I’m going to put up two posts this week because I have a lot to talk about—suffice it to say that as late as last night I was very prepared (and yet very unprepared) for a real downer of a post today, but things pulled through for me.
But let’s not spend any energy on that today. :P For now let’s look at lovely, lovely pixel art from Liz.
From left to right, these are an Impini, Impedi, and Impega! They’re mischievous forest-dwelling creatures that are mostly harmless to travelers, but can still be troublesome when they attack in swarms—and I do mean swarms. Even compared to kobolds, imps have a huge number advantage on their side, but they need it since they’re not at the same intelligence level or strength level of kobolds.
By the way, imps might be a great introduction to the grid system I discussed last week depending on how things work out! (Right now we’re having a certain level of trouble getting together funding for that, but if we do get there…) Imps flooding their side of the battlefield will eat up a lot of space, which makes them nice targets for big explosive attacks to take out a bunch in one shot. :D
Even if the grid system doesn’t work in the way I’m thinking (or turns out to be not as fun as I imagine), though, imps will still be a demonstration of how characters fight differently—it’s literally written into the story. You see, while fighting against these creatures, a certain character comments that even though she’s individually much stronger than other soldiers who were dispatched with her, her techniques aren’t suited for battling large groups, making her the wrong choice for the Empire to send on that particular mission in hindsight.
I’ll say no more about her since her entire species hasn’t gone through the character design process yet. ;) But like the Empire, you’ll have to make your own decisions and prepare for multiple possible scenarios without knowing what you might encounter, so which characters will your team feature? Perhaps using only characters who are strong in one-on-one duels or only characters who are strong against groups isn’t the best idea!
Anyway, gonna have to call it a post there—I’m heading out to Hawaii on Thursday and, as always, going through all sorts of last-minute rush shenanigans right before the trip. I’ll be away on the 14th, though I do still intend to put up a post if I have anything to share (like more finished pixel art, for example), and I return on the 21st, so that day’s post will be delayed until at least the 22nd.
It’s a little tough for me to think super clearly right now; I just might have pushed myself a bit too hard last week—Thanksgiving time here in the US and also making some more preparations for my trip later in December— since I seem to have either come down with some kind of sickness for the first time in several years or the fatigue has finally caught up with me.
Fortunately I did have some time to write about what I intend to do with grids, so let’s talk about it anyway!
Grid-based battles in RPGs are typically handled in one of two ways. Probably the most common of these is the Fire Emblem style, also seen in other games like Tactics Ogre:
In this style of battle, all the blue characters are in your control and all the red characters are enemies. You can move your characters in any order one at a time and they move within a certain number of square spaces, e.g. the one riding a horse can move farther than the ones on foot. When you’re within range to battle an enemy, heal an ally, etc., you can do that. After you’ve moved everybody, then the computer takes its turn (or “phase”) and also moves its characters in any order one at a time to battle yours.
This is probably more straightforward than I’m making it sound! If you’re on your computer or for some other reason won’t mind streaming video from YouTube, then you could start here around 2:19:49 to get a feel for it:
Fire Emblem is one of my favorite game series, but everything about the design comes with its pros and cons.
Moving each character one at a time is mentally engaging because of the needed strategy to readjust your plan after every one or two moves depending on how battles play out, but it can also feel somewhat tedious physically later in the game when you’ll be moving twelve or more characters in each phase.
During your turns, almost everything goes according to plan and even in cases when you’re rolling dice (e.g. you have a 65% chance to hit the enemy), you’re told upfront what those odds are and you don’t get blindsided by anything, so it has a strong feeling of fairness; on the other hand, since you don’t get blindsided by anything during the moments when you’re in control, the game can feel a little less dynamic compared to other RPGs where your attacks might be interrupted by enemies and you have to adapt.
The system of switching between your phase and the enemy phase is simple in theory and gives you maximum control over coordinating your characters’ movements and attacks, but it also comes at the expense of making sense from an in-universe standpoint. For example, a horse-riding enemy who might theoretically want to run away from your mage, who’s running on foot, can’t get away just because it’s not the rider’s phase, not because of something in the game world that would explain how this happens. Another example is that you can move your character with 3 Speed before your character with 20 Speed.
The bottom line is that there’s a reason this type of grid-based system is reserved for strategy RPGs, emphasis on the “strategy.” Just by the nature of each “player” taking their entire turn at a time, there’s not as much back-and-forth between you and the enemies, but instead you’re switching roles frequently between being the active player and the passive observer.
The second most common way to use a grid in RPGs is the Final Fantasy Tactics style:
Yikes, have those graphics ever aged ungracefully. :P
Anyway, in this setup, characters on both your side and the enemy side act one at a time according to their Speed stats. So it could be that one of your characters moves first, then an enemy, then two of yours in a row, then four enemies in a row, then three of yours, etc.
To a certain degree this makes more sense from an in-universe standpoint than the Fire Emblem style, but it still makes a lot less sense than the traditional Final Fantasy style (like, say, FF through FFX). This is because of the component of movement. Why does the character with 7 Speed get to move 5 entire spaces before the character with 6 Speed gets to move 5 entire spaces? It would be incredibly tedious if they traded off moving only one space at a time until finally the character with 7 Speed gets one extra space at the end, so we know why the developers didn’t design it that way, but that doesn’t explain how it works in the game universe.
In games like the traditional Final Fantasy series or Chrono Trigger, characters act according to their Speed stats, but with no movement in the game to muddy the waters. Of course the character with 7 Speed gets to cast one magic spell before the character with 6 Speed, but that’s all it is… one action. Makes sense. It’s the old spaghetti Western trope of whoever draws the fastest. (Things do get complicated when characters get to take multiple actions per turn later in a game, but more on that perhaps another day. :P)
An upside to the FFT style of system is that there’s more of a give and take. Your plans are always being interrupted or thwarted by enemies getting in your way, which can feel a little more authentic, and you aren’t simply setting up your goals and then moving toward them with no obstacles.
…but a downside is that it can also be a bit overbearing. In a Fire Emblem or Tactics Ogre style of game, at least when it’s your turn it’s really your turn because you get to move all of your characters with full control. In FFT, when it’s your turn, it’s only that individual character’s turn. Even though the battle technically comes across as more realistic and dynamic, in a way it can feel slower to only be offered one character’s action menu at a time.
Both of these previous styles were strategy RPGs and Dreamblazers isn’t a strategy RPG, so let’s look at one more game… This one doesn’t use an explicit grid, but it’s still one of the closest examples I can find to what I have in mind.
These are two screenshots of Lunar: Eternal Blue (albeit from different versions of the game), a traditional turn-based RPG. In this style of battle system, you choose actions for all of your characters and the AI chooses actions for all of its characters, then that turn (that round of combat) plays out according to each character’s Speed. If any character on either side dies, gets put to sleep, etc. before they get to take their action, then they lose their opportunity until next turn, so you try to plan in advance, but not too far in advance.
These are the very fundamentals of a turn-based RPG and Lunar basically doesn’t deviate from them except that depending on which enemies you want your character to attack, they’ll move automatically across the battlefield toward whatever they’re attacking and can’t hit it until they’re close enough.
In theory this sounds pretty cool to make close-range fighters and long-range magic users feel more distinct, but in practice it didn’t mean all that much (at least for the melee side of things) because generally both the heroes and enemy monsters would always be rushing toward each other on the relatively small battlefield anyway. You were always close enough to attack, so the only question left was more about keeping Lemina’s delightful self out of harm’s way.
(Or at least that’s what I remember. It’s been over fifteen years since I’ve played the game. :P)
Now that I’ve constructively criticized everything, what am I going to do differently?
Here’s the idea… Let’s take a look at a battlefield:
Right now all you’re seeing is the beautiful sprite work from Becca, Alex, and Liz, so let’s instead break it down more mechanically into a grid…
Becca’s tiles were specifically built to be 16×16, so that’s the grid I used here, but I’ll figure out how to handle the differently-sized sprites when that time comes. In any case, now you can start to get a feel for how much space there is for our protagonists and these kobolds to move around. But now my idea comes in! Imagine this field is divided into two sides…
…where you can only move your characters within the blue area and the AI can only move enemies within the red area. Because characters can move extremely fast in the Dreamblazers universe, I don’t want it to ever be the case that anything is ever “too far away” to be battled even with close-range combat techniques.
Recca: "You can circle the planet, what, 17 times per second? 22? A lot. So we can find her in an hour max!" pic.twitter.com/aVlS9qSwmZ
So either side can attack anywhere from anywhere. But my thought is that rather than targeting an enemy specifically, you’re targeting that enemy’s current space and a certain range around it depending on your form of attack, e.g. a burst of icy wind covers a wider area than an icicle crashing down from the sky. You can loosely think of this like the board game Battleship, but instead of taking a shot at a single spot, you might take a shot at a 3×3 square or a diamond with a diameter of 5. Here’s a visual illustration:
Let’s say you’ve targeted the green, yellow, and pink areas. The Kobold Chief in green hasn’t moved yet and has no chance to avoid the attack because it isn’t able to move its entire body out of all of those spaces. The Kobold Rogue in pink was originally at the center of that rectangle and moved to the left, but because it’s still inside the rectangle, it also gets hit. The Kobold Rogue at the upper right part of the yellow plus used to be in the center of it and already moved up and to the right, but that’s still within range, so it gets hit… and the Kobold Warrior at the bottom of the plus also gets hit!
Please keep in mind that I don’t actually know yet what will be in ORK’s grid feature (assuming we get enough contributors anyway), but this is the gist of the idea I’ve been tossing around in my head. :D
The first benefit is making it feel like it’s possible for characters to narrowly avoid taking a hit. Of course, it’s still possible to use your pure Evasion stat to dodge a hit, but this would add a second method of artful dodging.
The second benefit is making battles feel more awesome—because my intent is that it should be much less likely that your targeted enemy will dodge your attack than that an enemy you didn’t target will also step into range!
Exceptions, of course, include big duel scenarios with top-level warriors involved. Kobolds themselves might be able to transcend light speed in bursts, but they’re not the fastest things around. If you ever just so happen to play as Leaf training to grow stronger with her best friend Celty, who is the fastest character in the game and has the ability to teleport on top of it, then you could certainly expect her to step out of range of your attacks more often than a very large majority of enemies.
But that would be an unusual scenario to play since Celty has never once defeated Leaf in training. Maybe the opposite will happen. Who knows? ;)
Anyway, that’s the gist of the idea. All of this is within the context of a turn-based system, so you can use the first turn to gauge the Speed of each enemy, then plan out your next moves accordingly! (Except when enemies get faster or make you slower, of course…!) Sounds exciting to me and I’m definitely hoping the funding for this goes through so I can see what sorts of magic I can work. :D
As much as I’ve been in love with my complex enemy AI setups, there’s always been a lingering question in my mind about how much the player will notice. Sure, I know as the developer that a Sylph Mage is capable of doing A, B, C, X, Y, Z, L, M, N, and more, but AI design is to a certain extent supposed to feel “invisible.” Faulty AI is easily noticed and criticized, and justifiably so, but well-developed AI is supposed to feel intuitive and logical. With that in mind, I’ve wondered whether Dreamblazers battles would feel unique enough.
Grid battles will definitely make them feel unique enough, though! From everything I can recall, I’ve never, ever played an RPG that uses a grid and does some of the things that I intend to do. And what do I intend to do? Well… you know, there’s a certain US holiday coming up that might give me some time to write about that, so I’ll save it for then. ;) It’s way more than worthy of its own post. :P
New Pixel Art
Some Elven Archers ready to rock at 100% and 300% size! According to hair colors, they come in genki girl orange, fantasy purple, and traditional brown! :D
I had said earlier that most sprite variations will have identical stats, but after thinking it over since then, there’s no reason for me to hold back considering that the way Unity works makes it just about as easy to give each sprite variation stat changes as to not do so. And so, as you can see, from left to right they’re faster to slower—but each one has her own advantages over the others too!
Even though the stat changes might only be a swing of 5-15%, these girls get fashion bonuses for extra multipliers to make them more significant! Bonuses like…
Field-Ready Shorts: for combining shorts with an athletic nature
Fighting Spirit: for combining warrior attire with respectively an energetic, brave, or independent nature
Love of Gloves: for combining gloves with respectively a playful, brave, and independent nature
Love of Shoes: for combining shoes with respectively a playful, brave, and independent nature
Romantic Rogue: for combining warrior attire with a jaunty nature (Purple only!)
Sandal Fan: for combining sandals with a playful nature (Orange only!)
Sword Dancer: for combining warrior attire with a graceful nature (Brown only!)
Yeeeeeah… have I mentioned the fashion system is kinda comprehensive? :P On some days I actually ask myself if all the required calculations for it will prove to be too much for hardware weaker than mine.
Anyway, up to this point we haven’t seen any enemy sprites from the common species: elves, norians, the falician, sylphs, and so on. While you can be sure these Elven Archers will put up quite a fight since they’re gifted with full intelligence, control of magic, tool use, and more, it’s worth asking why they’re enemies at all.
In this time of global peace on Peremene, it would be very unusual to encounter a wandering fighter, especially one who has any serious battle training and isn’t an Imperial soldier—so why are there three whole variations of nameless Elven Archers?
RIP to my grandfather, who passed away today on November 17, 2015. He had been in and out of the hospital for the past two weeks, so I was prepared for this five, six, seven—probably even as many as ten days ago. He was 86, which is obviously a very full life, so it wasn’t a surprise that his time had come. 1929 to 2015: all things considered, a pretty long stay on this planet.
Normally I wouldn’t mention this sort of thing here, but he was one of the first seven people who knew that I was making Dreamblazers. It’s not that I was the closest with him, but he knew me well enough to guess.
What do I mean by that? When I first quit my job, several family members naturally found out, but I didn’t mention exactly what I was doing; I just said I was working on a certain project and that I’d tell them more when it was a little closer to completion.
I’m a pretty private person and didn’t want to be bothered with questions and discussions from relatives who, however well-meaning they might be, don’t know anything about games and don’t know all that much about computers. To this day, some family members still don’t know what I’m doing. But my grandfather guessed correctly one day and said he wouldn’t tell anybody if I let him know if he was right, so I did let him know.
Today—and for the better part of the last two weeks—I’m glad I did.
So this one is for you.
Like I’ve been saying, I’ve been in somewhat of a funk recently because of financial concerns and uncertainty about my trip in December—I always half-dread these trips because ~18-20 hours of travel (factoring in preparation and time spent sitting around in airports) and three hours of jet lag has never failed to throw me off schedule for weeks afterward.
An actual loss puts everything into perspective, though. In a strange way, this has been like my grandfather’s parting gift to me. I was distracted while he was in and out of the hospital, but at this time, far from being distracted, I feel more focused now than I have in weeks, possibly even months.
I can be somewhat of a distant and logical person much like my grandmother, who wasn’t shaken up even slightly from what I can tell on the phone, but even I could use the reminder that we’re here for a short while and better make it count.
I’m actually going to leave it at that for today, but as I get back on track, expect a bonus post later this week.
Up to this point, I’ve generally shown off an enemy sprite, then used it as a launching pad to explain that enemy’s unique traits and how it teaches and guides players as they go. To recap some highlights:
Slimaries teach that you can’t always rely on physical attacks
Elemental slimes teach elemental weaknesses and resistances
Greatwolves teach that monsters might be stronger than they look
Harpilures teach about status effects that throw your plans into chaos
Vivavines teach that sprites with variations sometimes have different AI patterns or stats
Ogres teach that monsters might be exactly as strong as they look
Griffinaires teach about two-turn setups for extra powerful attacks
Archweavers teach that monsters might be weaker than they look
As for today… Today I get to talk about something that I only briefly hinted at before with the Centaur Warrior’s week.
These are, from left to right, a Kobold Chief, Kobold Rogue, and Kobold Warrior… And you had better not expect to ever run into one of them by itself! These dogs thrive in packs—no, more like in tribes. For decades, kobolds have been one of the species considered most on the verge of sapience without being there. The Empire developed a keen interest in their future development, but nonetheless saw fit to leave them alone and restrict the common species’ access to their dwellings. So why are you, the player, encountering them? Well, obviously either they’re coming out into your world or you’re going into theirs. Time will tell which!
Regardless, things have changed since last the Empire looked into this species. For one thing, they wear clothes now. For another, they’ve developed character classes learned division of labor and how to maximize their unique talents and abilities. For a third, they now know how to (briefly) exceed the speed of light.
Thankfully even kobolds can exceed light speed in the kind of RPG universe I'm making, so it shouldn't be a worry. =)
Because, ya know, if you’re making an RPG then you better go big. Now let’s talk about the meat: how do they fight? I won’t go into too many spoilers here because I love the way these battles have played out too much in testing to disrespect them by explaining everything, but I’ll give a couple snippets…
The most important thing is that, while there are only three types of kobolds, you’ll usually run up against a half-dozen of these creatures or more. Suppose you run into two Chiefs, two Rogues, and two Warriors and you don’t know anything about what they do in battle other than their names. Which kobold do you go after first? Most people would probably say one of two things:
Obviously you go after the Chief. Once the leader has backed off, the rest will be easier to battle.
Obviously you pick off the Rogues. Rogues are swift but not durable, so you can chase them away to reduce the kobolds’ number advantage.
(Note my careful wording; there’s no killing enemies in Dreamblazers.)
That’s just your general common RPG knowledge! Even putting that aside, you might notice from the different animation speeds that the Rogue is the fastest, the Chief is almost as fast, and the Warrior is the slowest. So it makes tons of sense to leave the Warrior for last, right?
Well… no. Why would I make it that easy? ;P I have a chart just to make sure that the enemy designs are interesting enough to battle against:
After all, turn-based battles (and arguably even real-time battles) get old fast if they’re only about slugging it out with damage numbers on both sides. Kobolds fight with style and intelligence and the bottom line is that there’s no right or wrong choice of which one to go after first: they’re all high priority targets, so take them as you see fit.
Let’s end on a brain teaser. I’ll give away one ability for one type of kobold: the Chief can call 1-2 extra Rogues or Warriors into battle and they’ll show up that very same turn. Given that fact, how could I ever say that it’s not necessarily right to battle the Chief first?
