Second Class Preview

Sorry for the delay, life got in the way, but work continues.  Today I want to share our second class

The Protector

Protectors are characters who feel that they owe their very survival to someone else, or that they need others in order to survive.  This class is designed around enhancing allies with buffs that increase their offense or defense, and heal them simultaneously.  The more buffs a character has on, the more potent healing abilities the protector can use.  The protectors also have access to some enfeebling abilities to weaken opponents, and use both ray and miasma based offensive abilities. 
The protector is a bit of a twist on a normal healer because his only single target and group healing abilities are very expensive both in AP and MP.  Instead of just healing damage as it is taken, the player is encouraged to use his buffs to both increase his characters' power and heal them.  Abilities that provide healing each turn are also available, and their potency is based on the number of buffs. 

First Class Preview!

Each of the main characters in Shades of Grey will be able to change his class whenever he's in a safe place, aka most save points.  In a few weeks I will begin to talk about our cast of characters, but today, lets talk about one of the classes.

The Redeemer 

The Redeemer class is for characters who believe that by protecting those close to them, their comrades and friends, they will be able to redeem themselves morally and spiritually.  These character believe they have wronged society and feel a need to make up for their short comings and past actions. 

Redeemers are the "tank" or "Steel Wall" type class.  They have abilities that allow them to reduce the party's damage, take damage in the place of other members, as well as, reduce their own offense and defense to increase the rest of the party's.  They are also able to attract enemies to attack them and heal their life, though not in large quantities, and cure their own status ailments.

Redeemers unlock their offensive potential by taking damage in their allies' stead.  Each time they cover an ally their class bar fills, and they can use the bar to use offensive actions and ultimate defensive actions.  Your party will want to have a Redeemer in the front row in order to protect the more vulnerable classes.

Mastery vs Variety

An interesting concept that often comes up in the context of elemental magic/skill systems is whether the player characters should have mastery of a single element of their choice or whether they should use variety.  In many games this choice is truly non-existent as either the element chosen is just based on what the enemy is weak to, if any, or which effect looks prettiest.  Some games allow the player to enhance, via skill points or equipment or levels, into a specific element.  However, under these circumstances, the player only has one correct choice, which is to master one element that seems useful.  It is rarely worth it to try to put skill points or whatever into multiple categories because then the player's power is just simply lower than it would have been otherwise.  The elements often have limited meaning other than, in this specific fight you'll wish you had one over the other.

To this end I am thinking of going with the variety approach, but with the simple caveat of the elements being asymmetric.  Hearth and Tundra will not be opposites, they will cause different effects that will give the player a desire to use one element or the other under various circumstances.  For example, a multi-turn tundra spell will enhance the party's healing spells while it's being cast and then poison the foe when it goes off.  Fire spells by contrast will enhance the party's water resistance while being cast and reduce the enemy's attack when it goes off.  These two effects are very different, and will hopefully lead to players debating how much "mastery" via equipment they want to place in any given element.

Negotiations

Lets talk about Negotiations.

One of the more difficult ideas to put together is a fun and enjoyable way to implement a negotiation system for acquiring souls and other items from enemies without having to fight them.  Considering I want to use the negotiation system as the sole way of acquiring souls, I want it to be robust.

This becomes complicated because there are few negotiation systems I can look to for guidance.  The most comparable game, the Shin Megami games, have relatively poor systems.  You have to guess the answers to demons' questions, and hope to god they're not fickle and leave you with nothing.  This may be on theme for those games, but it definitely is frustrating.  My plan is to take a cue from Alpha Protocol's conversation system, specifically the level of detail and flow charts that they use, and combine that with the simple Q&A format used in SMT.

For example, each demon (not the individual demon, but the family of demons, such as "goblin") will have a personality.  This personality will guide what questions the demon will ask, and the flowchart of what questions will follow based on each answer you provide.  Some demons will ask the same questions as others, but each personality will dictate what the optimum answer is.  The demons will ask about five questions, give or take, before asking you what you want from them.  Based on the answers you provided up to this point, the demon will either agree, or tell you to shove off. 

I plan on giving out "Negotiation Points" for each answer provided, and at the end, when you go to ask the demon for something in particular, a bar will show you how many points you needed in order to have a shot at the demon acquiescing.  Certain answers will be worth many points, some few points, and some will subtract points.  It will be some trial and error, but once you learn how to deal with a certain demon, it should be relatively simple.  I also plan on adding a few sub personalities to each demon family, if possible, in order to keep things interesting for a longer period of time.

Much ado about Mana

One problem that many games have is how to handle a mana. The essence of using mana, or MP, is to create an artificial limitation on the use of certain abilities in and out of battle. This leads to some problems with regards to balance. If abilities require MP to use, then they have to necessarily be stronger than abilities that do not require MP, since you are limited as to how often you can use that ability. However, some people go in the opposite direction to try to balance and make these MP consuming abilities too weak. Lets look at two examples:

Dark Souls

Now I have only played a little of this game, but magic seems overpowered when compared to melee. Since you can only use a spell a limited amount of times, as this quantity is refreshed at save points, the spell must be stronger to compensate. The result is that magic can defeat regular enemies in one attack, occasionally two, which is ridiculous in a game where melee characters must hit enemies four times or more, and must learn to dodge enemy patterns. By limiting magic use, magic becomes too strong.

Etrian Odyssey

Skills in this game are much stronger than regular attacks, as one would expect, but the problem arises from the difference in power between physical and magical attacks. The magic type characters are required to use MP for every offensive action because their default action, attack, deals low damage. However, the power of magic does not scale well, and as time goes on the regular attacks from the melee characters ends up being just as strong, if not stronger, than the mages MP abilities. This makes magic almost worthless in the long run.

So how can this problem be avoided in Shades of Grey? I am going to try to take a different approach to MP and use it as a limitation for all non-attack options. Most skills in the game will require the same amount of MP, currently planned at five, and MP will regenerate each turn by a fixed amount, currently planned at two. Finally, all characters will start at 50mp and will increase that number slowly as time goes on. This situation means that the player must manage how many skills he plans to use in order to avoid running out of MP. However, the player can refill his MP by the class specific skills, each of which requires specific conditions to be met. I will elaborate on what these special skills are in a later post. Full MP will be restored upon the end of each battle

Through this system the player will have to balance his use of skills and MP regeneration skills, and will even use the plain old attack command in order to survive.

Equipment Design

Designing interesting equipment is a challenge that I have decided to undertake, and of course this challenge is further compounded by the existence of my Fusion and Soul systems.

In order for the fusion equipment to be meaningful in any capacity, it is important to make the choices between each possible fusion option meaningful and cater to different play styles, so here are my current thoughts.

Each permutation of elements will have a different name, so Hearth + Ray = Sun.  A 3 slotted weapon with 2H and 1R would then be a Sun Plate, or Sun Sword, etc.  At the higher end of the spectrum, the 5 slotted equipment, 3H + 2R would be Sunbeam equipment.  A similar name to convey similar stats.

When you create a Hearth item, it's going to add ATK, and affinity and resistance for the Hearth element.  Tundra gear will add DEF.  Gales Magic Acc.  Stones will add RES.  Ray will be Magic Acc and ATK, and Miasma DEF and RES.

When you combine elements, you will gain some of the stats from both elements as well as an additional effect (on the offense) or additional resistances or effects (on the defense).

For example.  T+T+H = Boiling Gear.  Weapons that are boiling gain ATK and DEF and inflict a damage per turn effect called Scalding.  Simply, it's just more damage for your weapon.  By contrast, T+T+S weapons would instead be called Arctic, and would reduce the enemy's T resistance.

Some non-symmetric additional effects should make the choices interesting.

Endings

Today I want to talk about game endings.  One thing I have noticed recently, though not to say this is a recent phenomenon, is how poorly structured many games' endings are.   A game will tell you a great story, immerse you in interesting and fun game play, and then right at the end, when everything is feeling great...the whole thing falls apart.  A bad ending spoils the rest of a game by leaving you with worse memories of the entire experience.

This is not limited to just games of course.  I recently read the Nights Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton, and the first 3700 pages of the trilogy were really fun and interesting.  The last 100 pages, ruined the entire story.  I would still recommend the series, but the ending saddened me, so I'm going to list off some qualities that I think all endings need.

1st:  A conclusion that does not sneak up on the player and comes out of nowhere. 

A game is not satisfying when the ending makes no sense in the build up of the plot, nor if the final area or encounter does not fit into the larger narrative.  Fans of Stephen King aside, a final boss, such as Necron in Final Fantasy IX, who was never referred to or surprises the player in a, Who on earth are you?, way makes the player feel cheated by the story. 

And 2nd: Don't have your story provide a meaningless choice at the end.

I recently finished Bastion, which again I will recommend others to play, but its ending saddened me.  Without spoiling anything, characters are given new motivations in the last half hour of the game, which do not really make much sense, and the player is given a large decision, which again is revealed quite quickly, and the result of the decision is just a different ending cutscene.  This does not make for compelling game play or interesting stories.  The game would have been better if the last minute plot twist had been introduced much earlier and the characters had discussed it more thoroughly. 

These are just two examples, but I think it is extremely important for a game to leave the player on strong satisfying note so they remember your game fondly.