Thinking over the combat system for Gold Fire, which seemed like such a good idea at the time, has now got me worried. The turn-based timed attacks worked great for X-Com, which is what I had loosely based my system on, but in X-Com, you used guns, which dealt a lot of damage, sometimes killing with a single shot. In a medival based fantasy RPG, however, this is not the case. With armor deflecting some shots, and monsters and players dodging or blocking or parrying others, it will take a rather significant amount of time to slay one monster, let alone several. This could be overly tedious. This does explain why action RPGs are so popular though. The hack-and-slash method works because the results come quickly. One does not have to fight for 2 to 3 minutes per monster. The fights are over in a few seconds. This shall be my new goal: Quicker fights.
I still want the player to have some say in how the fight goes down, however. I thought over an AI type of system, where the player picks a fighting style or offensive and defensive level, then lets his character go at it. As of yet, I havent figured out how to make this strategic ENOUGH, but I havent erased the chalkboard on that either. Another method Im seriously considering is something like a mix of Legend of Zelda and a fighting game, where the player has 2 buttons to block soft or hard, and 2 other buttons to attack soft or hard. Either of these could be fun, but the fact of the matter is, I have to actually code these systems to find out which is better suited for what I want to accomplish. After some more thoughts on what I could integrate into these systems to make them fun and interactive in my game, I will try some code out and see how she do.
AND NOW, thinking over the battle systems has also got me thinking over the weapons stats system, which in turn has me thinking over the weapons crafting system. I want there to be an unlimited amount of weapons that can be crafted, but in order to make this a useful option, there has to be a good reason to have so many weapons of the same type crafted. I have one of two ways to go about it. I can make it so that every weapon looks different, so that people will want to craft different weapons to make their avatars completely customizable. This will be hard as it will require an insane amount of spriting or an equally insane amount of coding to pull off. The other option is to make it so that every weapon crafted has different stats. This is my favorite idea so far, but the problem with it is that weapons dont have THAT many stats to make adjustable. Not to mention making the stat differences worthwhile or noticable. But that seems like the road I down. BUT... if I do, then that may mean I have to think over the gathering system. But I havent given that much though yet, so it will be easy to change if need be.
OK WOOO! Im done typing. Keyboards about to break. :o
