Let's Design #3: Elements

Make games! Discuss those games here.

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mjohnson092088
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Post by mjohnson092088 »

i like suikoden, not sure if i'd say more than final fantasy though... depends on which suikoden and FF (suikoden 4 was awesome, waaay better than FF8 IMO for example). i use the basic elements in my game, but i changed the behavior of the spells themselves. for example, Blaze lv.x does decent damage, but costs the least. Frost lv.x does the most damage to a single target, can divide damage among all enemies, but costs a bit more than Blaze. Shock lv.x costs the most, but always targets and does maximum damage to all enemies. but, that's pretty basic/unoriginal stuff.

i really like how elements are used in tactics ogre. characters with opposing elements (ie, fire and water, or earth and wind) deal more damage to each other, and spells of the same element as the caster are slightly more powerful. not only that, but the terrain that the character is standing on affects their attack/defense power. this is a very simple system, but it works, and offers a great deal of strategy.
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NinjaOverdrive
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Post by NinjaOverdrive »

I've always been sort of the odd-man out when it comes to game series. For example, I thought FF IX was one of the better ones even though, as I understand, it wasn't considered that big of a deal. I had more an emotional involvement in Suikoden I than I did with any FF game---I mean, you have to betray and eventually fight your own father to the death!

Anyways, with my game being science-fiction and a bit of biopunk/cyberpunk, I changed the elements to reflect that theme with things like Acid/Bio/Psy/Radioactive. I haven't actually worked out the tactical counter properties just yet but I hope the variance on names will at least add a bit of authenticity to the setting and story. Of course, Fire/Ice/Water are still present as well. And I think that's an important aspect to the magic/elements systems is that it is appropriate for the game. A fanciful system might be spiffy and all but it doesn't always fit well with the given setting. As far as how the tactical aspect works, though, I don't really find any particular method boring as it all just depends on what sort of game I'm into playing at that moment, thus, I don't think there is an absolute need to to change the elemental system or avoid using any specific method as there is going to be an audience for all the tried-and-true methods.

Errr, I'm not trying to discount the discussion of creating new methods as I realize my comments may imply that so don't take it that way. I'm just a traditionalist and don't like too much of a drastic change from what I'm accustomed to :)
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Nathan Karr
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Post by Nathan Karr »

James Paige wrote:The OHR's Normal/Blunt/Sharp damage calculations would be so much better implemented as elementals than as they are now.
I'd like to do something more like what GURPS does for "Armor Divisors", where you set your attack's damage stat and defense stat, and the attack's armor divisor changes the way the defensive stat is multiplied ((2) halving defense, (0.5) doubling it) and then the attack's penetrating damage is given a multiplier which applies to damage that gets through this defense (x2 for impaling weapons like spears and arrows, x1.5 for cutting weapons like axes, no multiplier for crushing weapons). If I can get that, I'll be a step closer to one of the games I want to make.

But, then, I'm just plugging my favorite tabletop system in a thread about designing electronic games.
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Feenicks
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Post by Feenicks »

That's basically what you can do already with the way elements are set up now - make elements relating to different types of weapons, make the attacks for the weapons in question have the corresponding element, and go wild.

On elements themselves:
How about actually making how the PCs respond to elemental attacks more interesting? As mentioned before, restrictions on the elements a character has access to can drastically affect how battles with enemies that have elemental resistances play out - and combined with PC elemental weaknesses can honestly make decisions a lot harder to decide.

[Say, what's the feasibility of eventually being able to mess around with elemental resistances in battle, or being able to modify it with equipment? Will that come with the eventual stat overhaul?]
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DukeofDellot
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Post by DukeofDellot »

Nathan Karr wrote: I'd like to do something more like what GURPS does for "Armor Divisors".
You can do exactly that.

Say you want an armor divisor of 2.

You make an attack that sets the target's DEF to 50% of current (never misses).
Chain to the actual attack.
Chained to an attack that sets the target's DEF to 200% of current (never misses).

Done.

And if you want to use the GURPS wound multipliers you could just set them as what the percentile weaknesses are since even in GURPS the wound multipliers were only the case against things that took damage like an animal. Undead, incorporeal, diffuse, gelatinous, or otherwise altered buildup of enemies had different wound multipliers. The functionality is the same.
Last edited by DukeofDellot on Sun May 01, 2011 12:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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shakeyair
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Post by shakeyair »

NinjaOverdrive wrote:I thought FF IX was one of the better ones
It is my favorite, by a long shot. Gets a little silly toward the end, but they all do.

I think the easiest thing to do would be attach status ailments to each. But thats not so exciting.

I think having elements stay simple as a base system is fine, but I'd like to see more reactions from enemies.

"WizardMan used WATER on FIREHEADGOBLIN"
"FIREHEADGOBLIN'S head was DOUSED, it became a DOUSEDHEADGOBLIN"
"DOUSEDHEADGOBLIN cannot attack until its head is relit"
"MAGICFACEGOBLIN used FIRE on DOUSEDHEADGOBLIN"

This is obviously very silly, but that sort of idea.
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Blacklight_Studios
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Post by Blacklight_Studios »

I don't know if this has been brought up, but I like how Quest64 handles their element system. It'd be nice to see a game utilizing something similar to it.

For those who haven't played Quest64, the element system works something like this(NOTE: the format was meant for the C-Buttons on the N64 controller):

----------- FIRE
----------- <>
EARTH <> + <> WIND
----------- <>
-----------WATER

So basically, what we have is the four basic elements. choosing one will bring up a basic attack from that element. Here's where it gets interesting. The elements can be combined in varying combinations to get different spells. So like Earth->Water could bring a mud-based attack, while water->water->wind could be a stat affecting spell, like Bind.
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Post by Baconlabs »

Wow, I didn't think I'd ever see Quest 64 brought up in conversation. That was a weird RPG. I particularly remember the staff whack being more powerful than any spell in your repertoire, it was just a pain to get close enough to hit some enemies with it.

But I digress, blending elements? I can imagine that being neat to use when it comes to teaching heroes out-of-the-ordinary spells, but I don't think this has much bearing on OHR Elements. I guess you could end up creating loads of new elements this way, but I'd imagine ending up with an unnecessarily complex game of rock-paper-scissors of Pokemonesque proportions.
For the record, I think Pokemon is a bad example of elemental combat. (How on earth does Bug beat Dark, anyway)
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Post by camdog »

What about taking a step back from the actual spells themselves and looking at elements in terms of character development paths? For example, when your party acquires a mage, you have a strategic decision to make in terms of what elemental focus the mage should have. The elemental focus determines a different, appropriately-themed spell set.

A fire mage, for example, could have powerful offensive spells, but their healing spells would also do damage to the caster.

An ice mage has less powerful attack spells, but also has access to certain de-buffs like slow.

Etc, etc.
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Post by mjohnson092088 »

Baconlabs wrote:(How on earth does Bug beat Dark, anyway)
fireflies, duh. :hurr:

i also wanted to say that i loved Quest 64, despite how cheap the physical attack was (seriously, once you have the "earth" spell that makes you invincible, you can use that and whack everything to death like i did). i think element mixing would be very interesting. has anyone ever played/heard of Growlanser 3? you can have two characters mix two different spells, whether they are the same element or not, and come up with some powerful effects. the same thing is done in that weird Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles sequel for the Wii. you wouldn't neccesarily be creating new elements, unless you wanted to. you would be creating spells with the blended effects of the parent spells, which have effects according to the corresponding elements. for example:

combining a fire spell (offense) with an earth spell (defense) creates:
fire wall. <=damages attackers with fire. yeah, really.
or
combining a water spell (recovery) with a wind spell (support) creates:
umm idk, regeneration or something more creative than that.

i don't see how this would work well with the OHR unless you had a custom battle system... but it could be fun and interesting to toy with.
camdog wrote:What about taking a step back from the actual spells themselves and looking at elements in terms of character development paths? For example, when your party acquires a mage, you have a strategic decision to make in terms of what elemental focus the mage should have. The elemental focus determines a different, appropriately-themed spell set.
it's an interesting idea... but that's why it's been done in almost every MMORPG in existence. not that combining elements is original either...
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Post by FnrrfYgmSchnish »

(How on earth does Bug beat Dark, anyway)
More like "How on earth is Dark completely immune to Psychic attacks?"

...of course, the answer to both questions is that Dark is a throwaway type added in for no reason other than to balance out how overpowered Psychic-types were in Red/Blue/Yellow, so of course its weakness/resistance chart isn't going to make a whole lot of sense.

If any type should be immune to Psychic, it's Bug! I mean, real bugs are pretty much mindless. Even if that's not necessarily true of Pokébugs, it still makes a lot more sense than anything people have thought up in an attempt to explain the whole Dark-is-immune-to-Psychic thing.

====

Anyway... I like the Pokémon games, but yeah, their type chart probably isn't that good of a model to follow when coming up with an elemental system.
Well, not if you're just directly copying it without changing it to fit your game, anyway. If you kept the overall idea of this huge complex net of elemental rock-paper-scissors relations, but trimmed out the parts that don't really work (the entire Dark and Dragon types, some of the odd weaknesses/resistances here and there, etc.) it could work out fairly well.
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DukeofDellot
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Post by DukeofDellot »

FnrrfYgmSchnish wrote:More like "How on earth is Dark completely immune to Psychic attacks?"
Anime convention... almost any anime with a telepathic (or future seeing) major character will have a scene where they activate their power totally sure of themselves then have either a pulse, flash, or other visual effect leaving them wided eyed and saying the line (sometimes to the exact words) "What? It's like he doesn't have a mind? How could this be happening?" Then the shady character proceeds to almost kill the psychic.

That said, unless the game is as slow running as Pokemon, having more than eight (and I'd say eight is almost too many) damage types is pushing it. Though now that you can have more, you'll never have to worry about extra effects that can be used with them.

...

GURPS/Final Fantasy style damage types.

Zodiac Signs for your heroes that increase healing/buffing with compatible signs.

A specific elemental assigned to your HP scanning attack that sets up a spawn that quickly self-destructs with an attack that gives a message telling you what damage types are good against the opponent, never got around to using this one.

Enemy types and attacks that deal extra damage to them.

DnD style alignments complete with a Paladin's Detect and Smite.

Together these only uses around thirty elementals.
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Post by msw188 »

Spawning for special purposes has been somewhat superseded by counter-attacks now. I had already set up a somewhat complicated system for my scan spell where the enemy scanned countered it with an attack that checked a tag to see if the scan spell was really what had just been used; now that we have more elements, I can scrap that setup (it really was a pain) and just have the enemy counter the 'scan'-element with a chain of attacks doing some of the things you describe.

And as soon as I discovered the new system, I got ideas for special equipment that makes your hero 'easier' or 'harder' to heal. Could make for an interesting choice. Is the super-armor worth it if it's so resistant to everything, it's even resistant to healing spells??? But I don't plan on waiting for super-armors for things like this to come into play. But I DO want to wait until we have a simple way for %-based damage to be affected by elements... I guess I could manage a workaround if I had to...
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DukeofDellot
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Post by DukeofDellot »

msw188 wrote:Spawning for special purposes has been somewhat superseded by counter-attacks now.
...

Those happen immediately? I hadn't gotten around to using them yet, neat. For some reason I was under the impression that they would decide the enemy's next attack.
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Post by msw188 »

They're immediate alright. It's awesome. I'm not sure what happens if they are triggered in the middle of a no-delay chain, though.
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