Battle System: Where do you start?

[Rayhaku808]

When you're starting to develop your battle system, where do you generally start? Or how do you get your ideas?

• Do you make your classes and database numbers and all that other jazz before you decide on how your system should work?
• Maybe you see another game and go, "I want it to be just, like, that."
• How about getting a feel about how the flow of battle should work and figure... something out from there.
• Look at all the available plugins and scramble something together that looks cool!
• Finish the story and adapt the battle system to match the narrative. e.g. huge war action game so ABS, steadily paced plot with romance, drama and plot twists so turn-based.

I personally have a general feel of how I want my combat to flow. It's heavily inspired by my experiences in playing as a Healer class for World of Warcraft and sometimes Tanking. My go to class was the Druid class. It could switch between the roles of Damage, Healing, and Tanking. By transforming into different beasts, its stats and skills changed on the fly. I realized I enjoyed dueling other players in one of the expansions in particular, constantly switching between tank and healing form to maintain my own resources while whittling down the other player. But I mostly enjoyed healing when partaking in dungeons because I felt it was the most dynamic of the roles. You need to adapt to other people's stupidity or just random unfortunate situations and react quickly. There are so many things for you to do as just one character, but in most turn based RPG's you control a party of multiple characters. What I want for my RPG is for the player to control just one character; but as that one character, there is a lot of responsibility for you so that controlling only one party member is enough to get that sense of fulfillment from doing your job. Whether it be to deal damage, tank, or heal, you will have to act and react constantly to what your party members are doing and what the enemies are doing. But I don't want to get into any more right now because it's not that interesting. I'm sure you get the idea though.

Anyway I'm curious to see where you all start with your battle systems or even where they come from, I think that counts. I hope this is the right forum for this topic.

Edit: Not really inspired by, but related to the more recent
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/inde...o-develop-the-battle-system-until-last.78376/

 

[Milennin]

There are a few core ideas I always put into my combat system, and then work from there.

The first concept is around choice, meaning there shouldn't always be one way to play a perfect turn.
The second concept is resource management, mainly MP. Managing MP through skill usage every encounter is always a core feature in my combat system.
The third concept is transparency. I always try to give as much information to the player as I can, so challenging encounters don't feel unfair.

A few other staples I like in my combat systems:
-Skills rarely do only 1 thing. Most skills have secondary effects, triggers or conditions added.
-At least 1 free to use skill, generally a utility/support skill that is at least on par with auto-attack.
-At least 1-2 skills that regenerate a character's MP.
-Low number of total skills (4-8) per character.
-Flip skills, meaning a skill changes to something different when it's used, and then reverts back if the other version is used.
-Auto-attack does little damage, meaning most of the battles are fought using skills. Auto-attack is only for finishing off enemies at low HP or after buffing it up somehow.
-Limited use of items, or no items at all.

 

[CleanWater]

I usually play some games similar to what I'm developing, analyze everything I liked and whatnot, then I figure out my own systems based on this research data.

 

[Pine Towers]

First, in your game design, is combat viewed as a sport or as war?

This article is quite good to express each option and, with the necessary adaptations, can be applied to RPG Maker. I'll quote this:

Combat as Sport: the PCs approach the bees and engage them in combat using the terrain to their advantage, using their abilities intelligently and having good teamwork. The fighter chooses the right position to be able to cleave into the bees while staying outside the radius of the wizard’s area effect spell, the cleric keeps the wizard from going down to bee venom and the rogue sneaks up and kills the bee queen. These good tactics lead to the PCs prevailing against the bees and getting the honey. The DM congratulates them on a well-fought fight.

Combat as War: the PCs approach the bees but there’s BEES EVERYWHERE! GIANT BEES! With nasty poison saves! The PCs run for their lives since they don’t stand a chance against the bees in a fair fight. But the bees are too fast! So the party Wizard uses magic to set part of the forest on fire in order to provide enough smoke (bees hate smoke, right?) to cover their escape. Then the PCs regroup and swear bloody vengeance against the damn bees. They think about just burning everything as usual, but decide that that might destroy the value of the honey. So they make a plan: the bulk of the party will hide out in trees at the edge of the bee’s territory and set up piles of oil soaked brush to light if the bees some after them and some buckets of mud. Meanwhile, the party monk will put on a couple layers of clothing, go to the owl bear den and throw rocks at it until it chases him. He’ll then run, owl bear chasing him, back to where the party is waiting where they’ll dump fresh mud on him (thick mud on thick clothes keeps bees off, right?) and the cleric will cast an anti-poison spell on him. As soon as the owl bear engages the bees (bears love honey right?) the monk will run like hell out of the area. Hopefully the owl bear and the bees will kill each other or the owl bear will flee and lead the bees away from their nest, leaving the PCs able to easily mop up any remaining bees, take the honey and get the hell out of there. They declare that nothing could possibly go wrong as the DM grins ghoulishly.

 

[gstv87]

When you're starting to develop your battle system, where do you generally start?

with the most prominent feature of the planned gameplay, and work your way down.
that's where you start.

"I want to have morphing battlers!"
.....great...... can you pull that off?
if you can't, there's no game.

 

[bgillisp]

How I did mine was I proceeded in the following order:

-Start by deciding what your classes are going to be for your game (this will, obviously, require some idea of what the plot is in most cases). At this stage you may have a few placeholder classes, for classes you want to implement and aren't sure you will.
-Once the classes are decided, set up the stat curves. During this stage, you will need to decide what stats each classes are good in and bad in as well.
-Set up the skills you want each class to have. Many skills will be placeholders at this stage. I had many that had the description ***Placeholder skill. Do not use*** for the longest time.
-Set up your items/weapons/armor. They might be placeholders again, but this is so you know what the weakest and most powerful weapons will be in your game. The rest won't matter at this point.
-Figure out your damage formula for attack now. Use the fact that you know what your lowest ATK stat will be and your highest ATK stat will be now (and same with DEF). You may need to go back and tweak character HP at this stage.
-Create a few monsters and some of the game, using the fact that now you know what the stats your average player will have at the start of the game. Test.
-Return to your damage formula, weapons, armor, items and stats, tweak. Implement some of the low level skills now, as well as some of the weapons, armor and items.
-Create more of the game, test.
-Tweak damage formula and stats again. Implement more of the skills.
-Keep at this until you get it balanced out. I had to do this cycle about 5 times in my game before I got all my skills and damage formulas balanced to the point that they felt good.

I found excel really helpful with all the enemy creation, as I put in it my average stats for a party of x level (and their equipment), then I could just look and say "Hey, the party will be at level 32 here, and have a weapon that gives +75 to ATK, what stats should the monster have to still be a challenge?"

 

[Wavelength]

Sometimes I have an idea for a specific combat mechanic that I want to form the basis of the battle system, so I start by designing and implementing that mechanic and then I build everything else (including the characters) around that systems.

Sometimes I have ideas for characters' and enemies' talents and I'm really excited to come up with skills that I can create which sell the dream of those characters' abilities, so I make those first and then I build mechanics and gameplay around those skills.

There's no wrong answer to how to start. All of the things you mentioned in your opening post can reasonably conclude with creating a good combat system. As a hobbyist, whatever excites you is a good area to start with. In my experience, I have to do the least "re-working" when I start with core mechanics, move onto minor mechanics, then create characters and enemies, then skills, and finally worry about troop eventing and stats/equipment/etc. - so this might be a good flow when working professionally.

 

[GoodSelf]

It all really depends on the game your building. I'll go ahead and tell you a couple different ideas I have comma as well as the battle systems of utilizing for each.

For the archaeologist, a puzzle game, I wanted battles, but I didn't want to use the standard system. Instead, I evented a simple turn-based system and battles only happen a couple times in the game.

For Fauna, a monster catching game, I want with the front view standard system. Creating SV enemies for every character is daunting, and even basic Sprites for all of them would be a large and expensive task too - so I opted to go with face sets instead and stick with front view.

For the main game I want to make comma I'm going to Commission animated Battlers and do an in-depth side view system.

There is no right or wrong way to choose a battle system - just do your best to choose one that fits with your game and your scope.

 

[Arithmetician]

I started by deciding on a core gameplay mechanic that I wanted ( a job system), and then looked at the numbers of the Final Fantasy series and used those to produce damage formulae and stat curves that produced similar results.