This week, I've rethought how magic works, and have added an additional form of progression. I think I'll stop fiddling around with the battle mechanics now and devote the next couple of weeks to figuring out how best to start getting some players involved!
∞ Last week ∞, I talked about some totally-final-guys-I'm-done-now-I-swear features I'd added to battles, and how I was going to try to do some kind of demo soon. This week's been almost a repeat of that. Every time I feel I've finished fiddling with the battle mechanics, something else comes up and consumes the whole next week!
Apart from some boring behind-the-scenes stuff, I did two major things this week:
Rethinking Magic
Previously, spells had you tap to the rhythm of a brief melody to trigger a reaction effect, like this:
An interesting concept, though I was finding it more of a nuisance than fun while playtesting. People had already started commenting on the BGM muffling and incongruity between the played melody and that BGM, and I knew those comments would only continue. So now it's like this:
Characters still play a brief melody, but it's more like a sound effect now that just accompanies their animation.
It's sad to lose something I put some effort into, but you can never know how well things will actually play unless you experiment with implementation, and not everything works. So sometimes it's better to remove things even if you felt they were a good idea.
Also, here's something annoying: I recently got some wireless bluetooth headphones, which have a fraction-of-a-second lag which really interfered with the note input before (and made replaying Sindrel Song so bad I had to switch to my old broken plugged-in headphones). I don't know how common that is for wireless headphones, but maybe that would have been a complaint too?
Training Essences
In last week's post, I talked about how skills can be levelled up to boost their power, speed, or to add to max HP. Since ∞ way back in January ∞, when I was still planning for this to be a 'MARDEK Reimagining' called Divine Dreams rather than a prequel that could potentially lead to that, I also had something called Essences, which you got for clearing out monster species and which were the primary way of boosting characters' stats.
These have mostly remained in the game unaltered, until this week. You can actually acquire them now, as I finally added the species-clearing mechanics last week:
And now characters can only equip three of them rather than six:
Each one potentially grants bonuses to the six major stats: body (HP), attack, defence, light, dark, and the arousal value the character starts battles at.
They can also be levelled up! Code-wise, they use essentially the same mechanics as skills, but instead of gaining XP through use, you spend a currency called 'glitter', which you acquire by defeating monsters (no different to money you'd get from monsters in other RPGs).
Each level boosts the stat gains by a bit.
These levels are bound to the user as well as the essence, so if Collie were to remove this Somunculimp essence and give it to Savitr, it'd be level 1 for him.
I also have this video/gif of that, but while it's a fundamental mechanic, it's not exactly riveting to watch since it's mostly menu stuff and I've yet to add fancy effects where there should probably be some (the XP bars filling, a level up flash of some kind, etc):
This essence revision came about because I was wondering what to fill treasure chests with in the little demo I've been trying to refine. I have reagent items that are used for brewing potions, but I'd prefer those to be acquired through special placeables so it feels like you're harvesting them directly from the environment (this is one of several things I still need to add). So equippable accessories seemed the most sensible thing, especially since the functionality for those was already there.
I wondered whether any of these could show on the characters' models, since that's usually appealing. I didn't want the characters' overall outfits to be drastically customisable though, as how they look is important to their personality and the story. So maybe something like amulets? Badges? Medals? Little things which could be easily added and subtracted and which would share models between characters.
This led to wondering whether they could be little fairies or flying pets, since they wouldn't even need to be attached to the model but could still give a feeling of visual customisation.
But would these be found in treasure chests? Wouldn't that be odd, if they're living creatures? And why make them accessories when I'm already unsure about what I'm doing with essences? Maybe these could be what essences are instead?
Here are some concept sketches about how these little creatures could potentially look. At first, when they were going to be accessories, I planned a list of potential traits (Attack buff, Health buff, etc) and wondered whether each could be represented by a different kind of six-winged Zelda-fairy-like thing with an aster motif... though that evolved into these little ghost-like things which would all use the same model, but which would have textures to have them resemble the monster species that they're essences of. Pawnite, Somunculimp, Brigrrnd, and Psyclop concepts are shown here.
I feel that having little 'pets' like this that you can 'feed' glitter to might make cold mechanical stat growth feel more personal and alive. It rewards you for clearing out monster species, gives you something to aim for and earn, and since essences can be given to whoever you want, that gives an element of customisation.
Overall it feels like the culmination of years of wondering how best to have some kind of non-permanent user-driven level-up customisation and adding value and personality to the monsters that you fight in a neat and tidy way. I also like the harmony between skills and essences. So I'm pleased with this!
I still need to play around with making them visible on - or rather floating above - the character models, but it's not a high priority at the moment.
I've also wondered whether instead of instantly getting an essence after clearing out the last individual of a species (as is currently the case), you instead acquire some kind of key which can be used to unlock a fancy treasure chest somewhere in the environment. That chest would start a battle with a 'paragon' version of the monster species, which looks and acts the same but has boosted stats, and which might be surrounded by generic versions of its species. Other games do this (Final Fantasy XIII Lightning Returns - and I think XII maybe? - had something similar when facing the 'Last One' of a given species), it wouldn't be difficult to add, and it might make the essences feel more valuable and well-earned. Plus the minibosses might be fun to fight. But it might also just be some unnecessary extra steps. I'm not sure though; what do you think?
As I said last time, I need to start looking into how to handle a demo, or at least some kind of early alpha testing or something.
For the past few months - or however long it's been, time feels so weird these days - I've been trying to work on actual development for around six hours every week day. Some days I do more, some less, but I do usually get about that much done on average. I tweet about it where I can, but often there's not really anything exciting to show in a fancy image so I don't bother. "Today I spent six hours working on some menus and statistical formulae!" Who cares?
I'm going to stop doing that active development for the next week or maybe two, though, to focus wholly on figuring out what to do next. I feel that I've been tweaking the battle system constantly since it's so much easier to do something familiar like that than it is to venture into the unknown and take the next steps. But I do need to at some point or I'll never get the game out!
Instead of fumbling around blindly, I'll write a list of specific questions I don't know the answer to, then I'll try to answer them through research. I'll write another post in the Promotion category specifically about that soon.
I'd also like to spend the time making at least one practice video; maybe I'll try to make a video from this post and write another post to show it privately here before putting it on Youtube? The dwindling view counts here might make that less daunting. We'll see!
(Speaking of the dwindling view counts, I've also seen a drop in impressions on my tweets overall since the MARDEK Steam release: I got 132K overall impressions in May, 114K in June when MARDEK was put on Steam, then 37.9K the next month, 58.8K the month after that, and 53.8K this month so far. So it does seem to be because of that. So much for leveraging old work to help promote my new stuff.)
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