View topic - A second try!

Well, after some thinking, I've decided to start legitimately working on a second try after the terrible first attempt of a newbie game called Hero, haha. I mean, I've had vague ideas for a storyline, and I've drawn some sprites and tiles and such that I'd want to use, but I think it's time to bring them all together. Well, it's all still conceptual, of course- I think I'm going to borrow heavily from my old game's story (since it wasn't ever presented anyways, and the parts of it that were presented were done so very poorly), but write the entire thing out first, while drawing graphics along the way. I think I'm finally at a breakthrough of really figuring out what I want. Perhaps this isn't the place for a NON-SCREENIE post, but I figured I'd start hyping up my new game. Some features, which obviously will need balance will include:

MP-recycling: I've always wanted to try and find a way to make magician type characters more balanced. So I was trying to find games where that was the case, and I honestly could only find balance in ways that wouldn't really work anyways. Some ways were the DQ style: having BANG and BOOM for regular battles, and then spells like OOMPH and ACCEL in boss battles, but that takes away the ability to add more characters, as I feel like the magician is essentially doing the job of two units. Well, more like the mage and healer do the job of 3 combined, but either way...
So my idea was to give the mage and healer BOTH ways of transferring their MP to another hero, to try to avoid the making mages necessary to make regular battles go faster, but useless on bosses. In this sense, it would be giving the heroes a limited option for a "shared MP pool". We'll see how it turns out, but I'd like any initial input on things to watch out for, things to help improve the system, etc...

More use of the element system: The hope here is really to use this system to encourage the switching of different heroes. I want each of the 8 (no hard number on heroes yet) heroes ideally to be perfectly balanced, and at some points it will require all of them at a time. My goal is to use elements in order to naturally push a player to use certain heroes in certain dungeons so that everyone gets some up-time to avoid unnecessary grinding up the lowbies later on when they're needed essentially "just to fill slots". Obviously, this would work fine if the two parties were just forcibly interchanged, but it would be ideal to give them choice, where more than one character can be used in different situations to encourage mixing teams so that a player can get an unbiased feel for what combos work best for his play-style when. Guided, yet flexible is the aim here.

Debating stealing the customized item menus idea from my brother, as I think it offers so much easily implemented strategy...

Multiple layers of playable backstory, not quite DQ5 style (I could never hope to do something anywhere near that cool, so I'd never try!), but a similar concept which I think drives DQ5 to have my favorite story of any video game. Actually, it absolutely is my favorite. I just LOVED the idea of playing through the history, rather than optionally reading (spacebar mashing) your way through it, and not really caring. Only so much can be emphasized through the normal flow of a game without very fine tuning on how much is too much and gets tiresome. If the player gets to just play through everything that's important essentially... well, I think it works out for the best.

Please give me any feedback you think of- I'd really appreciate it. I know they're all just concepts, and ideals to how I want to make, and play my game, but early feedback is good feedback, right? Smile

Thanks a ton for reading the long post! I hope to have enough story written and graphics done by February or so to pump out a decent demo.

You can't fix stupidity.