I'm working hard on finishing combat! I don't really want to show it off until it's completely finished, but since I'm in the process of implementing a finished concept, I thought I might take some time to describe how combat will actually work in the game. At least for now!
Certain rooms in the dungeon contain Encounter Slimes, which are inspired by the Ghosts from Pac-Man and chase the player relentlessly through the room. In contrast to random encounters that halt your player character in place and break the action at unannounced moments, I think representing encounters with entities that can interact with and pressure the player adds a lot of decision-making and risk-reward elements to an otherwise simple mechanic.
These encounters give no experience and no reward to the player. This is to make sure there's no incentive to grind encounters whatsoever. It's a big decision, and there are a lot of reasons not to agree with it. Experience, gold, and other goodies for winning a battle feel good. However, I want the emphasis of encounters to be survival and not reward. Every encounter has the potential to damage and even down members of your party, decreasing your chances of making it further in the game. Fight at your own risk!
Now, this poses an obvious problem. What's to stop a player from avoiding every encounter? If there's no experience or reward, why risk my party members in combat? Well, you can do that if you want to! If you really think the best thing is to avoid as many encounters as you can and try to be as cautious as possible, I want that to be a viable strategy. Especially if your party is particularly weak or damaged. HOWEVER, I also want to reward people who decide to face danger head-on. So, in every room where encounters spawn, there will be ONE locked room. The only way to UNLOCK that room is to find the key, which is dropped by one of the encounters in the room. Any time you walk into an encounter room, you'll have to think to yourself: "Can I risk it? How badly do I want in that room?" Nobody likes skipping things they could otherwise explore, so I think it's a good enough carrot to entice people to fight.
There are also special encounters involving plot-related characters, these may drop special equipment and unlock new playable characters.
Now, for how combat actually works.
The player team consists of you and two minions. The core premise of the game is through politics and power forcing your way through an evil dungeon and attempting to overthrow the resident dungeon lord. You'll have to recruit minions along the way, and you can recruit ANY minion you run into, though some are more straightforward than others. The enemy team can be anything from one to six enemies.
Participants take turns in order based on a speed stat. I tried to keep the process of a turn as simple as possible in order to keep gameplay intuitive. On a friendly turn, you can FIGHT, use an ITEM, or TALK.
FIGHT lets you choose from one of six moves, which you can set outside of battle. The current plan is to be able to swap these out freely if you have more than six, but not within combat. Each move can have one of a number of expected target patterns, such as a single target attack, a row attack, a full-party attack, and friendly targetting.
Damage is calculated with a simple formula that subtracts or adds a offense/defense contest modifier from a base damage value. Certain moves are affected more or less by weaknesses and stat modifiers than others. An attacker's STR or POW stat is contested with the defender's appropriate damage resistance (crush, fire, evil, etc.) and multiplied by a scalar representing how much of a factor resistance should be for that move. That number is combined with the move's base damage number to create a true damage amount. Other modifiers come into play with special attacks, but those are more designed case-by-case. Whether or not a condition is applied to the defender is handled the same way.
Items can be used within combat one at a time, and take up an entire turn. Unlike moves, which are limited to six in combat, all items are available for use. However, once you use an item it's gone forever, and they're not that easy to come by! Deciding when to use an item and being as efficient as possible is an emphasis of the game. Items can have various effects including health and mana recovery, one-battle stat buffs, consumable moves, and conversation effects.
Conversing with the enemy is the one non-standard mechanic that will be included in combat, and will be where I spend most of my time trying to get right. It's shamelessly inspired by Shin Megami Tensei, but I feel like it could have been taken further in the series. It's a cool mechanic but always felt a little shallow - more of a combination lock than a conversation. I need to play a few VNs and other text-based games to figure out how I want the dialogue trees to work! I really want every minion to have personality, IMP's created some great characters and I really want them to come alive when you talk to them!
Oh, and there's no running away in a dungeon. Sorry. Everything here knows its way around better than you do.
Anyway, transparent excuse to take a break from dev - over.
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