~Battle Systems for RPG~
- RStwalleyIV
- Jun 20
- 4 min read
Before we begin talking about the battle system I wanted to talk about the game as a whole for a moment. This has been a dream project for me for years, I've had workings of it in someway shape or form since I was in high school back in the 2010s. The story has been reworked since then to better fit my ideas and values reaching into adulthood, but I'm also happy with how much of the story does still thematically works and still ring true today.
That being said the working title for the game might need updating, in 2015 an indie game released with a similar title to what I had fallen in love with. So we are pivoting and seeing if we can't find a new title that still fits the themes of the game and still is a good hook.
Enough about that though, on to the core of the post!
Battle Systems
It was important to me that the battle systems are something fun and worthwhile in the game. I hope to achieve this through comedy and enough animations that it's pleasing to the eye. To me, the thing that made games like Earthbound memorable were the moving background with it's trippiness and memorizing patterns. I feel if I was to emulate that, we'd be too closely following the things that inspire us however.
The goal to have is inspiration without too much emulation. So while I was moving to a new building and didn't have access to my main PC that had the project file on it I began prototyping the battle system. Currently, it's got turn order, unit movement, and attack selection working.
Enemies join the fight
At the start of the battle enemies are spawned outside the screen and move into their position.
If let's say another enemy joins the fight either through a set marker in the battle or a unit calls for reinforcements we are able to move all enemies into their new positions.
Choosing the attacks
While we are designing the battle system we are trying to make sure it's able to be expanded on and it's flexible enough to design different types of fights throughout development. Currently we have AI's that have four different styles of choosing their attack.
One way we try to make sure battles have some balance to them is enemies are able to have powerful attacks but they won't be able to spam them. Here is an example from our Dum Green Knight.
When the Dum Green Knight lands a Zwerchhau. The attack has the ability to be chained 3 times dealing on average 7 points of damage on the player. After calculating out it's different hit's it deals a total of 20 points of damage. *The system might change as development progresses based off more play-testing and what is fun.*
Players HUD
Something that's important to me is giving the player information at a glance without having to see every detail. It's bothered me that in some RPGs the players health is stated but there is no indication at a glance how they're doing. While playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends my Game Master, to prevent giving away too much information, uses the healthy > bloodied > very-bloodied system. I wanted to use something like this to show how the player is doing in terms of their health pool.
I feel like this illustrates how the player is doing on health without always having to display the max health the player has per character. In turn that shows how much wiggle room they have for selecting healing items for consumption. If your HP is showing a green number you'll know that "hey, maybe I don't need to use the item that heals 45 points of health."
That being said, I feel like for the Special Power display a system like that isn't needed. In my mind as long as you know the cost of the attack, and the amount is bigger than that, that's all the information you need. However, things become a bit more complicated when it comes to regen items. I've tossed around the idea of having the max amount flash on the display after a few moments just to give the player ALL the information but it's also not often shown to the player in other games so it all could be a moot point. Bottom line is I feel like it'd be nice to display somehow but if players are used to just KNOWING what their max amounts are, I won't stress too hard about it.
I'd like to go into the thought process behind the Enemy designs with their actions, quirks, systems, and battle logic but I feel like this post has gone on for quite a bit, and the enemies have a lot to go over. So that'll be for another time.
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