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Weekly Update - The Hows & Whys of Figmon

3 years ago2,724 words

It's already September! How did THAT happen?? I've been working on Atonal Dreams for over a year... So much for the hope I could start and finish in 6 months like I did with Memody: Sindrel Song!

I've been working more on the intro section this week. Some technical stuff like bug fixes, but I also composed a couple of pieces of music: a new musical theme for Collie, and some background music for her Psychepelago based on that. I've posted them both on ∞ my Patreon ∞. I'm not sure how many people actually see them on there - I have 83 patrons currently, though the posts only get like a handful of likes, and maybe a comment or two - but Patreon's a big chunk of my meagre income at the moment, so I feel I should post some stuff there to make it worth supporting me, since the main thing people are probably supporting me for takes so long to finish. And because I appreciate the support a lot!

In ∞ last week's update ∞, some of the (surprisingly large number of) comments gave me the impression that I should better explain what I'm trying to do with the monster-taming aspects of the game. Fair enough; I've written about it in these posts before, but it's not reasonable to expect people to read and remember them all, plus I've revised a lot over the past few months. So what I want to do this week is explain how the monster-skill mechanics work like in the game, and why I've decided to go in this direction, both from a game dev perspective and in terms of in-universe lore.

How Figmon Work, Mechanically

The monster enemies in Atonal Dreams are called figmon, and they're essentially 'solid hallucinations' that manifest from 'The Imagination'. So like 'figment(s) of the imagination' but combined with 'mon'. You can either 'kill' them (though they're not exactly alive), or tame them.




Taming is an important - though technically optional - mechanic. In addition to HP, attack, and defence, each creature - human or figmon - has two stats, Light and Dark, shown as a halo in their UI display... which are also missing in that video... whoops. Here's a screenshot which actually includes them:



(Other stats - arousal and runes - are hidden here though. They're locked during the tutorial, and I have no not-too-old saved files from the post-tutorial bits!)

Some skills add points of light or dark rather than dealing damage; when points are added to one, they're subtracted from the other. If a foe's balance tips fully towards light, they're tamed over to your party, meaning they run to the other side of the battlefield and become a controllable ally - with their own set of skills - for the duration of the battle. They disappear at the end. You can temporarily lose your allies if they become fully dark (though opponents that add dark only appear mid-way through the game).

(The Light and Dark stats are also used to determine the power of some skills, while others use the attack stat, or whichever of the Light and Dark stats is highest.)



Once a species of figmon has been tamed for the first time, you acquire its essence, and see this Pokedex-style entry for it (which needs revising, probably to match the Lore screen I revised last week). This doesn't mean you have that instance of the figmon, as you would a Pokemon, or a pet. Rather, it means that you have the potential for any character to summon it via an equippable skill.



In battle, characters have six skill slots. These are the primary actions that they can take. Each skill is associated with a figmon; that is, each time you tame a figmon, you're effectively acquiring a new skill that any character can equip. Multiple characters can equip the same skill at once if you've unlocked it; they're not like items.



When you use a skill, the character plays their instrument, and the figmon's model appears (usually) in front of them, executes the skill, then disappears. The power of the skill is based on the character's stats; the figmon has no stats of its own. It's not a separate entity, just an extension of the summoner.

Characters don't have levels, but skills do. Or rather, characters have a level for each skill, so Savitr gaining XP for his Brightblade wouldn't level up Collie's Brightblade.

When any skill deals damage, it gains that amount of damage as XP. The level adjusts the power of the skill; in most cases, it'd be a straight integer addition to the power (and the game uses low numbers, so +10 is a big deal). Skills initially have a level cap of 10; when this is reached, the character unlocks a 'boon' which grants a permanent increase to a stat (eg +5 HP).

When you kill or tame all members of a species (each species is limited to a single area, and has a small number of members), the cap for that species increases to 20, and reaching that new cap unlocks a second boon.



Once an essence has been acquired, it's not bound to any particular character, though each figmon has either one or two 'species' - Monstrife is Beast/Arcane, for example, while Bridove is Avian/Fey - and each character can only equip certain species (or I could make it so they are only adept at using certain species and get penalties for the others; I've yet to decide or implement this).

Essentially it's just a way of making standard magic spells a bit more interesting by instilling them with a kind of life. Or you could see it as all skills being summons, technically, though they're pragmatic and snappy rather than Final-Fantasy-style ostentatious lightshows.

Each character also has a single unique 'Special' action that they can use. Savitr has a taunt, Collie howls to rile the whole party, etc.

There are a bunch of skills in-game that work kind of like Pokemon moves, and during battle figmon can have up to six of them. They'll retain the same arsenal when tamed to your side mid-combat. When summoned, though, they only use one of the skills from their arsenal (not randomly; it's like one skill is a 'signature skill' for that figmon, though that doesn't necessarily mean no other figmon would ever have it in their arsenal, just that no others would have it as their summonable skill).

For example, going back to this image:



That's the arsenal of a tamed Pawnite: Slash, To Arms!, and Defend. When summoned as a skill, though, it'd always execute To Arms! (or rather, I'm probably going to remove Pawnite as a regular enemy and give it a different role, so this is a bad example, but I don't have better screenshots!)

Why - Game Dev Reasons

∞ Pokemon is literally the highest-grossing media franchise in human history ∞ (including $3 million from jet aircraft sales, apparently). A big part of that is down to marketing, and appearing at the right time, and other such factors, but the basic mechanics do scratch a lot of fundamental psychological itches. We like pets, we like to collect things, and we like fighting and coming out on top.

Other games - most notably MMOs - have all those too, but most don't put fighting pets at the forefront.

I've loved the Pokemon games myself since they first came out. Even now, I look forward to new installments of the still-going-strong series more than probably any other games. I've tried to make a handful of Pokemon clones in the past - Beast Signer and Miasmon being the most notable ones (I tried a few others but never got very far with them) - but I didn't stick with any.

That's because those were made in Flash, which there was no money in because Flash games were released for free. It was always hard to stay motivated, knowing that. Game-making's vastly different when I know there's at least the potential to sell my work in the end!

That said, I'm not intending for this to be a Pokemon clone; I don't exactly want to try that again at the moment, and a bunch of other indie devs are trying to make them, or already have. But whenever I've played RPGs, I've been interested in the monsters, and I've always appreciated it when the game allows me to do something more with them than just mindlessly mowing down hordes of them. I like it when they feel special, or unique, or like each one means something rather than fighting a ton of disposable, forgettable Fire Golems and Swamp Wolves or whatever.

In FFVI, the character Gau could effectively collect monster skills, and I think when he used one, the enemy briefly appeared in front of him to execute it? I can't remember; I haven't played that in ages. Some other Final Fantasies had tamer-type jobs where you could capture a single monster and unleash it later as an attack - Bravely Default II had this too - and several had 'Blue Magic' mechanics where you could acquire enemies' skills. The (probably obscure?) game Legend of Legaia allowed you to summon some special enemies after you'd defeated them.



There were always irritations with these systems, though, which tarnished their appeal for me. Gau learned too many skills, many of which were useless, and the whole thing felt tacked-on and barely-utilised; the tamed monster skills in BDII could only be used once for every tamed monster; Blue Magic basically required a guide to know which monsters even had the right skills and what you had to do to get them to use them on you; Legend of Legaia's enemy summons were slow and had a heavy cost (I think?). Essentially all of them were more hassle than the other more readily-available standard attacks and magic, so as much as I liked them conceptually, practically I just ignored them most of the time while wishing that I had more reason to use them, or more opportunities.



Other games, like Ni No Kuni (just the first one) and FFXIII-2 (I think?) allowed you to gain monsters as allies in battle... somehow, though I don't really remember how the mechanics of either worked, I do remember the feeling of appreciating that. I didn't care for how impersonal Ni No Kuni's battles were though, as you only controlled one character during them while your allies just used AI.



When I worked on Taming Dreams in 2015, I had this same desire to make the monsters (called miasmon in that) unique and worthwhile, so I had it so that miasmon to be equipped as either weapons or shields, kind of; that is, they'd be summoned as your basic attack, or they'd be summoned briefly while guarding.




Characters had an 'integration' value for each species; when you dealt 600 points of damage total using a miasmon as a basic attack, you 'fully integrated' it and unlocked an associated boon.

What I'm doing with this is essentially an extension of that... except now figmon are summoned to deal a variety of attacks rather than just changing the flavour of your basic attack, and they have several levels rather than just the one affinity value.

While I didn't necessarily plan to include this mechanic when I started on Atonal (or Divine) Dreams - and it wasn't in the alpha a few months ago - I have thought about these ideas a lot, and I keep coming back to them, so I really like that I'm able to implement them in this in a way that I hope will make sense and be appealing to players without having to scrap this and work on a separate Pokemon clone!

Why - The Lore

Someone last time asked how any figmon could be tamed, if you need to use a figmon to tame them in the first place. Even though I pay a lot of attention to - and care a lot about - lore, I hadn't actually thought about that!

I mean, on some level it's just the sort of thing you're meant to suspend your disbelief about. Like how can anyone catch Pokemon if they don't already have a Pokemon? And why do Team McEvil grunts not just punch or restrain the mute child whose pets just defeated their pets in a very ordered and fair battle? There's a ton of stuff in games that'd be completely absurd if it played out in reality!

Still, can I explain how this would work?

I've talked a lot over the years about mental issues - particularly mine - and I have a degree in Psychology. Sindrel Song had themes of exploring mental illness, and struggling with mental demons was an explicit inspiration for how the monsters manifested in previous projects like Taming Dreams. I might even have talked about Divine/Atonal Dreams in this way too.

But I'm not aiming for these figmon to be metaphors for battling mental illness, necessarily!

Instead, they're based more on spiritual concepts I've read about - and which might very well be how reality actually works, who knows - where essentially consciousness is the substrate of the universe, and this is all one big 'dream', of a sort. More crystallised than the ones our mind conjure up at night, but that's because it's born from a far grander mind. Whether or not there's any truth to that idea, I found it interesting as the setting for a fantasy world.

Alora Fane was created by a highly advanced race called the Aolmna, who were aware of and able to directly manipulate this fundamental structure of reality, to bring into being their own 'solid dream'. The world was wounded - and the link to the Aolmna severed - by some great 'Fracture', and the unformed consciousness potential in which the world floats was able to seep in.

You could maybe imagine it as an ice sculpture, precisely formed by manipulating molecules directly, suspended under a vast ocean, which cracks, letting the water in. It's cold inside because of how the ice sculpture was formed, so this water freezes into new shapes once inside. Something like that.

The unconscious minds of the sentients that live in Alora Fane have some spark of the Aolmna's creativity in them, and they unwillingly cause this water - 'The Imagination' (formely miasma) - to form into figmon. Their forms aren't created by individual minds usually, but rather they're archetypes born of the collective consciousness, like the stuff Jung talked about.

Essentially it's like if our dreams seeped into our reality, or if everyone hallucinated and those hallucinations gained real physical properties. They're not necessarily born of specific thoughts - negative or otherwise - though the contents of a character's mind could inspire certain archetypal species to form, just as how nocturnal dreams are born of what's going on in our own minds at the moment (though not always obviously).

Some figmon could potentially be formed deliberately. One feature of the story is the concept of 'figmonads': unique figmon that are specifically born of a single mind rather than the collective consciousness. Some species - like Palade and Bridove - are born of the collective mental intentions of groups, like the Seraphim, and are assigned to recruits.

It's not perfect... but I'd like to think that this lore is at least a little bit more interesting than just "they're wildlife and they're in your way so you kill them"!



A lot of this would probably require actually playing the game to really see and make sense of, but I'm hoping the next alpha test shouldn't be too many weeks off (though I've been saying this for months). Hopefully this clears at least something up though maybe?!?