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"ROHOPH" Battle Concepts, Indecisiveness

5 years ago4,114 words

I spent a couple of days building a battle system mockup for a potential MARDEK reimagining... though there are many issues and uncertainties with it from a mechanical and conceptual perspective. Should I be returning to MARDEK at all? To what degree? There's a lot to work through.

What I should be doing at the moment is researching publishing indie games, so then I can finally get Sindrel Song out there and make some money from my efforts. I've done a little bit - I learned, for example, that one thing a publisher can do is actually fund the development of the game, which I didn't know before - but for the most part I've been distracted these past two weeks with the MARDEK stuff that's come up. I sort of wish I had a separate person who could handle all that stuff while I handle this, but since I'm only one person already trying to do the work of a team, when one thing takes up my time, I can't exactly spend that time on other things.

I've also been worried about brain stuff, and struggling with fatigue because of said brain stuff, though I wrote ∞ a separate post ∞ about that.

I thought of returning to MARDEK because there are a lot of remasters out there and some people do have fond memories of the series. I thought it'd be exciting going back to it, seeing what I could do with it. But that excitement has turned to mostly frustration as people have been so closed-minded about the idea of any change, stubbornly refusing to even entertain the idea that anything even slightly different to what they remember could be better than how it once was.

I suppose it's not about 'better', though, it's about revisiting feelings and memories. I do understand that, but I wonder about whether it'd be enough to hold a long experience.

I've been playing Spyro: Reignited for a couple of weeks now, and at first, there was a strong and lovely feeling of nostalgia. I was taken back to the Christmas day where I got a Playstation and several games that are still dear to me now; I felt the same childhood wonder and excitement I had back then. It's an appealing thing, going back to that.

But it didn't last for very long at all. Minutes, at most. Soon, that warm and fuzzy nostalgia was replaced by frustration at some of the clunky game mechanics or simplistic dialogue (eg some freed dragons just saying "thank you for releasing me"), things born of limitations back then that really should have been changed, or even feelings of tedium when I realised there was a whole lot more to slog through before the end, and none of it would be really new and surprising. There's this persistent feeling of deja vu, of recognition and knowing what's to come, or of triggered memories - "oh, I remember this" - but I wouldn't describe it as hugely compelling. It's more like "but I've seen this before".

But then again, I'm the sort of person who gets excited by updates and layout changes on websites, whereas a lot of other people loudly complain about them and insist on reverting to what they were used to before.

I suspect it is related to the Openness personality trait, as I said before, but I don't know. It's frustrating to me as a creator, because I'm always striving for improvement, striving to become better and make better things, and the idea of just discarding all that to work on something I've long since grown beyond feels like some awful kind of mental imprisonment. I wonder if the people who'd want that have ever done anything creative themselves, and if they understand the sheer number of hours that'd be involved in that. I'd have to devote the majority of every one of my days for years to it. It's not something I can do easily.

But then I feel bad about not being able to give people what they might want. Though I wonder, how many people is that, exactly? Some commenters have spoken of 'everyone' wanting a completely faithful remaster, but I think that's just projection, assuming that their feelings are representative of the vast majority, which likely isn't the case.

I don't know how many people ever played MARDEK, so let's use 1 million as a generous estimate. Statistics for badges on Kongregate - as mentioned by one of the commenters on a previous post - show that the vast majority of those never even got past the first dungeon in Chapter 3. This makes sense, since just investigating a free game would cost nothing but would inflate the view count, and it doesn't mean that the person investigated very much or liked what they saw. So a statistic like "3.5 million plays" doesn't mean that 3.5 million people loved it. It means that maybe a million investigated, and a small number of those liked it enough to come back repeatedly.

The people who follow me and read this blog specifically because of an interest in MARDEK have an interest in the series that far surpasses that of most people. I'd love to reward that in some way, and appreciation for those of you who have that much faith in my work is largely what keeps me going, but the cold fact is that it just doesn't represent a majority at all. Most people would have forgotten all about MARDEK, if they even completed it at all (it's interesting that some of the commenters have mentioned not actually completing it themselves).

Perhaps there'd be a large number of people who'd buy a remaster or remake because they'd vaguely remember it, even if they're not devoted fans - it's not as if I was a manically devoted Spyro fan, but I bought Reignited anyway - but I wonder how many of those would be disappointed if what they got was exactly the same as the old, naively-made Flash games. Perhaps they'd be more impressed if nostalgia sparked their curiosity enough to investigate, but that investigation led to something better than they were expecting?

So I feel that targeting stubbornly anti-change long-time fans is necessarily targeting a limited audience, and I don't think that most people would see the game's many faults quite as charitably as those of you with a vested emotional interest in the experience would. They might even feel it's not for them because they don't have that nostalgic connection.



Still, I do like the idea of a remake which uses nostalgia as a hook, but doesn't rely wholly on nostalgia for every moment of gameplay. Similar in concept to the Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus remake that's coming, which I mentioned before (can you think of any other significantly improved/changed remakes, actually? There are definitely many of them, but that's the only one that comes to mind at the moment).

Taming Dreams was, I think, an enormous improvement over MARDEK, but it too has its issues. So as I've said in a few of these posts, I'm wondering how best to draw upon both of these as inspirations, to take the best of them both to make something better than either.

The battle system is the core of the game, the actual gameplay which was more accessibly fun in MARDEK, so it seems most important to get that right. With that in mind, I spent a couple of days building a prototype battle system, which I'll now try to describe.

Oh, it also draws heavy inspiration from Belief, which I worked on recently... and which I'll get back to later on in this post. The (temporary) character models are bases I made for that (I don't know if I'd use these proportions, and I don't like the faces as they are now).



What stands out the most here, I feel, are the GLOWY WEAPONS! I like the light/dark thing, not from some kind of deep and meaningful philosophical perspective (it's hardly profound), but because I was imagining something like this, which I find pleasing aesthetically in the same way that a blue vs a red lightsabre is. I like the idea of 'cleansing darkness' with weapons - especially of the 'dark phantasms' that are miasmon - rather than just chopping away HP to cause physical death, which is mostly from a lore perspective (I find it *interesting*) rather than a pacifistic "violence is bad!!" one. It's a combination of basic violent domination and something that people might not have seen done in this exact way before.

This battle system combines basic 'violence' mechanics with the mental/emotional 'taming' of Taming Dreams. Characters have two bars: the top is their 'HP', and the other is 'rapport'. They have simple 'attack' and 'defence' stats, determined by their equipped weapon and shield, which are used when determining the potency of basic 'attacks':



(Obviously there are no animations or particle effects yet!)

'Damage' numbers are either yellow or purple, signifying either 'filling with light' or 'filling with dark'. Enemies start with fully dark bars, while allies start fully light. Turning an enemy's darkness fully light will 'kill' them; miasmon simply disappear, human opponents might be snapped out of a stupor, causing them to run away. Allies reduced to full darkness might go into a berserk state, where they attack allies, like the confusion status in other games. Some abilities 'heal' by restoring light, and allies snap out of this dark berserk state if restored to full light (there are no special 'revive' abilities; normal healing works as usual on characters in this berserk state).

Reactions were fairly straightforward in MARDEK. You had a bar with a single gold spot which you had to stop a cursor on to trigger the reaction correctly. It was similar in Taming Dreams, except there was no bar, just a ( ! ) thing that you had to press a button in reaction to.

Here, it uses that same system as MARDEK, but improves on it. Now, the bar has different sections. If you stop it on the dark section, your attack misses. If you stop it on the dark orange part, you do damage as normal. The lighter orange part is a critical hit, and the yellow bit gives you a 'bonus attack', which essentially means the attack you just did is executed twice.



On defence, you can only react if you have a shield, and it's similar, except there's no darker orange section, the lighter orange is a 'block' - where the defence stat of the shield is taken away from the damage inflicted - and the yellow bit is a 'dodge', where you avoid the attack completely. (Thought while reviewing this: shouldn't everyone be able to dodge regardless of whether or not they have a shield?)

While this, I think, is an improvement over the MARDEK system, it's not perfect. Currently all enemies and all attacks have exactly the same bounds for when you're supposed to react, meaning that if you got really good at this one bit of timing, you'd be able to bonus attack and dodge your way through the whole game without issue. A better way of doing it would be to make each enemy or skill have a different reaction time - the Mario & Luigi RPGs did this really well - so that might be the way to go.

I also wondered whether to do some kind of rhythm-based thing, where each character or weapon or maybe background music track had a rhythm you had to hit in time with, and either each hit could be a separate hit from the weapon (high accuracy would produce criticals), or perhaps the accuracy of all of them together would determine the overall power of the attack. While I like this in theory for the same reason I like Sindrel Song, I'm not sure how it'd work. Would it be dependent on the background music track? In which case, would you have to wait until the start of a rhythm section before the attack could launch? That's not very fluid. Or would you just start the rhythm wherever it was in the bar at the time you launched the attack? When, then, would your attack end? Could you just keep going forever? (MOTHER 3 did something like this, I think?) Or if it was unrelated to the background music track, would that music have to go quiet while you played an unrelated rhythm? That seems disruptive to immersion.



In MARDEK, characters could learn a list of abilities to select from, and they also had a basic 'attack' command, because that's what the early Final Fantasies did. I've mentioned the game Marvel Strike Force a few times on this blog (since I've played it every day for like a year and a half now), as that's got a turn-based battle system which I think is better than MARDEK's. In that, each character has either three or four abilities: a 'basic' which can always be used, a 'special' and 'ultimate' which have limited energy that regenerates each turn, and a 'passive' which is always in effect. These all have unique effects for each character, and even the 'basic' is different for each one. It means that the characters aren't interchangeable, which is something that always bothered me about games like FFVI.

Also, I've been playing a game called Pokemon Masters since it came out, which is interesting because it's kind of a cross between whatever you'd call the sort of game MSF is (gacha?), and the Pokemon battle system, which is a bit of relic at this point. Whenever I've played Pokemon games, I've never had any issues with the battle system, because it allowed me to choose whichever Pokemon I liked the look of and spam the same old attacks ("Charizard, use Flamethrower! And again! And again!", "Chandelure, use Flamethrower! And again! And again!"), whereas the uniqueness of characters in MSF means that some are objectively better than others, meaning that everyone ends up with the same set of 'meta' teams, and if you try to cobble together a hodgepodge of your favourites, you're going to lose. I've been struggling to really get into Pokemon Masters because I've been approaching it with this 'meta-focused' mentality, trying to choose the characters/Pokemon which are the 'best' rather than just focusing on my favourites. I've come up with a team and strategy that works for pretty much everything, meaning that most of my characters are completely neglected, and all the battles end up feeling the same. I'm not really enjoying it as a result. And yet if I were to try to stick with my favourites instead, I might not be able to progress.

That uses a skills system not too dissimilar to MSF (I suppose all games in this roster collecting/gacha genre do a similar thing? All the ones I've played do). Each Pokemon has four moves and up to three passives, which can be gradually unlocked. The balancing seems all over the place, though; some pokemon have a move which, for example, sharply boosts two stats for your whole party, while others have a skill that only slightly boosts a single stat of their own. You also don't take turns with each of your party pokemon; instead, you have a single shared turn bar, and choose whichever one you want to attack with. What this means for me is that I have two who just buff at the start, and one attacker who just spams the same attack after it's buffed until I win. Pokemon types were a huge part of the original games, and the elaborate rock-paper-scissors thing was something I focused on a lot, but here I largely just ignore it, and it all just feels like I or the game is doing something wrong somehow. I don't know.

I mention that because both Pokemon Masters and MSF have made me wonder how best to approach skills in this, while also retaining the learning-skills-from-equipment aspect of MARDEK that people have frequently commented on. What would be ideal for me is if every skill mattered, so you didn't learn skills you'd never be interested in using, but also I'd want every character to be different in terms of what they could do.

Currently, I've got this: each character has six skill slots, and they learn skills unique to them. In Pokemon Masters, you're stuck with the four skills (plus passives) for each character and that's that (the same is true of MSF), which does make them unique, but also makes it much more difficult to use your favourites if they don't have attacks you like or want to use. In the main Pokemon games, each pokemon can learn more moves, but they have to stick with just four, and if you choose to replace one, often it can be gone 'forever' (without using some kind of move reminder/tutor/TM), which always bothered me. Something I wished for instead - and which I think I played with in other older game ideas like Miasmon - was skills that could be learned, but then freely 'equipped' as you changed your mind about which ones you wanted to have available.

So here, each character could learn a long list of skills, but they could only equip six. They could change these six whenever they wanted outside of battle though, choosing from their list of learned skills. This allows for customisation, while also adding some of the strategic limitations that come with limited slots.

Skills currently come in four types: Attack and Sentimancy, with positive and negative 'valence' versions of each. This 'valence' concept has issues, which I'll get to in a minute. Attacks, which use the dark/light thing, could have a sentiment, or none; if they had a sentiment, then they'd be more potent against opponents with a sentiment that they were effective against (eg a 'Bliss Blade' skill would be more effective against Bliss and Destruction enemies, and less effective against Fear ones).

Sentimancy works completely differently to normal attacks. This is more like the Taming Dreams system, where sentiments, runes, and 'excitement' (the beating heart) are used to determine how much a 'rapport' bar fills. All sentimancy would have a sentiment and a rune, and would be more effective the closer these matched the target's. It's fairly complicated, and I've explained it elsewhere, so I won't go into it again here.

Drawing from Belief, when you fill a target's sentimancy bar, they convert to your side:



I really like this as a mechanic, because it gives a lot of choice about how to play. People who prefer to wipe out their enemies can, while people who prefer to understand their enemies and make them into friends can do that instead. It's like the 'pacifism run' concept some games explore, and which seems to be appealing to certain types of people, but it goes even further by combining Pokemon-like acquisition aspects, as once converted you can freely control the characters and use whatever skills they were using against you.

When 'killed', enemies might drop items that'd help you upgrade attack-based aspects of characters, while enemies on your party at the end of a battle would drop items that'd help you build sentimancy-based aspects. I've not devised specifics yet though; I can't do absolutely everything all at once!



As much as I like all this, in its current form, this battle system is far from ideal.

The biggest issue is how the dark/light thing plays with the sentimancy and conversion. If an enemy is at full darkness and you convert them, they join your party... but they're still at full darkness? Or do they convert to light? If they're at 30% light when they're converted, do they swap to 70% light instead? What if their attacks inflict dark rather than light? Do they swap too?

I've been wondering whether opponents could swap ∞ 'valence' ∞ (a term from psychology meaning whether an emotion is either positive or negative) once converted, altering their appearance into something less monstrous and more 'good'-looking, and changing the valence of their skills (dark-inflicting ones become light, and vice versa), so that's one possibility. It seems strange though if you'd be using sentimancy - unrelated to the dark/light valence - to swap that valence through conversion. Why would appealing to their essence change their valence?

Another, simpler one would be to simply do away with the dark/light valence thing and change that to HP and literal physical violence... but I don't like that for philosophical reasons, plus it doesn't play well in a lore sense with the idea of miasmon as dark phantasms. It'd also be a shame to lose the glowy weapons look, I feel!

And what of healing? It can't be sentimancy, since that affects rapport, so would it count as an 'attack'? It works alright if it's a 'light skill', conceptually, but not so much if it was just HP/violence, unless healing exclusively involves using items, which I've considered. Gathering food and making meals seems to appeal to primal instincts, and that could be considered a 'physical' sort of healing without being magical. Interestingly, a lot of Pokemon in Pokemon Masters have skills with names that correspond to items from the main series, though those items don't have to be acquired since they're mechanically the same as any other skills. So you can effectively use infinite Potions or X Attacks without ever needing to replenish supplies. I wouldn't like the idea of infinite food though, really.



I'm wondering whether it's best to continue down this path, or whether I should just go back to ∞ Belief ∞. Belief was essentially based on the MARDEK story anyway, but it was even more of a change than Taming Dreams was. All the characters were renamed and most were omitted, and only the beginning of the story was essentially the same (starts with a fantasy sequence, then you explore the woods and get possessed by Rohoph), with the rest after that diverging from the original plans for either MARDEK or Taming Dreams completely.

There are a lot of plot things that people have mentioned from MARDEK that just make me think "ugh, I don't want to revisit that!". Things like the 'chaosbringer' or the elemental crystals, which all feels more than a bit puerile to me now... though I suppose it's no less puerile than what the MCU is doing. I don't think that diving into some philosophical/spiritual deep end like Taming Dreams did is the way to go either, but, well, I suppose I need to find a compromise somewhere.

How Belief handled swapping sides was fairly elegant, and it being based around human social disagreements and belief conversion opened up a lot of possibilities for culturally relevant humour shown through character designs and skills that wouldn't be possible with just monsters (a stereotyped 'Lout' character using a 'Racist Joke' skill - to use an example from a previous post - which riles up both teams and makes his team distance themselves from him is way more interesting and amusing to me than a monster just using a 'really powerful fire attack!!' or whatever). It also wasn't so close to MARDEK that any changes from the gospel that was the originals wouldn't annoy people in the same way, but it was similar enough for people familiar with that (and Taming Dreams) to get some pleasing sense of familiarity or recognition from some bits.

So I don't know, I feel like I'm at a bit of an impasse at the moment. Do I keep trying to refine a battle system between MARDEK's and Taming Dreams, with options for both attackers and tamers, for a plot heavily based on both MARDEK and Taming Dreams without annoying fans of the original while appealing to people despite their lack of familiarity with the original? Or do I continue with Belief, and try to make something that'd be funny and original in itself but which might not get a boost from MARDEK memories?

It's tricky. For now, I should really be sorting out the Sindrel Song stuff...

Either way, I'll look into what old notes I have about MARDEK and Taming Dreams, and I'll post somewhere about what was going to happen in those, if you really do want an answer to long-lingering wonderings.