Development Diary Week 3 -- Design doc, beginnings of battle prototype

Fresh off my successful three-evening computer rebuild (could have been much faster, but it was my first time so I was super-paranoid), Last Ancient is moving forward again. I worked on the design document and started a prototype of the battle system. I met my goals for the week, although just barely.

Design Document

Got the actual design document started. Spent a lot of time listing planned character abilities. One problem I noticed is that it's easy for me to think of powerful spells and special attacks, but harder to think of simple ones suitable for the earlier game.

The ideas just keep coming when I'm thinking about spells and attacks for battles. This confirms my decision that "fun battles" is my top goal for the game.

I'm pretty sure that I have way too many ideas planned and will have to make some wrenching cuts as I go along. I think for now I'll go ahead and put everything I want in the design document and start making cuts later on after I'm in main development and have a better sense of how much is feasible.

Character Abilities

Selections from the Abilities section of the design document:

Beating enemies (and doing other stuff?) gets you Ability Points (AP), which you spend to raise your stats or learn new abilities. You can learn new special attacks, weapon techniques, magic spells, or support abilities. Or you can improve one of your existing abilities, like making your Fireball spell cheaper, faster, or stronger. The key idea here is to let the character specialize in certain abilities (meaning he'll clobber some enemies but maybe not have much to do against others) or be more diverse (or jack-of-all-trades, depending on your viewpoint) as the player chooses.

Note that spending AP is the only way that stats are permanently raised – there's no “level-up” process or anything else that automatically raises stats. Player has to balance raising stats (general character improvement) or learning abilities (more specific usefulness).

Special attacks should be usable frequently (several times in a battle); they are not occasional things that are hard to build up to (e.g. Limits/Overdrives in Final Fantasy). Ideally they should be used for a momentary boost to turn the situation in your favor. (Knock a tough guarding enemy out of the melee temporarily so you can take out the others, suppress enemy ranged fire so you can close in safely, strike down the troublesome armored enemy, that sort of thing.)

Special attacks:

• (weapon type) flurry: no wait time between (weapon type) attacks for a certain time

• (spell type) flurry: no wait time between (spell type) spells for a certain time
  

• shield blocks more/unlimited attacks for a certain time

• Lunging sword attack

• Several rapid sword slashes

• Double spell: Next spell cast fires twice rapidly (no MP cost for second one?)

• No MP cost for a certain time

• Hard hit: attack with greatly increased knock-back

• Piercing strike (normal damage against Armored target)

• Critical: ignores several pts. of target's Defense

• Sure shot: arrow automatically strikes nearest enemy

• Spinning sword/axe

• Spear spin: spin defensively in front, deflect all weapons/projectiles for a certain time

• Great Guardian: automatically intercept all attacks against nearby allies with shield for a certain time

• Light Burst: sword shoots beams of light in all directions

• (other such “Super” attacks)

“Super” attacks such as Light Burst shall be expensive to learn such that a normal character will probably have only one or two.

Spells (many of these are tentative / for example):

• Fire Shot: fire attack flies straight across screen

• (similar simple ranged attacks for most/all elements)

• Lightning: lightning bolt strikes spot at certain distance in front of caster

• Fireball: fireball flies straight, detonates on striking enemy/obstacle

• (Element) Field: creates stationary magic field around player that has some of the following effects (TBD): weakens/dispels spells of the inferior element, provides permanent duration for enchantments of that element, allows casting of advanced spells of that element, has permanent duration as long as caster remains in field

• Barrier: magical wall, works kind of like a shield but wide, blocks physical/magical attacks but loses strength with each hit as well as time – may want several power levels and specialized varieties (strong barrier against fire magic, etc.) for this

• Dispel: (large-ish) spell flies straight, weakens/destroys all enemy attack spells or enchantments that it hits

Inherent:

• faster MP recovery

• less/no wait before MP recovery begins

• increase (weapon type: sword/spear/axe/etc.) damage

• reduce wait time after (weapon type) attack

• able to resume casting spell after moving

• able to move while casting spell

• less/no chance to lose concentration (spell canceled) when struck while casting

• Pierce Elemental Field: Your spells can go through a field of the superior element without getting dispelled

Battle Prototype

I spent some time learning basics of TGB and GIMP, building up to start prototyping the battle system. My immediate goal for this is to try out the key ideas and make sure they seem like they'll work, so that I don't sink a lot of time into a design element that wasn't such a hot idea.

So far, the demo has a player character who can move around and make a momentary sword attack. (Yeah, he's stuck facing right, and he can leave his sword in mid-air and move away, and....) There's an enemy who makes a beeline for the player. If the enemy hits a sword attack, he dies and restarts from another spot. If the enemy hits the player, the player vanishes.

So it's not much at all, but it's the first step. I was pleased by how quick and easy it was to put together in TGB. I still feel that I don't "get" TGB, how the objects, scripts, and levels relate to each other, or what the "right" way is to design everything. But I'm finding it pretty easy to learn so far.

OK, one screenshot.

WARNING WARNING BAD PLACEHOLDER ART AHEAD



Next Week

I've got less than a week to submit my design document. (I might be better off points-wise turning it in a bit late, but it's important to me to hit the deadline.) I may work on the battle demo too, but I'll have to manage my time very carefully. (Focus on just testing the ideas as quickly as possible, not tweaking things to be more polished. It's a prototype, self!) This will be a tough week.