My RPG. Part 3

Hooo boy, it's been a while.

I currently have 8 stats that I plan to use in the game. Unfortunately I still haven't decided what some of them is going to govern. A couple of them are easy to place, but others are more difficult. So here's a list with some descriptions of what they do, or what they might do, or both.

- Strength. This was one of the easy ones, it will affect how much damage is dealt in melee, with a physical attack. I'm not sure how the inventory is going to work now, but if it involves the weight of items, then the amount you can carry will be affected too. I was initially thinking that strength would also affect the damage of ranged weapons like bows, but I soon decided against it.

- Endurance. This will affect the maximum amount of health the player has. I'm undecided as to how exactly it will affect it. I think I'll use endurance multiplied by a number as an interim maximum health, but I will look over this again later.

- Agility. This one was a bit tougher as I have three ideas for what it could be used for. As an addition to physical defence, as an increase for ranged physical damage, or as accuracy for physical weapons. I could just make it apply to all these things, but that would make increasing strength worthless. If I increase damage for ranged attacks with agility I'm making less incentive to get into close combat, so that is out for now. I'm not sure about making a stat affect accuracy either, even if it isn't agility. I can see it being a good idea and a bad idea, so I'll leave that out for now too. Which leaves physical defence, for now.

- Speed. This one is another easy one. It affects attack speed. I also had the idea that increasing speed would marginally decrease spell cooldowns. Pretty cool idea, huh?

- Soul. I decided that this will affect magical damage, no matter the range.

- Will. This stat will affect the maximum mana that a player has. Should be pretty much the same as endurance. Except with magic.

- Intelligence. My original idea for this stat was for ranged magical damage, but when I decided that agility wouldn't affect ranged physical damage, I scrapped it. But I still had the stat lying around. I'm leaving out accuracy in all forms for now, so magical accuracy is out as well. This leaves magical defence, which I guess will have to do for now.

- Psyche. This currently will affect the regeneration of health and mana. Not much else to tell.

So that's all the stats I have currently. The first 4 I'm pretty happy with, as far as names go, but I'm not completely sold on the last 4, so I might end up swapping them around, or even replacing the names of some of them. Feel free to leave some suggestions for magical stat names in the comments.

Next post should hopefully be about races, since I mentioned it last time, but then again, I might talk about levelling, or multiplayer. One of those, I hope.

-Shadowfred

My RPG. Part 2

Ok, so I said this post would be about the different roles in the RPG. So it will be.

Now when I say roles, I mean what job each character has in the group. These are the basic roles that I have.

- The Tank. Someone who should be taking the brunt of the enemies' attacks, and surviving. Be it through insane amounts of health, enough armour to mitigate the damage or just avoiding the enemies' attacks.

- The Nuker. This type of character should be outputting as much damage on the enemies as possible.

- The Healer. Should be healing the team, making sure that they don't die. Often has abilities that help the teams effectiveness, or buffs.

- The Controller. This role is used to take enemies out of the action by immobilising, stopping use of abilities, or decreasing their combat efficiency.

- The Summoner. They summon things to attack people. I'm pretty sure there won't be any kind of summons in my game, but I thought I might as well list it.

Okay, so there's the four roles that I plan to work with, plus one extra.

There's also where they tank/attack/heal/control from. Close range, or long range.

Combining these two things gives 8 total roles to use, some may not be as viable as others, but I'm still going to consider them when I start work on the classes. Perhaps, depending on the tech trees that the player picks, characters could fill different roles, or at least branch off from what they do as a core concept. Like a melee tank learning some healing spells to keep him alive in the middle of combat. I don't know yet.

So there we go, roles explored. Next post might be on races, or stats, or both. I don't really plan ahead.

-Shadowfred

My RPG. Part 1

Alright, here's a little update on what I've got going in my RPG.

- Movement is constricted to a square grid, once you start moving, you can't stop or change directions until you reach the next square.

- You can move up, down, left or right.

- You can't go through walls or enemies

- If you click when you aren't moving, you will attack in the direction you're clicking.

- You can call up the grid.

It also uses this awesome picture for the player, made by my good friend Mitchell Crouch.

Now, for stuff I've been thinking about.

The choice to go with a square grid is really a gut decision, I decided that it's what the game needs. I did know that I was going to be doing a top down game though, I'm nowhere near good enough to make it first person, especially for multiple people. I'm thinking about dropping the clicking to attack because I'm thinking about putting in some kind of bonus for attacking from behind, but I'll figure that out later when I actually have some more things in the game.

One dilemma I've had so far is with the implementation of classes. I really like games where you can modify your character's skills to create your own "class". But I want the game to be multiplayer, and I don't want one player with the most optimised super character overshadowing people who picked skills that don't word at the same time, like all weapon skills or something. So I've decided to uses classes of some description.

My first idea was to make classes have a bonus to certain skills, or perhaps restrictions so you can only put a set amount of ranks into a skill, it's not a bad idea, and I might test it to see how it goes, but for now I'm looking for something different. I just think that doing it that way would still be an invitation for Mr Optimal to do his thing.

My current idea is to have tech trees, or talent trees. Each tree has a few skills or abilities to put ranks into, like each rank adding 10 damage to fire spells. Once a set amount of ranks have been put into any ability in the tree, the next tier becomes available and so on. There would be a tech tree for each class that only they can put ranks into, as well as some communal tech trees that any class can put ranks into. Alternatively, there might just be a few tech trees for each class. This is all theoretical, so I'm not sure how it would go.

If you have any suggestions for me to do with classes or skills or that kind of thing, feel free to comment your ideas.

I'll try to get at least one more post up tonight, probably with regards to the different roles I want to have in the RPG.

-Shadowfred

Acheivements

My apologies for not posting in a while, I've been putting some work into the RPG and some into TF2. But here's a post. Just a note, these are my opinions and ideas regarding achievements. I haven't actually done any research into this stuff, so it won't apply to every single game, but hopefully it will apply to some.

Achievements

For those of you who don't know, achievements are basically awards for doing a specific thing in a game. It could be to get past an area, not hitting anything for one loop of a race or killing 10 enemies in 30 seconds.

I really like achievements in games, they appeal to the part of me that wants to finish everything. They also make me feel like I've accomplished something special.

Putting achievements in a game isn't hard, but you should think about what they're going to be used for before you start chucking them into your game. If they're just to give the player some more playtime with the game, you can put in as many as you want with as many requirements as you want. But you don't want the player to go crazy trying to get all 10,000 achievements.

An example of this is in Spore, there are achievements for making a creature with three heads, or completely dominating your planet's economy. These are good because they affect the way you play the game, allowing you to experience most of what the game has to offer. Then there are achievements for completing each stage in hard more, encouraging the player to test their skills as well as to build them up.

Next, if the achievements actually give you something you have to figure out what that something is. Is it something that doesn't affect the gameplay in any way? This time, you should make sure that the amount of achievements is enough for the rewards, no point in having 100 achievements when you only need to complete 10 to get all the unlocks. Also, my recommendation would be to give out points for completing each achievement, which can be spent on the unlocks, rather than having an order to each unlock, like "7 achievements".

Then you can get things that actually affect gameplay, these are the most difficult to implement properly as you have to make sure that their rewards are seen as a good thing in comparison to what the player already has, but also that the rewards don't overshadow what the player already has, not too much at least. This is even more apparent in multiplayer games, where not everyone will have the achievements and thus, the rewards.

I don't like achievements that only show the name of said achievement. Even more so when they give you something tangible when you complete them. Granted, I've only played a few games where this happens, but it's extremely annoying when you only have one achievement to go and it's called "Space Cowboy" or some such name that doesn't help me complete it at all.

Well, that's all on achievements for now.

-Shadowfred

More RPG stuff.

This is a follow up to the previous post.

A friend read the last post and thought I should know about the levelling system in Final Fantasy 2. I've never actually played it before, so I look around on the internet to find out some information.

http://forums.ffshrine.org/showthread.php?t=20674

"The Level System

In Final Fantasy 2, there is no experience point system. Instead there is a system where your stats would be affected by the way you battle. If you took damage, you would gain stamina. If you use a lot of magic, you'll gain a more power version of that magic and some MP. The list goes on and on. Each weapon, magic, and the stats on each character are leveled up via this system.

These rules apply for stats:

You can only gain one level for a stat per battle. You cannot get two level ups for a stat or weapon from one battle.

Running from a battle will cancel out any stat gains you may have gotten during the fight.

These mostly apply to the DoS version of the game, while it MAY apply to the original, a lot of things will not."

So, that's how it works. Now, onto other news.

The recent post about RPG's got my brain thinking about different game mechanics. So I've decided to start work on another game! I've also been reading through my book on python and have arrived at the chapter on network programming. So not only will the game be awesome, it will hopefully be multiplayer.

-Shadowfred