Heya all,

Yeah, in for this one. Finally managed to get around to doing one of these.

Anyways, the plan:

Platform: Flash (Web)

Programming Language: Actionscript 2.5 (Bit of 2.0, but of 3.0) or Actionscript 3.0 (If I can manage to completely remove references to Actionscript 2.0 in my code).

Sound: Used to have experience in Personal Composer 2.0, but I don’t have a Floppy Drive or a computer that can run it anymore, so probably going to be finding some free MIDI program on the internet to do some quick songs (I had one earlier, but can’t find it at the moment.)

Graphics: Yeah, at best, I’m going to take the HAL Kirby Origin story approach to this (That is, placeholders that hopefully will inspire the final version.).

Style of gameplay: Certainly 2-D movement, not quite ready to try and import 3-D into Flash yet. (Also, see Graphics). Aside from that…well sure, anything goes, but here’s a snippet of what I hope to do this Ludum Dare – or at least, my inspirations (Will probably inspire a tl:dr;):

So I’ve recently been playing a slew of RPGs, most notably Star Ocean: The Last Hope (And Star Ocean 1 too, but that has no bearing here, mostly). In SO:TLH, what really struck me was the Bonus Board mechanic in battles: how this worked was that if you defeated enemies a certain way (Say, killing multiple enemies in one hit, or with a Blindside Critical Hit move), you would get a certain type of point added to this Bonus Board, and after each match, whatever your Bonus Board had in points, it would give you certain bonuses (Such as 10% more money than you would’ve gotten normally, or 1 Skill Point more per level, or 10% EXP. These can stack, so you could get 20% more EXP with two points, for example.) to your grinding. If your main leader dies in battle or gets a critical hit, the board removes these points, less so if enough points are accumulated of a certain type, in succession.

Grinding; pretty much a cornerstone of the RPG genres out there, whether it be grinding for EXP, Money, Materials, IVs, EVs, Rare Candies (See Pokémon for the last three.), Morality Points, Pieces of Hearts (For those of you who want to argue Legend of Zelda as a RPG.) – you tell me about a RPG that doesn’t have grinding in it, and I’ll show you a liar (Hint: using a mirror.). At it’s essence, grinding happens when a player is doing an action solely to get a reward, and stops caring about the action in between not having the reward and having the reward. What Star Ocean was doing here, however, was letting you get the game to acknowledge why you were grinding, and helped motivate you to care about how you went about grinding – if you’re grinding for money for something expensive, you could play each battle specifically so that you would be getting more money than usual, and you’d want to maintain the work you did in an earlier battle.

So there’s that. There’s also the general idea of EXP being significantly different than any other type of source in a game – instead of having to redeem it manually by finding shopkeepers or such to get something that drains it, it automatically drains itself into it’s own little drain every time you get it, and eventually tells you “Hey! You have enough to level up! So yeah! You Level Up! Don’t want that? Too bad! You’re going up a level whether you like it or not!”. It may require you to spend stat points to finish leveling up, or it may do it for you automatically, but you can’t opt-out of leveling up after reaching a certain amount of EXP. Can you imagine if quests did that for you, where as soon as you got the last quest item for a quest (Say, it told you to get 12 health potions for someone), it would immediately just remove them from your inventory and add the reward to your inventory?

I can understand why that might not work for quest inventory items (The above quest being an obvious reason if you’re about to fight an Giant Ogre or something boss-like), but I’m thinking of doing something similar in the monetary field. And/Or in others. We’ll see.

tl:dr; Star Ocean’s Bonus Board, instant drains like EXP model.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 at 12:26 am and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.