This week has been pretty smooth. The event system is getting pretty close to done, despite me taking half the week off for design work. At this point I’m only really worried about getting scrolling functional, since it’s a complicated weave of several systems. Most everything else is just going to be grunt work. Takes time, but not much thought. Getting it done this month is still pretty bleak, though.

Design work was all over the place. A lot of stuff is still very much in the realm of, “I know how this needs to work, but don’t know how to fill in the details yet”. What I can talk about is the conclusion I made about battles. Right now it’s very hard for players to get much of a sense for their progression, any idea what a given tier of difficulty requires, or even feel very good about the rewards they get. All these problems have a central problem: players aren’t in battles long enough to get a sense for anything. They also aren’t required to be in battle that often for them to care about being more powerful in battle. No one really loves having to fight the same enemy over and over again in an RPG, but the fact of the matter is that it actually serves a vital purpose. The key is to not go overboard with it.

One of the more recent updates added more battle opportunities to the map by placing chances of encounters between every non-battle area on the map. It was an improvement. But it’s not enough, since the system still relied on luck so it was still possible for players to miss out on battles. The new system I’ve proposed flat-out requires every player to engage in combat if they want to move around the map. It works by placing a monster encounter on every tile. Once a player defeats that monster encounter, they’re free to move there without having to fight it again.

Whether an encounter is cleared is actually instanced for every player, so people can’t just follow someone else around to avoid battles. I was really hesitant to make it instanced since I think instancing things tends to make the multiplayer element a little more detached. But then I considered the fact that having random encounters is also instancing in a sense, since one player rolling a battle doesn’t influence the odds of another player rolling a battle. I began to get more comfortable with the idea of instancing after that.

A lot of fringe benefits start to fall out of this system, too. A major problem with the game was that players can very easily snipe rewards that other players found, diluting the joy of exploring the map. By requiring a battle and having it instanced, the player who beats the battle first will also get first dibs at the reward. This also creates moments of tension where the player who can kill the monster encounter faster will get the reward at the other end. Since these encounters are instanced between players it also means where each player can go on the map changes over time, creating some strategic movement choices.

I’m not completely confident that this particular system is going to be the right solution (and it definitely won’t erase all of our problems), but I feel like I’m probably headed in the right direction now.