Fear Tactics Dev Log

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kylekrack
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Fear Tactics Dev Log

Post by kylekrack »

[game]Fear Tactics[/game]

I've been working consistently on Fear Tactics probably for longer than any other game I've worked on. I decided it was probably time to start a dev log or something, if not only to keep myself on track and maybe get some feedback along the way. All the dev logs I see on here are always really cool, so I figured I'd hop on the bandwagon.

So what is Fear Tactics? It's a tactical RPG inspired heavily by Fire Emblem that was originally intended to be a submission for the Megallennium multicart project. I quickly discovered this project was far too ambitious for the time period we had, mainly because of the obstacle of scripting pathfinding. Thankfully that issue was remedied not long ago, and I started working on Fear Tactics again. Now, most of the base mechanics are laid out and much of the narrative structure is already present. I'm confident in actually running Fear Tactics to a full release.

Fear Tactics follows Julia and her mercenaries as they fight against the Khar military. Khar is a neighboring country which has lately begun to enact oppressive military actions. The Khar monarch has always ruled with a heavy fist, but Julia finds that they have crossed the line into injustice. Julia has no strict political affiliation. Instead, she claims to fight injustice wherever she sees it. What she has seen is innocent citizens killed in the street for minor offenses, small villages ransacked for not having the funds to keep up with inflated taxes, and much more. Julia's mercenaries aim to strike the Khar at every opportunity in order to curb their destruction of innocent lives.

Partly to motivate me, and partly to make a more well-rounded product, I invited two friends onto the project with me primarily for art and world-building collaboration. One friend is on for character design, specifically costume design. The characters in the game have personalities, backstories, and basic physical attributes developed already. Our costume designer will take those elements and create personalized and historically based outfits and armor for each character. Once that is done, our sprite artist will take those designs and make them into something I can import into the OHR.

I do have plans to make Fear Tactics a more interesting and unique mechanical and narrative experience. First, along with the rock-paper-scissors weapon triangle that appears in the Fire Emblem games, Fear Tactics will include varying damage types that have a differing impact depending on the enemy's defense. For example, the Rapier weapon has a sharp damage type, which means it deals more damage to low defense enemies, but a Hammer has a blunt damage type, meaning it greatly damages more heavily armored enemies. Spells also have damage types. For instance, the Fireball spell boils enemies with heavy armor, while Icicle freezes low armor foes.

As for the story of Fear Tactics, each character will be developed through flashback levels, in which the player experiences moments in the character's past. Perhaps you will have to return to the moment a character first learned to fight after their town was attacked by bandits, forcing them to take up arms. These flashback levels will pose specific challenges and limitations, all while peering into the character you control, giving you a better understanding of who they are and why they fight alongside Julia.
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This is a screenshot of the game with its current art.
This is a screenshot of the game with its current art.
Screen Shot 2017-09-03 at 7.53.09 PM.jpg (524.87 KiB) Viewed 762 times
These are the characters in Fear Tactics and their current designs.
These are the characters in Fear Tactics and their current designs.
FearTactics-faces.jpg (174.82 KiB) Viewed 2356 times
Last edited by kylekrack on Tue Sep 05, 2017 2:43 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by TMC »

Cool! This game looks super promising, both mechanically, and for having a lot of story-telling. Is there any input already from your two friends in the current demo?

Effectiveness of different magic types depending on armour is a nice touch. It makes sense.

Some comments on the current demo (I got wiped at the second battle (the first actual battle), I should try again, although I expect the demo doesn't go very long?):

It's confusing that Bret's attack has range 1 and Dana's attack has range 2 although they're palette swaps.

While walking around outside of battle, I noticed that there's a wait(1) delay after every step, so walking around isn't smooth.

Also, you're probably aware of the bug where the UI for a player character, including their portrait, stays up during cutscenes or during the enemy's turn. I saw it quite a lot.

Will there be any tactical bonuses such as attacking while standing next to an ally? You don't currently seem to have any of that.
Last edited by TMC on Tue Sep 05, 2017 5:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by kylekrack »

Thank you for the questions! A lot of things sort of go over my head.

As a general answer, the current demo is actually less playable than when I was first working on it, which is just a product of me changing all of the battle math and not rebalancing everyone's stats. Because I'm still testing all of it out, some characters have certain stats or weapons just to see whether things are working, but it's not set up to be a healthy challenge. The demo is not very long. There are 3 battles, and in the 3rd the enemies have 0s for all their stats, making the game throw a 0/0 error when trying to attack them.

If it is confusing why Bret's and Dana's attacks are different, I will have to make sure to provide some explanation in-game for that. Bret begins with a Lance equipped, while Dana has a Javelin by default. I do plan to have Bret's stats scale more defensively and Dana's more offensively, so they aren't just palette swaps.

On that note, if I can make it work, I want to add bonuses for being next to Bret specifically, for being a kind of 'guard' character. If I can get that, though, I might add other bonuses for other characters as well.

I'll fix the delay outside of battle. Not certain which script it's coming from, so it'll just take a little bit of looking. Thanks for noticing.

There are a few UI bugs. I'm learning the effects of not being experienced in programming. I originally set up the UI scripts rather poorly, basically saying "if you're hovering over a character and don't have someone selected, display their UI" and then never acted on those slices again. Now I have to find every player action and make sure the scripts update the UI slices if necessary. The bug you mention specifically I didn't notice, probably because I'm so used to it that it just didn't stand out. I'll get to working on that first.
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Post by TMC »

OK; because they looked the same I assumed Dana and Bret were the same unit type. But actually, I guess you don't have unit types/classes for player units, just enemies?

I think that in good tactical RPGs, making tactical considerations (meaning, placement of characters to get certain advantages) is the most interesting part of the battles, not just deciding which of the enemies you want to engage with which of yours. Does terrain currently have any effect on combat? I noticed that tree tiles have a larger movement cost; I guess pathfinding for enemy units isn't quite right because of that.
Last edited by TMC on Wed Sep 06, 2017 4:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by kylekrack »

Because the party in Fear Tactics doesn't exactly align with the 4-hero party that the OHR normally refers to, I had to create status and equip menus from scratch. The default menus work to an extent, but unfortunately, when you're looking at one character's stats, you may press the left and right keys to swap to other heroes in the party. In Fear Tactics, the cursor is in the hero party, and for obvious reasons, I don't want the cursor's stats and equipment visible to the player.

So, using slices and a bunch of for loops, I put together some alternative menus that serve the same purpose as the default equip and status menus. What I've learned is that the equip menu is far more complicated than it looks, but also that sometimes having a simpler menu screen with less information can be more accessible.
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(the game only uses 2 equip slots, to be clear)
(the game only uses 2 equip slots, to be clear)
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

That looks great! Nice scripting :)
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Post by sheamkennedy »

This looks awesome! I'm going to have to make my own inventory, ability and equip menu at some point too and I'm dreading it haha. You did a really good job of this.

I like how your equip menu only allows for a single equip slot. I may do something like this in my own game for simplicity sake. I'm thinking I'd have something like Lite Gear, Heavy Gear, Flame Gear, etc... each of which takes up a single slot at represents the hero's entire equipment in a single set of stats.

Also I think it would be good to have a visual representation of the equipped weapon in your game. Maybe if you equipped Broad instead of Lance you should have an icon-picture of Broad beside that given hero's status screen in that empty space which is available. This would allow the player to determine what every single unit has equipped at a glance without having to check the equip menu.
Last edited by sheamkennedy on Fri Sep 15, 2017 9:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by kylekrack »

sheamkennedy wrote:This looks awesome! I'm going to have to make my own inventory, ability and equip menu at some point too and I'm dreading it haha. You did a really good job of this.
If you ever have trouble, I'd be happy to help out. For me, the hard part was putting the menus together in Custom. The scripts themselves are relatively easy; it's mainly just a for loop calling "add menu item()" for each, say, item in the player's inventory. The confusing part is making sure all the bitsets and on-close scripts and menu item subtypes/extra data are all correct.
sheamkennedy wrote:I like how your equip menu only allows for a single equip slot. I may do something like this in my own game for simplicity sake. I'm thinking I'd have something like Lite Gear, Heavy Gear, Flame Gear, etc... each of which takes up a single slot at represents the hero's entire equipment in a single set of stats.
I feel it makes the game easier to digest, and on top of that, it's easier to balance. Since it's a tactical RPG and not something like a jRPG, I want the focus to be on the strategy of battle: unit positioning based on terrain, weapon advantage, etc. I agree with TMC that those parts are the more interesting and engaging parts of a tactical RPG, so that's what I'll try to emphasize. Having an additional equip slot aside from the weapon slot allows me to add items that have a single effect. For example, there may be an item that enhances attack and one that enhances defense. As a player, you have to determine which one you want to give to your characters. The main character is very vulnerable but has high attack. Do you give her the defense item so she can take more hits or give her the attack item so she can kill enemies before it matters?
sheamkennedy wrote:Also I think it would be good to have a visual representation of the equipped weapon in your game. Maybe if you equipped Broad instead of Lance you should have an icon-picture of Broad beside that given hero's status screen in that empty space which is available. This would allow the player to determine what every single unit has equipped at a glance without having to check the equip menu.
This is a brilliant idea. I hadn't even thought about a visual representation, but it would be so easy to put a weapon sprite next to the character portraits, and it wouldn't even make the menus cluttered. Thank you for the insight!
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Post by sheamkennedy »

@Kyle: Awesome, I'll keep you in mind once I get to doing menus!
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