Here''s the lowdown: You can move around in battle. You can have multiple AI party members. You can attack at any time, but waiting for your meter thingy to fill makes attacks more effective(think secret of mana). First you choose an attack(weapon magic etc.) then an approach(curve anound to the side frontal etc.) Then when yor character is approaching the enemy, you select a type of attack (jab, swing etc.) Attacking raises attack, magic raises intelligence, etc. No general "EXP" stat. I have this planned much more in detail in my head, but I''d like your feedback.

It sounds pretty good, but you will probably have to flesh it out a bit (e.g. you could add some kinds of special moves that you can unlock) as it sounds like it could get slightly repetitive.
If you want more detailed feedback you will have to explain your system more fully.

Do you choose an approach from a menu, or do you do it with a joystick?

Sounds decent, you say you have a more sophisticated idea? Let''s see it.

I think it would be nice as long as it''s not slow. The problem with games with many fighting moves are the controls and interface. You should use as few buttons as posible, pressing them as little times as posible. You have to group attacks in a logical way but too many group subdivisions force the player to do press too many times the buttons.

If plan it to be real time..
With menus and too many subdivisions the fight would get annoying, having to choose so many darn times the attack just to kill a lousy enemy. The longer you make the battles the more boring they will be, but of course if you have lots of battles they should last little time while having few battles make them able to last longer. Also if using menus doesn''t freezes the rest of the game then the player would spend too much time choosing rather than attacking.

With button combinations and too many subdivisions the player would have to remember long combinations, and when they are too many learned too fast the player will confuse and screw up the playing experience.

If you plan to fuse both together like secret of mana, it''s probably better, but make sure that the menu''s aren''t used much then, I really hated to stop every 5 frigging seconds to cast a magic, 2 of which were used in the magic animation and the other 3 while the magic was casted while I was trying to hit an enemy but 3 seconds would be too little to think and act.

Are certain attack patterns dependant on your position, in terms of being available or not? Since enemies will be moving too, the effectiveness will change as the battle goes on.

You can use the downtime (as you are waiting for the meter to increase) to choose a different pattern. Moving might also be a cause of slowing down the bar regeneration depending on your attack style.

Having a nice fluid, real-time battle is cool, but in non-FPSs you shoudl not penalize a user who is a little slow at the mouse or thinking. Bioware's answer was the pause function. However, battles loose the excitement found in games like Mana and Chrono Trigger.

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interNEKO

[edited by - taulin on January 14, 2004 4:37:02 PM]

quote:

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Original post by Taulin
Are certain attack patterns dependant on your position, in terms of being available or not? Since enemies will be moving too, the effectiveness will change as the battle goes on.

You can use the downtime (as you are waiting for the meter to increase) to choose a different pattern. Moving might also be a cause of slowing down the bar regeneration depending on your attack style.

Having a nice fluid, real-time battle is cool, but in non-FPSs you shoudl not penalize a user who is a little slow at the mouse or thinking. Bioware''s answer was the pause function. However, battles loose the excitement found in games like Mana and Chrono Trigger.

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interNEKO

[edited by - taulin on January 14, 2004 4:37:02 PM]

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I like your idea abiut slowing down the meter when you move. BTW, as much as I love the game, I did get bored with the battles in Chrono Trigger. Maybe that was because I''ve done new game+ about 300 times and my characters are all between lvl 70 and 90...

How can you get bored when the battles last about .3 seconds each?

quote:

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
How can you get bored when the battles last about .3 seconds each?

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They seem like big speedbumps in the story.

Hey, that reminds me of an important element in any good RPG combat system: It shouldn''t be a pain in the butt to fight battles. Final Fantasy IX takes a huge amount of time to start a battle. First, it does the little screen-blur-out thing, which involves a bunch of superfluous visual effects. Then, it pans around the "battle arena" it just loaded, carefully not looking at the space where the unnecessarily complex enemy models are going to be when they load. Then, it shows your little guys getting psyched up to fight. Then, the enemies appear.

The fight takes a variable amount of time, and then it shows your little guys dancing and spinning, and then it fades slowly to black, and then it returns to the world map. Eight steps later, you encounter a damn enemy. You play about 40% of the time. I''d rather have text-based battles than that.

for the spells part of a combat system, I think it would be really interesting to do more or less what black and white did, that is, gestures.
there has been a very recent and interesting article on that matter here on gdnet: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/gpplr/
and this looks dammn easy to implement. drawing patterns with the mouse would be much faster than selecting the right spell inside complex menus IMO. and allowing the user to create its own patterns and bind them to whatever spell he likes would be great. I''m seriously thinking on implementing this
treating patterns as keys, and allow them to be bound to anything. that wouldn''t be only spells, but anything. if you bind game scripts to keys, you could bind scripts to patterns. I can''t even think of all the possibilities this would bring up.
and have something like a key that activates the gesture recognition. you press it, draw the gesture with your mouse, release it, and the gesture matching is performed.

and of course leave the choice to the user. if he prefers menus, then don''t force him to use any of this.

what do you think?