Work Done

This month I've managed to get in a little bit more than 11 hours of work. Most of this spent on implementing the combat board to simply have something to work with when we're working on the core combat mechanics.

The Board

So I've refined a design on how I want combat to be but today we'll focus on my idea concerning the board. Not all things explained here have yet been implemented, only the fundamental stuff for the board has been implemented. I'm inspired by how simple Darkest Dungeon is when it comes to this, but I want to add my own little flair to it.

The board is made up of two sides, left and right. The party members will be on the left side with their foes to the right. Each side has a set amount of slots which can have one character in them.

I do want things to be simpler when it comes to dealing with combat and not needing a whole grid system, one it makes it easier to generate a combat as we don't need to design or procedurally generate a good looking board to fight on. But also since we have several slots on a side for a player to consider, still less than a whole grid, we can do some more interesting stuff like make positioning matter. For instance I want front line characters to be able to defend characters behind them.

I'd also like slots to be able to have elemental effects applied to them to let the player consider some interesting combinations of different elemental effects. Like if you've managed to make some slots wet and apply an electricity effect on them, all the connected wet slots should also light up.

The January Crunch

So January is coming and I have some time off. So I'll be using that month as my own personal game jam to make as many prototype systems to play around with to see what's fun and what sticks. The systems I am aiming to play around with are

• Combat
• Exploration
• Dungeons

Combat

Core to get fun, hence why I've already got some headway on it. The goal is to have something that is engaging and let's the player make meaningful tactical choices. This mainly done through the positioning and usage of abilities.

Exploration

Inspired by an old flash game I played on Newgrounds called Caravan. It can be summed up as an overworld map where the player travels and discovers points of interest that the player then can further explore. Doing this movement across the land costs resources which you gain from exploring points of interests. This gives us a loop of discovery gives opportunity which further more discovery.

Dungeons

When the player decides to enter a point of interest and explore it, they will encounter a dungeon. For the prototype these will be mainly interacted through a combination of choices done in narrative events and combat. Depending on how these encounters pan out, the player will be awarded with resources to feed back into the exploration.