How Do You Organize Your Spells/Skills?

[Frostorm]

Just wanted to see how people go about this, both on the database/dev side and the player experience side. I personally have skills divided into 5 "tiers", but not in the sense that they're powered-up versions of earlier skills (due to utility scaling). More like each tier unlocks 3 new skills (1 passive, 1 active, & 1 utility), and the next tier will unlock another 3 different skills, up to tier 5. So each school/discipline/tree has 15 skills to choose from. They can pick as many or as few abilities as they want, spending any leftover points into stat allocation. Curious to see how you all handle skill organization.

 

[Tiamat-86]

i have a system going with current project where you get skills through unlock/learn with JP
but then have equip skills and skill tiers. so its a build your own class style.
tiers are broken up into Offence/Support/Passive/Limit and Guard Replace(only 1 for obvious reasons)
meanwhile the characters have different amounts they can set for each tier, and some get less equip skills because they have special skill type besides the equip skills (like Blue Mage)

 

[Frostorm]

Nice, I love build your own type RPGs. I also use skill equip slots, in which the player only gets 1 slot to begin with, but gains +1 slot for every/any tier they learn. So by max lv (50), they'd have 16 slots. I wonder if this is too many slots... How many slots do you offer your players?

 

[AelphysTerra]

I tend to put "magic" skills first, then non-magical skills next, then arrange them like FF games do (e.g. elemental spells by element in order of increasing strength, healing magic being listed before attack magic which is in turn listed before status magic).

Then I arrange skills based on who gets to use them (so example character 1 gets to use skill IDs x to x + n).

 

[Ami]

back then,i made 4 types of skill

1. Healing Magic (Heal)
2. Destruction Magic (Destruct)
3. Magic Sword (ala FF5 Spellblade)
4. Mystic Skill (Like monster skill ala FF Series,like White Wind,Auto Revive,Aqua Breath,Libra,more)

now,i only made Perform Skill (Weapon Skill and Magic are united and can Equip it as you want,learn it with Books) and Special Skill (Same like Mystic skill that i made. It cost cooldown,learn it from NPC)

 

[gabrieldiastche]

I will always do first by character, I will to all my party have something different from each of them.
And I see who I want to do what because I don't like that kind of party like: Ah this guy is a warrior so he is gonna only use "Attacks" and no magic... I kind of like to give them exclusive things or skills that can help.

And mostly the games I do right now have a lot of strategy in the battles, so every skill I design has a reason in the game, it's not just damage or healing or reviving, but something more than that.

 

[Frostorm]

And mostly the games I do right now have a lot of strategy in the battles, so every skill I design has a reason in the game, it's not just damage or healing or reviving, but something more than that.

This should be a goal more devs strive for imo.

 

[gabrieldiastche]

@Frostorm thanks man

 

[Frostorm]

@Frostorm thanks man

Yea this aspect is something I've been struggling w/ since I have ~210 skills/spells available to the player. Ofc, they only learn a small portion of this depending on where they spend their points. But its really hard coming up w/ 200+ unique skills/spells lol.

 

[TheoAllen]

I don't. I made it completely random, even in the database list.
However, I have an OCD that every character must have the same number of skills.

 

[Milennin]

I've always kind of gone the Utility -> Damage -> Utility -> Damage order of skill unlocks for playable characters. The first skill is always at 0 MP cost, so there's always a choice to make during combat, even when a character sits at 0 MP. For my current project, I've ordered them the same for each character like:
-Free support skill
-Low damage disruption skill
-Self heal
-Swap skill (first Skill grants a battle-permanent effect, until the swapped in skill is used, which is strong, but cancels the first effect, and swaps back to it after)
-Powerful multi-target skill
-Once per battle utility skill
-Once per battle damage skill
The first 6 skills also have 3 other variants, that all add different secondary effects, which are determined upon at the start of the game in a randomising event to add potential replay value.
Below the active skills will follow that character's passive skills.

So my skills are ordered by character , then followed by monster skills.