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WU 2020-10D - Concords, Greatshield

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago3,018 words

This week, I added the beginnings of long-planned mechanical feature: something called 'concords', which represent the connections between pairs of characters, and which grant various benefits when developed. Also, I redesigned Deugan's weapon.

I didn't do as much as I would have liked this week, because of factors outside my control (looking after a dog; ∞ I wrote about it in the personal post ∞). Still, I did something, at least.

I've been unsure about how to handle Deugan's weapon for a while. In MARDEK, he used a greatsword, but I felt that in this he'd focus on defence in a more nerdy/intellectual way. So I gave him a shield and a wand. I thought the wand shared with Emeela could be something he could use as a reason they "have so much in common!!", and I also liked the idea of Mardek and Deugan being warrior and wizard types respectively rather than both just physical attackers (I suppose Mardek's a healer too, but not exclusively; he's not a fragile White Mage type). I also thought that if his primary 'weapon' was a shield, he'd have a free hand, so holding something light and useful - like a wand - would be a good use for it. Still, as a couple of commenters pointed out - and as I'd been thinking myself for a while - it didn't feel quite right.

An earlier concept had a kind of 'bladed mask shield', which some people have told me they liked. I wondered whether to go back to that, though that'd mean he'd have a free hand again. What else could he do with it? Maybe he wields two bladed shields?! Maybe they're both the same, but they combine together to form a larger face/mask shape when he's holding them in a defensive posture? I drew some quick, sloppy concepts:



The two semicircles idea was... interesting, and I actually modelled it, but something about it didn't feel right/satisfying/appealing to me.

Someone mentioned that Zweihänder swords were wielded in two hands, but were designed - or at least used - quite defensively. So that led me to combine the mask shield approach with a two-handed greatsword. I don't know why I didn't think of that earlier, since it seems so obvious, really!

There are a few ideas for how such a thing could work in those sketches. One's just a boring greatsword with a face. Silly. A couple are strapped to a forearm, with the hand of the other arm offering additional maneouverability/support. The one that I liked the most is kind of like an upside-down gravestone on a stick, which I liked because the pose with it gave a very clear defender vibe that I felt the others didn't.

I modelled that and added it to the game:



I liked it at first, but changed my mind when it came to animating it. It couldn't be swung from that standing pose without a drastic shift of the hands, so I had to do this convoluted animation to get it to work:



That took more than two hours, and the results are still really sloppy. Animation takes time in general - longer than you might expect - but that's longer than I'd personally like to spend on one action since I'm not exactly in love with the animation process. It's something I've developed some mediocre skill at over the years, but I tend to put off animating until I absolutely have to do it, and try to minimise the amount of animating I need to do where I can. With this game, I'm hoping to end up with animations that aren't poor, but which won't blow anyone away either. "Functional" and "adequate" are what I'm aiming for; the sorts of things that aren't bad or good enough to attract particular notice!

Another far more important issue with that attack animation is that it's too long. I'd guess that the average player would care a whole lot more that they have to wait a couple of seconds every time they make Deugan attack than they'd care whether his hands made sense when transitioning from an idle pose to a swing.

So I essentially wasted a day messing around with that. It's a shame, but sometimes you have to take a step back and redo something, even if you spent a lot of time on it.

The next morning, I started again, and came up with this:



I greatly prefer this! It looks - I think - like a combination of a shield and a greatsword, plus I find the solution for how it'd be held (a straight pole from hilt to tip, with a convex shield section), and the holding stance itself, really satisfying. It's far easier to animate too, since all he needs to do to swing it is move one hand down to the hilt.

This attack animation took much less time to make, and it's quicker for the player to execute too:



I imagine the shield as sturdy but fairly lightweight, and the attack is about slashing with its bladed edges rather than slamming with a heavy weight (the attack name, 'Bash', is a hold-over from the weightier tombstone version). It's not exactly clear from the model or the animation that this is what's going on though, so perhaps I'll tweak something there to make it clearer. The most important thing is definitely to make it fast for the player; everything else is secondary to that.

Also in that gif: I improved the look of the stratapillar monsters (no textures yet though), which meant adding some technical stuff like glowing parts on monster models. They also have animations, and they dissolve when defeated. All those things took time. I think I did a few other small but important things like that this week too, which needed to be done but which aren't worth talking about.

One of the stratapillars uses a skill called Balance, which balances the Body and Mind values. Seemed sensible for a thing which is literally balancing stones!



The more important thing this week is the beginnings of a system that'll be important for both gameplay and story, which I've been planning since the beginning, but which I've been unsure about the details of until these past few days.

Having emotional connections - represented via accumulating numbers, of course - between characters in games isn't anything new. Pokemon has 'friendship', even Final Fantasy VII had some hidden values which determined whether Cloud took Tifa, Aeris (with an s), or Barret on a date. Star Ocean games did some convoluted relationships thing that I never understood when I played them, I think? Maybe you're familiar with other (less dated!) examples.

In MARDEK, you could unlock backstories for your party members when you levelled them up enough, which players seemed to like (I did too). In Taming Dreams, I no longer had this - since there were no longer levels - but instead there was a deeper 'P dialogue' system, where you could have Mardek talk to individual allies, or you could view scenes where two allies had a conversation between one another without Mardek. In this, I wanted to do essentially an extension of that.

I wanted a system where characters could develop bonds between one another by fighting alongside one another, using support abilities on one another, etc. The depth of these bonds would unlock dialogue scenes between pairs of characters, rather than universal 'backstory segments'.

You're likely familiar with the phenomenon where you randomly think of someone, then you get a text or phone call from them moments later; "hey, I was just thinking about you!". It seems to be a common thing. Some 'parapsychology' types have actually done experiments on this, and they've found that people actually can 'telepathically' predict who's going to call them at a rate significantly greater than chance... but it's heavily dependent on the strength of the emotional connection between the individuals. So the success rate is just random chance if they're strangers, whereas if they're family members, romantic partners, or close friends, the chance of guessing correctly is much greater (though still never 100%).

Whether or not you accept that as 'true' is heavily dependent on your beliefs about the world, and honestly the 'truth' behind it isn't all that important or interesting to me. I find the idea of it fantastically interesting, in a "that seems like something that could be integrated into a story!" kind of way. I wouldn't ever try to convince anyone to believe that it's 'real', nor do I particularly want anyone explaining to me how those experiments were flawed!! or whatever because that's not the point at all here.

I think it's an interesting idea, imagining two minds becoming bound together, as if by some kind of aethereal thread, such that they come to share a kind of spiritual connection. It's a mental image I ran with to come to the name concords, a word which means "agreement or harmony between people or groups", and it has 'cord' in it, like the 'silver cord' that - in similar new age mythology - supposedly binds an astrally projecting spirit to its body (there's one as an item in MARDEK). It's not a perfect name, but it'll do.



Anyway, that's a lot of rambling about why I've added them and roughly what they're supposed to be, but how do they function mechanically? Here's a screenshot:



Essentially, a concord exists for each pair of characters. So there's a 'Mardek+Deugan' concord, a 'Deugan+Emeela' concord, etc. The strength of the concord is a simple number; I'm using 6000 as the max value here, though I'll likely alter that after some testing (Pokemon friendship only has a max value of 255). Different actions would contribute points to the total. Here, you can see that Mardek and Deugan start with a fairly strong concord since they're childhood friends and it'd be senseless otherwise, whereas they've only just met Emeela, so their concord with her is 0, and Deugan's had a brief encounter with Steele before this, so the Deugan+Steele concord has 100 points in it (the concords don't show friendliness, just how much of an impact they've made in each other's minds).

Importantly, each person in the concord has a different 'impression' about the nature (or 'valence', to use a psychological term) of that concord. That screenshot is of Deugan's concords screen, so it shows that he believes he has a 'harmonious' friendship with Mardek, and that he Adores Emeela and Loathes Steele.

This is what the concords look like from Emeela's perspective:



And from Steele's:



The distinction between the 'impression' and the actual concord depth is an important one. Deugan Adores Emeela despite having 0 concord points with her because that represents fancying someone you don't actually know at all. It's obviously one-sided though. Steele believes that he and Emeela are relatively close, but from her perspective the relationship is toxic; this is definitely a kind of relationship that occurs often in the real world.

Characters gain bonuses based on the type of their impression and the strength of the concord. Essentially the impression determines the max percentage, which is multiplied by the fullness percentage of the concord. So if Deugan Adores Emeela, that might give him a base 30% strength bonus, and if they have 3000/6000 concord points, that's multiplied by 1/2 to give a total bonus of 15%.

Adjacency is also important. Characters gain significantly more bonuses from the concords of characters directly next to them than they do from someone at the far end of the party. This presents some interesting strategic options! For example, Emeela has negative feelings about Steele, which have some detrimental effects, but her negative elements (Fear, Destruction, and Sorrow) are also boosted quite a bit, which is important for her since she exclusively uses those. Concords would also grow much faster between characters standing next to one another.

Originally, I was intending for concords to grant team-up skills, kind of like the ones in Chrono Trigger, to use an example I'm familiar with (you might know of others). That'd be fairly complicated though; I'd have to plan all the skills, and work out how to animate them, what their costs would be, balancing, etc. It's easier to have the concords grant passive effects, kind of like how friendship works in the later Pokemon games (it gives a chance to evade attacks, survive KO, recover from status effects, etc). I played around with a few ideas, and currently have these:


Strength Bonus - This would be a straight multiplier applied to max Body and Mind, which - as described in previous posts - serve as both offensive power and HP.

Positive Element Boost - This would be added to the power of Courage, Bliss, and Creation skills.

Negative Element Boost - This would be added to the power of Fear, Destruction, and Sorrow skills.

Assist Chance - When a character uses an attacking skill, this is the chance that adjacent allies will follow it up by using their weapon skill on the same target, at no cost.

Avenge Chance - When a character is hit, there's a chance their allies will use their weapon skill on the attacker.

Cheer Chance - On a character's turn, there's a chance their allies will cheer them on, increasing their Mind by a few points. Restoring mind was an issue with what I had previously, so this should hopefully help with that.

Console Chance - When a character is damaged, their allies might reassure them, restoring some Mind (not Body, since these are non-magical effects), and increasing their 'time' slightly.

Victory Restoration - I like the thought of the "VICTORY!" bit at the end of battle, where everyone does a pose, having some functional effect. Characters' Mind recovers by an amount based on the strength of their concords with their allies.


Both Avenge and Console activate when a character is hit, which is less than ideal. Either I could remove one, or give characters some individual value that determines which they do (Steele would Avenge, Emeela would Console), or at least the percentage ratio for each one (Mardek has a 50% chance of either, Steele has a 100%/0% chance). Or I could replace one with a "Defend Chance", where an ally jumps in the way of an attack and takes the damage, but that's harder to code than the others, it'd require a new animation (probably), and it might not even be desirable for players.

I might change, add, or remove some of these if they don't work well during actual gameplay. I'll also need to tweak the numbers, but balancing stuff like that is always going to be part of the process.

I imagine that certain skills could add to or multiply these base percentages. For example, Deugan's "White Knight" passive, suggested in a previous post, could maybe give him a +50% chance to Cheer, Assist, Avenge, or Console Emeela? Perhaps moods could multiply them too, so someone Depressed is less likely to do any, someone Brave is more likely to Avenge, etc?


At a glance, the system seems perhaps overly complicated; so much for keeping things simple! But it's not, really. It's not as if you actually have to concern yourself with or alter the numbers; essentially they're just bonuses granted by having characters stand next to each other through a lot of battles. You could definitely go through the entire game without even looking at this screen. Many games would just keep numbers like this hidden, but I thought it could be interesting to give the player the opportunity to see them if they're curious.

The presentation of the information is somewhat confusing though, since I couldn't think how better to do it. Here's the Deugan example from earlier:



The green numbers on Deugan's box are the totals he's getting from everyone. So his Strength Bonus is the 20% from Mardek - the 0.1% from Steele (it feels a bit ugly using non-integer values, but if they were rounded down, many of them just wouldn't show up at all). The green numbers on characters other than the selected one show what they're contributing... but the white numbers on those characters show how likely the currently selected character (in this case, Deugan) is to help them out. Perhaps it'd make more sense for this to show the likelihood of them helping Deugan out, which would mean a total could be calculated for Deugan (so if all three allies had a 33% chance to Assist Deugan, his total might show a 99% chance). That's misleading though - three 33%s wouldn't be the same as an almost-guaranteed chance at all - plus I wanted this screen to show things from their perspective. So Deugan doesn't exactly know how likely Mardek is to help him out, but he does know how likely he is to help Mardek out based on how close to him he believes himself to be (they do both have Harmony with one another, so they're equally likely to help one another, if you're curious).

Characters' impressions wouldn't be directly manipulated by the player on a battle-by-battle basis, though plot events - and perhaps optional side quest - would alter them, and perhaps changes to these would alter certain events, or at least what characters say during certain events. Having a branching story would be far, far too difficult, but having dialogue variants (with the same grander plot outcome) would be definitely achievable and certainly appealing.

This system - and the associated UI - is brand new, so maybe it'll go through some revisions as time goes on. I'm curious to hear your thoughts though, as always!



Thanks for reading! I read and appreciate all comments, though I'm aware that I've been terrible at actually replying to them recently. I'm hoping to improve with that, though!