Progress is moving fairly smoothly on the node action system. Slowly. But smoothly. Sometimes you get so wrapped up in a thing that you forget where you are. Barring further major re-designs, this node action system is basically the last major piece of functionality that will need to be added. Lots of additional minor systems, stability, refactoring, etc will still remain, for sure, but this is possibly the last major thing! That’s exciting. But there’s not that much to discuss there. So let’s talk about battles.

Random battles are a tricky subject in every RPG. The best that they’ve been done is as an optimization problem- the player seeks out a way to end the battle as quickly as possible using as few resources as possible. Once the optimal battle solution is found the player will stick to the routine except (in a particularly well made game) when circumstances require them to do otherwise- expend more of one type of resource (MP/Items) to get out of it faster to spare a more precious resource (HP). If a game has an exceptional amount of luck added to it, the player is still optimizing as best they can within the luck- doing their best to understand the potential costs associated with a given battle. This is inevitable to any game revolving around throwing the same scenario at the player again and again in a system that is determined entirely by rigid digital choices. Things start to go sour in such a system when a battle is thrown at the player too frequently relative to the number of times it takes to fully optimize it. Repeating the same optimal attack pattern can get tiring very quickly.

The problem I’ve been facing with battles stems primarily from one thing: non-boss battles need to be done in 2 turns to keep up the game speed fluid, which means I need to find a way to make a 2 turn battle interesting. An endeavor which has been largely hopeless unless you vastly expand or otherwise mess with the pool of available options per turn (ie, shuffling them like a deck of cards or something).

Which I guess leads to an inevitable conclusion: Why not drop the regular battles entirely and just use the saved time for more boss battles where the turn count is high enough to allow for strategy? Hitting the resource consumption part of regular battles has always been shaky in this game since even regular battles can’t occur often enough to really drain the player all that much. It’s even worse in terms of stopping players from entering areas too high for them- at the moment I’ve been using a clumsy hack that dramatically increases the encounter rate in areas that are too high for a player to create a “are you even strong enough for this place?” check. Instead it may be better to abstract the resource drain of random battles entirely to just happening. I don’t know the exact form of this abstraction- a simple HP drain + exp gain per tile walked might be ok, but there’s probably something more interesting to do it with. It’s a good line of inquiry to start walking down.