar to you. At any moment during the game you can pause it, look around, assign orders to your character and your companions and then see them perform those orders. Sometimes careful planning determines, will you win a tough fight or lose the game.
This week I’ve made a bunch of improvements for battle interface, controlling you and your companions, and their AI. I plan at least 20-25 different companions that you can meet and recruit to your party, which can be as big as 4 units. Some of your companions can be summoned creatures, like skeletons or elementals. In that case, each summoned creature eats the part of your maximum mana, while it’s summoned, and the max amount of them depends of your skill in magic.
In the comments for the recent reddit post a lot of people were saying that they don’t like wow-style combat that I chose to implement in the game. It’s completely fair for them to not like it, however I wanted to try to explain, why I chose this system instead of the more modern style of combat with aiming/dodges, flashy combos etc. It wasn’t just because it’s harder to implement it, although it is one of the reasons, but there are also many others.
I conclusion, of course action combat is flashier, more exciting in the short term, and more marketable, however I believe that it would be better to not go this way with Gedonia.
Thank you for reading this post, stay tuned for updates.
Follow me on twitter for more info: https://twitter.com/OlegKazakov1990
Join the discord to talk to me and discuss a game: http://discord.gg/XQjSzCN
Battle pause and battle plans
I design fight mechanics for Gedonia to be inspired by older RPGs, which means auto-attacking and using a number of abilities to win. There aren’t much “action”y types of mechanics in the game, however, this doesn’t mean that the fights will be slow and boring. Actually, if you don’t pay attention, you can end up dead extremely fast. You need to use your abilities and items quickly and smart, that’s why there is a battle pause implemented in the game. If you played any Dragon Age or Kotor game previously, this will be very familiar to you. At any moment during the game you can pause it, look around, assign orders to your character and your companions and then see them perform those orders. Sometimes careful planning determines, will you win a tough fight or lose the game.
This week I’ve made a bunch of improvements for battle interface, controlling you and your companions, and their AI. I plan at least 20-25 different companions that you can meet and recruit to your party, which can be as big as 4 units. Some of your companions can be summoned creatures, like skeletons or elementals. In that case, each summoned creature eats the part of your maximum mana, while it’s summoned, and the max amount of them depends of your skill in magic.
Why I chose to not implement action combat in Gedonia?
In the comments for the recent reddit post a lot of people were saying that they don’t like wow-style combat that I chose to implement in the game. It’s completely fair for them to not like it, however I wanted to try to explain, why I chose this system instead of the more modern style of combat with aiming/dodges, flashy combos etc. It wasn’t just because it’s harder to implement it, although it is one of the reasons, but there are also many others.
- Action combat devalues your equipment. If I want to put it simple – your armor doesn’t really matter, if you can completely block an attack or dodge roll from it. Yeah, new shiny armor item looks cool, and it might give you more times you survive an attack or less times you attack an enemy, before he dies, but it’s not the same is for example – finding a power armor in Fallout 1. I recently played two great games – “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning” and “Darksiders 2”. In both of them, I found myself not caring at all about each new piece of equipment I found, because it didn’t really impact my gameplay. What mattered is my personal skill, and even if there is nothing really wrong with that, I find that for RPG it’s much more important to have gear that is impactful for your gameplay. A lot of older RPGs had that, and I hope to achieve this in Gedonia too.
- In more action-oriented game there isn’t much depth to the stats. Gameplay mechanics like dodge, miss, parry, block, attack speed are all handled with controls, and aren’t stat-based. This means you can’t for example create a character with a lot of dodge chance and base your gameplay around it, and that means less freedom in creating a unique character. And this is also very important in RPGs for me.
- And finally, there is already a huge amount of great AAA and indie action RPGs out there. I feel that I might have a tough time be compared to them, or adding anything new. If you love action RPGs, you have a lot of choice, but if you want new RPG with targeted combat, not so much. I can’t even remember any right of top of my head right now.
I conclusion, of course action combat is flashier, more exciting in the short term, and more marketable, however I believe that it would be better to not go this way with Gedonia.
Thank you for reading this post, stay tuned for updates.
Follow me on twitter for more info: https://twitter.com/OlegKazakov1990
Join the discord to talk to me and discuss a game: http://discord.gg/XQjSzCN