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Weekly Update - Alpha 2 Soon! & Boss Battle Strategies

2 years ago1,018 words

I'm intending to run another alpha test the week after next!! Also, how might you make a turn-based JRPG boss battle challenging?

I got back to Atonal Dreams again this week, after a couple of weeks... and I wish I could say that time off helped to renew my focus, but pfft! I've got so little left to do before I can move to the next stage, but I've only been managing like two hours of work a day despite trying hard to sit down and get stuff done.

It's frustrating, and I think it's specific to this project, because I've been able to devote intense focus to other creative things. This week, I've composed a couple of pieces of music, drawn some things, made a 3D model, etc! But I've spent my days trudging through the AD work so then I can finish for the day and get to the other stuff... which isn't the way I should be doing it, especially since I need to be done with this game before I can move on with my life.

I think I need some actual feedback, to stop working away at it in isolation. So what I'm planning to do is to spend the coming week getting everything ready for the next alpha test the week after next. I'll ask on Patreon or Discord or something who among my supporters there is interested in testing and providing feedback.

I would have liked to clean things up a bit more before getting to that point, but it's not really working out that way, and I don't want to keep putting it off more than I already have.

I should also look into making some better promotional assets, revising the Steam page and posting about it publicly, things like that, then I'll need to start researching Kickstarter best practices... Bleh.

I don't want to do any of that! I just want to make things! Which is surely why I've been dragging my feet so much. But I have to, so...



Also, I've been thinking this week about how turn-based (J)RPGs make boss battles challenging, which has led to the addition of a new mechanic.

The Sprouting Isle section ends with this battle against Pierce and three 'Impotantrulfs':



In other JRPGs I've played - several Final Fantasies most notably come to mind - boss battles typically involve gradually whittling down a huge amount of HP with your most powerful abilities, healing when necessary; fairly straightforward, but more of a chore than a challenge. Sometimes you get gimmick bosses who do something unusual - like they have different parts or allies you have to target - but they're uncommon.

Additionally, whenever you face characters in battle who at other times join your party as an ally, they have a ridiculously inflated amount of HP. So you might battle them with 60,000 HP, and when they join, they have 1200, or something. I've never liked that, because what then are the numbers even representing?

I prefer consistency; it's one of the reasons Pokemon has always appealed to me, because you and your opponents are all working with the same stats.

Pierce here has the exact same stats he'd have when joining your party later. But if you were freely able to target him in this battle, you could dispatch him so quickly he might as well not be there at all, which didn't feel right. I had to brainstorm solutions for that.

Some turn-based battle systems include some kind of Taunt mechanic, where combatants force attention to themselves to protect their allies, and the opposite, Stealth, which prevents them being targeted normally. Previously I had status effects called Taunt and Veil which worked this way, but they were lost when I stripped out status effects in favour of the other stuff I have now.

So I've added them back in another form. Now, the 'third eye' of the status 'statues' - which previously just showed the resilience (mental defence) stat - additionally has a reddish circle which represents a value between 0 and 6. When it's full, the combatant is taunting, and must be targeted. When it's empty, they're veiled, and can't be targeted unless there are no valid non-veiled targets.

I'm thinking of calling it Presence, maybe.

Additionally, enemies use this value to weight their decisions when selecting a random target to attack. If Collie's Presence is 2 and Savitr's is 4, he's twice as likely to be attacked. Some skills can change this value. Shield, which buffs defence, also increases the target's Presence.

Since it's not an added buff, some types of figmon could start battles with full or empty Presence.

The Impotantrulfs in this battle start with full Presence, meaning you can't target Pierce until they're gone. So that worked out well!

I still had to revise it multiple times over several days though, fiddling around with HP and attack values and inventing new skills to make it hopefully challenging without just involving using the same attack over and over and healing when necessary. It felt like the first real test of all the novel mechanics I've added - the battle revolves heavily around controlling Wakefulness and Intensity - so I'm really curious to see whether other players will be won over by them during this encounter, or whether they'll just feel frustrated because they don't understand what they're supposed to do.

And that's why I should really do the next alpha sooner rather than later, which I'll spend the next week looking into! Finally!!



Also, I've been putting off replying to things again. I've been intending to reply to several people all week, but keep thinking "I'll do it when I'm in a better mood later", and that later never comes. I don't like that I do this! It's disappointing to other people, burns bridges, robs me of future opportunities. And yet even knowing all that, I'll still do it 'later'... Sigh.

Oh, and I haven't looked at the Flash game ports at all this week, though nobody commented on the previous post anyway so maybe nobody's bothered by that!