My Game Dev Journey — The Beginning
Hello all!
I’ve taken a six-month vacation from work and all things responsible to focus on developing an indie JRPG idea I’ve had sitting around for a couple years. I thought I’d use blog posts like these to share some (hopefully regular) status updates, as well as talk a little bit about my thought process as I go through various design decisions in realising my game. For this post, I’d like to focus on the systems and mechanics in my game’s combat.
Although polarising to some, I’ve always loved turn-based combat in JRPGs. Done properly, it can offer strategic players the opportunity to come up with a variety of devastating tactics to crush their enemies with. It can also be a fantastic (and underrated) tool for implicit narrative purposes too. Want to convince your player that this boss is terrifying and should be feared? Watch them panic as the enemy’s first move is to take four turns in a row, and subsequently watch them celebrate when they defeat “that cheap son of a…”. Like any game mechanic, there are implementational pitfalls that need sidestepping; in the case of turn-based combat, this primarily means avoiding the brainless monotony of ‘attack, attack, heal’ that it can sometimes devolve into.
In order to keep combat engaging, I’m keen to place the strategic aspect of turn-based at front and centre. In a way, a lot of the battle should be fought in the overworld — your plan of attack should depend on, and vary with, your characters’ builds. Once in a fight, those who execute the strategy most appropriate for their strengths — whilst adapting to their enemies own capabilities — should be rewarded.
Combat in the game doesn’t use mana points for spells, but instead two parallel resources, tentatively named Calm and Strife (this ties into the game’s narrative, but that’s for another post). While Calm focuses on restorative, beneficial abilities such as buffing and healing, Strife is used in destructive and damaging ones. Resource points aren’t spent when casting spells, but instead gained; for instance, casting Fireball may net you 10 Strife points. Importantly, gaining X amount of one resource will cause you to lose X amount of the other. Finally, the most powerful Calm and Strife spells will require the caster to have a certain amount of their respective resource built up.
What this translates to is incentivising strategic combat premeditation. Confident enough to steamroll your way through fights without a thought for defence? Invest in powerful and high-resource-generating Strife abilities and watch enemies melt, but be careful not to find yourself caught in a scramble of reviving party members you couldn’t heal adequately. Jack-of-all-trade characters will be gated from those epic, fight-deciding, tide-turning abilities that JRPGs champion, and characters built for specific roles will excel in them.
On a high level, characters are shoehorned into one of two archetypes — Calm specialist or Strife specialist — but that’s a design decision I’m pretty comfortable with, as long as there’s plenty of room for build expression within each archetype or across different characters. It eliminates any out-of-character nonsense (black mage Tidus anyone?) which, although funny, would run quite bluntly at odds with the narrative of the game. Also, as evident from the enthusiasm around each of Splatoon’s infamous Splatfests, players tend to get very passionate about dichotomies, and a two-class system healthily taps into that.
There’s quite a lot more to combat in the game that hasn’t been covered today, and it’s probably the most dev-intensive aspect. Progress is steady, and in its current form it is technically playable, but missing heaps of stuff and quite prone to change.
Those ‘animations’ don’t look so great, do they…
I’d better get back to work. Thanks for reading!