Now that the majority of the combat system has been fleshed out for Singularity: Tactics Arena, I’ve moved onto sequencing the story and polishing up enemies. As many of you already know by now, I have a serious problem with scope creep, and that definitely seems to be the case for the story behind this game. However, it shouldn’t seriously push back the release date, which I currently project will be around the end of March, 2019.
So far I have finished programming about 20% of the story, starting with the player’s introduction to the main character (Eloise Fleming) and the rest of their party. The gameplay loop is simple, almost basic: there is downtime for the player to interact with the game world and NPCs, engage in a battle, then go back to downtime. During downtime, the player can speak with their party members, purchase or sell items at the nearby shop, equip and unequip gear, and use stat-boosting or healing items to prepare for their next fight.
Sleeping does restore health, but not totally – and sleep is limited to only once per day. Due to the narrative, players are forced to engage in fight every day, so rationing health items and other resources are the key to victory. I also want to prevent players from reaching a state where they are so battered that victory becomes improbable or impossible, so battles will be designed to be winnable despite overwhelming odds – if the player is skilled enough (or figured out how to completely break my system).
Moving onto enemies, this is a rather fun part of game design but also difficult due to balancing. I want to create enemies that not only a different from each other due to stats, but also differ in the tactics they use to attack the player party. Different enemies have entirely different skills, elemental resistances and vulnerabilities, and perhaps most importantly, changes in AI. AI is relatively difficult to adjust, but I’m slowly moving beyond the standard “melee” and “‘ranged” archetypes. Some enemies will attempt to disrupt the player party’s formation, isolate them, inflict a wide variety of status effects, aid their allies, or inflict environmental damage. One thing I’m conflicted about is whether or not to have charm/mind-control skills in the game. Personally, I really, really don’t like this mechanic as it takes away control from players (and is rather annoying due to how powerful it is). However, I do appreciate that it creates an interesting dilemma for players who don’t want to kill one of their own party members. Part of bias comes from D&D, where just about every high-level enemy has a charm ability of some kind… but that’s neither here nor there.
Currently, I’m working on stating out and creating animations/sprites for “Tier 1” enemies, essentially the weakest enemies the player will face in the game.
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