This week consisted of doing a bunch of minor tweaks, performing more tests, and making a decision on whether to do a major change to the battle system. The long and short of it is that as-is the battle system doesn’t allow for much in the way of creative combinations. Which is pretty much inevitable when players can only do a single action in a battle turn and whatever passives they have. There’s a lot of ways we could try adding multiple actions per turn to give players more opportunities for combination (and hence customization). Doing a card deck shuffle system has been pretty appealing to me (because it still minimizes the number of options players have per turn, thus minimizing turn time). On a less drastic note having players choose two actions in a turn was also interesting. But eventually I settled on leaving it where it’s at.

There’s quite a few factors behind this. The system is at a reasonably good place right now- PVP is viable against players with differing levels, battles never take too long, PVE has a decent (but not great) element of following patterns, people can pick up the system quickly, etc. The only major flaw is the lack of combo depth, and I think I can actually improve that through smart ability design and map system interaction rather than pouring another layer of complexity on it. There’s also the big factor that I only have 3 months left to overhaul the design of this thing and adding this stuff on to combat would take up a significant amount of time. So I’m leaving it alone for now, changing it is more likely to make a bigger mess than it is to elevate it.

So with that out of the way I’ve started taking a spread shot approach to improving the game from here. There’s basically 5 points that I want to improve on, 3 of those I had numerous ideas for (and mostly pertain to improving the newest additions) and just picked some of my favorite improvements and put ’em on the schedule for update 5. Let’s take a look at the currently focused elements:

1. Refine The Battle System

There’s no single major problem with the battle system at this point. Just lots and lots of minor things. Some of it is just usability, like stats being unreadable nonsense to players. Some of it is broken monsters. Classes and their abilities need a fair amount of rethinking to see if I can add more combo opportunities. The attack type system is overemphasized and needs toned down slightly.Equipment needs to be a more interesting choice. There are experiments I want to perform like having 4 types instead of 3. Just lots of little things to punch it up and make it more immediately readable.

2. Improve Racing

The new main quest basically turns the game into a race to a goal between the players. Which is actually a big step up from the directionless mess it was before. But the actual racing itself needs improvement since once a person takes a lead, there’s very few options to catch up to them. I Have a bunch of ideas for making this more interesting.

3. Improve Victory Resolution

Right now if two players make it to the game ending battle at the same time, it all comes down to turn luck to determine who wins. This isn’t satisfying at all. We had some convoluted ideas for how to fix this like letting players fight each other in a battle against a monster. But we eventually went with the much simpler idea of ending the game with a climatic PVP showdown between players. This will probably fix it just fine, and there’s plenty of ideas for variations in this method of resolution.

4. Improve Progression 

While requiring battles has made a world of difference for players in appreciating their progression as being useful, the actual acquisition of power is still pretty straight forward: kill monsters. I want to give players stronger reasons for going off the primary objective, which will make the race itself more interesting: try to take it on slightly underlevelled, or be slow and cautious about it? On top of that I want to give players more options in actually customizing the build of their character to adapt to the game situation. The current leading proposal for this is to have 5 or so resources that players have to turn in varying combinations of to unlock different parts of their progression. This is starting to become an optional point to work on (might slow down pacing too much and makes the learning curve harsher), but I still want to give it a shot before dropping it.

5. Add Chain Reactions

I’ve talked about this a billion times on this blog. I want systems to bounce off of each other in a natural way to create unexpected situations for players. Right now the leading idea for this is to allow the map tiles to have effects on them that affect the battles taking place in them in various ways (ie, double damage from a particular attack type, everyone takes damage each turn, etc). This is one of the optional points that I’m willing to drop if nothing works.

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Once I’m satisfied with these points, the main goal is going to be to implement prototype versions of each of the scenarios. From there it’ll be about balancing and coming up with the final classes, items, equipment, monsters, and so on. Ideally the entire final versions of the scenario quests will also be done by the end of the year, but I’d settle with the prototypes since the rest of the game will have been finalized. There’s plenty of other work to be done with polishing, finalizing the menus, etc as well which will happen in who knows what order (ideally we should start on the menus once I finalize the systems rather than waiting on content completion). I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s very far away.