Elysian Shadows

dejai wrote:Wow another rpg? Why is it so generic? Make it interesting. If you can honestly say its like nothing you have ever seen that would be awesome. Originality is the key. Generics are so boring. Last thing I want to do is play another rpg with another story about an antagonist and protagonist and a bunch of characters in between. I enjoy original story, original ideas. Still good work on the coding side of life if your skilled enough to make the god of wars combat system I applaud you.

GyroVorbis wrote: Okay, first of all. He didn't go into any specifics about his RPG. Your rant about being generic is based on... nothing? And if an RPG really did implement a God of War style combat system, that would be far from generic. That's never been done before.

Back on topic.

I'm all about the philosophy behind why games are fun. Why is God of War fun? It's the way that you wreak havoc, obviously. It's the huge array of combos, the way that player feels as though they're inflicting serious damage, and the arsenal of different and interesting ways to kill things.

Now what makes other games that try for the same action-based combat suck? Usually it's because they become button mashers of some sort. There aren't enough moves to really go crazy with, and there aren't enough reasons to be using these different moves. So the player just hits buttons.

I call designing an action based combat system risky business, personally. If you screw up, you really screw up. It could go from being an epic, kick ass, action packed murder fest to being mindless killing by pushing the A button over and over. It's infinitely harder to screw up a turn based combat system. Look at Poke'mon. It's tried and tested, and it works.

That being said, we both (at least I was) were going to be using this style combat for an RPG. My idea was to add another level of customization. I wanted the player (based on class/job, level, a "scroll" he found, whatever) to learn different moves. Maybe a fast right jab, a slow and powerful left kick, a heavy left punch, an uppercut, whatever.

These moves have different point values. These values are for how much of your combo they take up. Say at level 5 you're allowed a 5 point combo. The player can assign these attacks to buttons and string them together one after another until the allowed points have been used up. Then you have to start a new combo.

It got quite a bit more intricate than that, but I'm sort of fuzzy on everything that we planned. This was towards the birth of our project, before we opted to go with a more traditional combat system.

GyroVorbis wrote:Speaking of "Lua based quests," have you found any useful articles on the matter? If you don't mind posting them, I'd love to take a look.

if player.IsTalkingTo("SomeNPC") and player.HasItem("letter") then
    ShowTextBox("Thanks for the letter, please take this potion!")
    player.RemoveItem("letter")
    player.AddItem("potion")
end

if player.GetKillCount("snake") > 15 then
    player.AddToken("snakeskilled")
end

if player.IsTalkingTo("AnotherNPC") and player.HasToken("snakeskilled") then
    ShowTextBox("Thanks for killing all those snakes for me!")
end

dejai wrote:I am sorry for my comment earlier I was wrong. I did read through your post the words, "high-fly and action / adventure RPG" and I thought it would be better to get you to think more imaginatively. Game creation is a form of self expression just as much as it is a technical challenge if not more. By letting your imagination run free in the streams that are appropriate and achievable without getting to ambitious you could make a respectable quality product. Again sorry for my previous comment, the moral of the story "Be Original". Thanks.

MarauderIIC wrote:The thing with tokens is it can get to be a big huge mess. Say you add on to a quest, but the next # token is taken. Or say you have 100 quests with 5 steps each. Ugh *shiver*

I've seen such a big huge mess. Is there no cleaner way to do it?