Story plotting is over, and hopefully there aren’t many spoilers from now on, though I’m sure they will pop up from time to time. I realize the writing of these isn’t necessarily well organized, but that was the goal, to write my thoughts and what I was doing as I go, so you can read the thought process. It’s…been interesting!
(Just ignore the ‘part three’ this was how I was originally writing it)
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PART THREE: Mechanic
Okay, okay I fleshed out that story more than I thought I would. Here’s our mechanics from it tho:
Dungeon Crawler
Crafting System
Quest System
rock/paper/scissors typing system (probably will have more than 3 typing tho)
We’ll also need an Inn for recovery
And a Blacksmith for Weapon/Armor Crafting
At the beginning you can Item Craft, but gaining Grace into the party adds more useful healing recipes
It’s…it’s 1:40am…I’ve spent almost 3 hours on this, minus the time I helped Hubby with his fishing reel. I should get to bed. I’ll see how I can clean up the above and make it into a blog post.
Just remember, I’m not promising that a game will come out of this, but this is my idea so don’ steal it! Haha, no really.
By this point anywho I’d be jumping into the editor and start building the systems, or maybe I should flesh out the dungeons with their typings, and setting a total number of monsters…
Something like that will be next.
[WOW! This is Dev blog 3 and we just finished the first chuck that I had originally written the first day! x.x originally this was started for about 3 hours one night and continued all day the next day, so this was the end of that initial work]
PART THREE?! FLESHING OUT OUR ENEMY MONSTERS?
We know we have 3 dungeons, one based in a forest, one under the city and one is a mountain and/or tower. Probably a tower to connect to the Rapunzel thing. Maybe this game should be called Rapunzel’s Flower?
Anywho, we need monsters. We already decided to be limited by Aekashic’s resources so I have to use his free librarium of stuff. Most of them are static battlers, however there are some animated ones. Will the animated one have enough of what we need to fill our world?
Do we want to use animated battlers?
LET’S THINK ABOUT SCOPE:
We want this game to be pretty easy to make, animating our enemies and creating attack sequences and such for them (being people will expect an animated enemy to be more dynamic) is probably outside of scope, so I say we stick to static battlers. We can give them a breathing animation with plugins,
Also, to change things up, I’ll do what I did in Well Yu and create ‘dead’ sprites of the enemies we use, so when they are dead, they turn into a dead sprite instead of disappearing. I really like this effect, and think it adds a nice unique touch to games.
So the static battlers….will we even be able to make dead sprites?! These are far fancier than the pixel art from Well Yu where it would be easy for me to edit….
(searches through the animated battlers who would have dead versions) eh, not enough of what will fit the game.
The goal is to have animal/nature like creatures, no humanoids, I like cute, with some of the harder enemies being tougher looking. I’m going to have to dive into the Statics.
So we may not be able to have a dead sprite. Unless Aekashics has a pile of bones we can use. Or maybe use a dead slime, with the color representing the element of the creature? Naw, that might be too out there.
So let’s go find Aekashic’s static battlers. And that’s a large download so let’s talk about the game’s typing which will influence the monsters we need.
HOW OUR ELEMENTS WORK
As mentioned we’re going to use a natural power source based on a rock/paper/scissors type system. Normally my system has about 7 elements, but for this game we’re going to simplify it to 5, as I feel 3 will just be a bit too simple for this game.
The five will be: Flame, Soak, Shock, Light and Dark. They work as so:
Flame is fire and combustion style abilities, flamethrowers, self-destructs, etc. It will be weak to Water, strong to Shock. Powers up in Dark.
Soak element is water based moves, weak to Shock, strong to fire. Powers up with Dark, weakens to Light.
Shock is electricity based moves, strong to Soak weak to Flame. Powers up with Light, Weakened by Dark.
Light moves involve energy based moves and healing. Can be a secondary element, and powers up Shock, but dampens the effect of Soak. (sunlight/heat evaporating water) deals with healing and buffs. It isn’t weak to things per se, but it will buff Shock enemies and debuff Soak enemies.
Dark involves energy based moves and poisoning/status affects. Can be a secondary element and powers up Flame and Soak but weakens Shock (Fire brightens up the dark, and the ocean gets darker as you go deeper, Shock has the concept of light, so it can’t be powered by the dark) Dark will involve things like poison and paralysis and draining effects. Isn’t weak to things per se, but will buff Soak and Flame, but debuff Shock.
OUR DUNGEONS MAIN ELEMENTS
I like to make the dungeons based off a main element, as most of these dungeons have two parts to them (the player is sent back to Capital mid way) I’d like for them to change focus about mid way, while still having their main element. As such, this is what I’m thinking.
1st Dungeon: Forest Dungeon
This Dungeon is based in a forest, perhaps in a cave, so I’m thinking its element will be Shock, as I’d like to save the Soak for the 2nd Underground and Flame is seen as a strong element so I want to save it for the last dungeon.
So we start with Shock, and as we get deeper, the cave gets wetter, and we’ll introduce water. As Shock is weak to Flame, that’s what the player will first equip, but introducing water deeper down will make it harder, as now the Player’s Flame will be weak to the secondary water creatures popping up, will probably have some Shock/Water type monsters as well the deeper we go.
We can introduce the concept of Light element deeper down, but I want to keep the dark, poisoning stats for the mid game.
As this is a forest/water area, we want are enemies to look like fluffy animals, lizards and amphibians.
2nd Dungeon: Underground
As mentioned before this one is based under the city, maybe starts as a sewer type system and then goes deeper into the ground, as this will be a wet and dark area, the main monsters will be Soak, and we will introduce the Dark element to the player with poisons and such. The player will want to use Shock down here, but eventually as it gets deeper, fire starts to come into play (hot center of the earth?) So the dungeon will start to dry out, and you’ll get rock monsters and such. So the top will have wet, slimy and fishy monsters, but as it drys out you get rocky lizard monsters and such.
3rd Dungeon: Mountain/Tower
I’d like to have bigger animals, maybe even birds here, as well as other type of creatures you might find on a mountain and find in a tower.
The element is fire, and as you go higher, you’ll find Shock. Maybe the top of the mountain is surrounded by a thundercloud.
This dungeon, which includes a mountain, will also have areas where water based creatures will be, and both light healing type monsters and dark poisoning monsters will abound, making sure the player uses all the skills from before.
Now the woods area is going to have some monsters too, and I know we said there would be two woods, but I think it would be better if we had the 1 woods map that connects to the first dungeon, and then the mountain is the 2nd woods area, that will then lead to the Tower.
First dungeon will have 3-5 levels total, plus the one map for the woods. If we want to start with the woods having 2 unique monsters, and then the first level of the dungeon introducing a 3rd, and then each floor for the first dungeon can add 1 new monster to face so…doing math that’s…7 unique monsters for the first area, we’ll say that 7th is a boss monster found in the lowest level of the dungeon so:
2 beginner enemies
2 mid level
2 hard level
1 boss.
For the Second dungeon there will be 7-10 floors, there is no woods, so we just jump in with adding one new enemy on the first floor, then 2 on the second to replace old monsters, and then 1 new from there…by the 9th floor you’ll have 10 new monsters, for scope purposes we will lower that down to 6 normal and 1 mid-boss and 1 end boss at the very bottom level of the dungeon.
2 beginner
2 mid
1 mid boss
2 hard
1 final boss
For the mountain, I’d like to treat it as 3 or 4 levels, and add 4 new monsters, as this part of the story will have the Assassin and Dark Lord as the bosses, I’ll save the 2 Monster Bosses for Post game! The Tower will be treated like 6 floors, with a 7th for the boss monster/Dark Lord. So that’s 6 new monsters in the tower, so we’ll have 10 new monsters, and 2 boss monsters for post game:
3 beginner level
4 mid level
3 hard level
2 post-game bosses.
So we have a total of 7 + 8 + 12 = 27 monsters. I like making my numbers nice, so lets add 3 more and make 30. We can save the 3 new monsters for post-game quests.
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And there we go! The ideas of the game are already flowing together real well! Next time we will be diving into finding our monsters, and I’ll start posting pictures of what I’m working on, as the ideas will be coming out of my head, and real work will start to happen!
As always, thanks for reading and God bless!
Meike Kima
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Thanks for reading and God bless,
Meike Kima