<-- Archived --> (Battle Engine and Combat)

[Xela]

What I love in wm ex is its difficulty. You actually have to work hard there to not lose, not just lazily look at hentai pictures. However, proper balancing right now is impossible.

WM-EX did that at cost of great constrait of chocies in the beginning of the game. Also money kept flowing in much like in WM after business operation was setup (that might not be a bad thing btw).

Proper balancing might be possible but it'll delay the @ even further... I have some ideas on that.

[Armegetton]

It's just my opinion, but shouldn't the early game be incredibly easy in all aspects?

While I understand that there are many well-versed gamers who play, I feel like it shouldn't chase people away by running them into the giant wall of 'learning curve'.

As long as players don't over extend their reach too fast, a game should generally be relatively forgiving early on.

Don't misunderstand, I completely agree with Dark about

not just lazily look at hentai pictures.

But from what I've seen with the original brothel sim, the early game was actually the most difficult part. Once you got past a certain point, you were really just waiting for money to buy or upgrade whatever is next. The reason why it was annoying later on wasn't because of difficulty but because it was death by spreadsheets and micro managing.

While I did enjoy my plays of wm, I never really understood what I was supposed to be doing. I think I finally started doing the gangs thing, but it was after I had like 40 girls already.

I don't think players should have their hands held as they play through an entire game, but I do think that games should be upfront about how they can be played.
Basically, being intuitive.

For example, if a player never battles and only plays the sim and brothel parts, that's all fine and good. but the player shouldn't be finding out about rpg battles at the end game.

That's just me though.

[Xela]

...

Well, that's more or less how the game is planned.

It will be easier to add difficulties when the system is set. As for different paths player can take while playing, I don't want to force any specific one, even not the brothel management path but that can only be achieved after more paths are actually available.

[CherryWood]

It will be easier to add difficulties when the system is set. As for different paths player can take while playing, I don't want to force any specific one, even not the brothel management path but that can only be achieved after more paths are actually available.

Maybe we could do something like "impress 6 out of 10 important people in the city" goal while approval of each of those 10 NPC's would be tied to a bit different gameplay style (arena wins, high class of service, number of customers, relationships with girls, slave training...)

[Xipomus]

The Battle Engine is already in there.
It's probably possible to generate a dungeon like with WM, only offer 2 choices.
1. For a job of dungeon hunter (for money, stuff and girls)
2. Or the player goes in on his own and navigates the dungeon.

I can probably render some wall images for the sides or in front that sort of thing.
That way you generate a Ultima Underwold kind of dungeon.

The player can come across different things, girls, monsters, treasures, make a puzzle or a shrine that refills AP for max ap.
Like every event takes one AP point (fighting a monster.. ap point.. fighting a group 1 ap point. opening a treasure one Ap point.

You could have doors with keys and even have a few events of meeting enemies or girls by maybe making a default trigger.
So when a girl is in the dungeon in the xml and either randomly give the girl an event if it is the player.. (maybe tease when it's the girls).

We can use the BE for the fights and probably give players another way of generating cash before the taxes come along.

Let me know what you think.

[Xela]

It's a possibility. We haven't decided what to do with dungeon exploration yet (the system you describe vs the rpg-maker style). It's very difficult to make/gather resources for both.

[CherryWood]

It's a possibility. We haven't decided what to do with dungeon exploration yet (the system you describe vs the rpg-maker style). It's very difficult to make/gather resources for both.

For me both seems complicated. I would be content with just VN-style dungeon (=like our current forest exploration), just moving from one static background to another.
I would prefer improving the BE instead (add skills that will turn it into something more then just clicking on attack).

[DarkTl]

Well, if Xela is able to code it, and Xipomus is able to render for us resources from the scratch, then we lose nothing.

Though it's hard to imagine a forest with walls and doors, as well as any other open space, so we'll have to either use both EE or abandon the forest...

[Xipomus]

Forest is possible too, to render. Will have to picked some more forest resources.. but should be doable.

The forest demo was the idea i had with dungeon. But with a forest you usually have more open space... dungeon is usually more closes so easier to have it look good. But that's just my idea.

If you want some different forest stuff, i can render some things for a test. If you like it we can discusses what you guys want in the forest and what is possible.

[Xela]

Forest is possible too, to render. Will have to picked some more forest resources.. but should be doable.

The forest demo was the idea i had with dungeon. But with a forest you usually have more open space... dungeon is usually more closes so easier to have it look good. But that's just my idea.

If you want some different forest stuff, i can render some things for a test. If you like it we can discusses what you guys want in the forest and what is possible.

I'd actually prefer current forest to a rendered one! Dungeons are completely separate from that.

Where I stand on the actual dungeon exploration:

- Algorithms to generate random environments or predetermined environment thought json/xml are all in my head and ready to be implemented.

- Most of RPG-Maker resources are basically at our disposal but it's still a lot of work (Tiled software). I've toyed with it myself and I've personally have confirmed that it will work out for us (pretty auto-tiling included).

- Since Dark have failed in cracking the dungeon crawling on the Alice soft game and before Xip offered to render some textures, I was at a loss on where we can get the graphics for the true "3D Crawler".

- As far as coding/workload is concerned, there is virtually no difference in Python between the RPG-Maker and "3D-Crawling" types. I give you my word that I'll be able to code both if the graphical/logical resources are provided. There is almost 0 difference in complexity in between the two types.

- I recon we'll have to keep an improved current variation of "forest" exploration to "Look" for the dungeon or other cities. In depth dungeon exploration will take form as we move forward with development... If Xip will be able to render graphics we require or someone rips them from a pre-existing game, we have a choice between RPG-Maker type and "3D-type", before that, we have RPG-Maker type only, as I've said, I've worked with that and tiled and was able to create very good environments under that context! I cannot create a lot of those myself, but if other dev team members will chip in, I expect that we can make it work.

[Xipomus]

Personally I find the RPG maker tiled stuff boring... but that's me.
What i suggest is making it a 3d view with prerender pics with a alpha (transparent) part of the pic.

Like say when you enter a cave/dungeon the dungeon is calculated on what it will be (some random, so quest based)
For instance. You enter the cave/dungeon you see a hallway ... with to sides rock/wall.  You can only exit of move north. (the engine sees opening north walls east and west and shows the pics for that)

You move north. you have 2 choices north and east. (engine shows opening north and east).
You move east.. you see a chest . (i could render a falling blade that could show some times and do a random amount to damage) and a way east.

You go east again.. you see a locked door north and a unlit torch to the east. Also you can go south
You click on the torch, it pulls down (prerendered anim) and the doors opens.

I have a cell you could put the battle sprite of a girl behind the bars (i could render seperately so you can overlay the cell bars on the battle sprite) in which she asks for help. When you try to free her and orc of something shows up.

That sort of thing.

You can probably use a lot of stuff from the forest exploraton setup.. that is what make me think of it, combined with the battle engine.

But i'll leave it to you guys to discuss. I'll start building some test stuff tommorrow.

[Xela]

Personally I find the RPG maker tiled stuff boring... but that's me.

But i'll leave it to you guys to discuss. I'll start building some test stuff tommorrow.

Yeah, I hear what you're saying! For every 3D type game, there are like 300 RPG-Maker types. It's definitely not a decision that I can make without CW/Dark. One single and overwhelming pro towards RPG-Maker type is that the amount of resources readily available for that is outright "purrfect". We want lava, we get lava, we want city, we get city, we want forest, we get forest, we want castle, we get castle. It doesn't depend on anyone, we just have it, if anyone is willing to invest 15 - 30 minutes that is required to convert from RPG-Maker tiles to PyTFall tiles (within click/result type of conversion (no coding skillz required at all)), it's just there. There are no buts and if's...

On the other hand, even I, who likes RPG-Maker stuff, find the whole deal boring as hell

There is no way around that either, there are simply too many RPG-Maker types around. Doesn't even matter if real RPG-Maker resources are used or not! Dark is the main advocate of the the exploration/combat system in the game so it's his opinion that matter most in this case. Let's wait for what he has to say. Basically if we go with 3D Type, we'll be bound to whatever you can render. If we go with RPG-Maker type, we have a commonwealth of RPG-Maker resources to work with... It's just there (Lets not forget the 1000+ independent drawn/developed tilesets either), noone can take it away from us. It's an important decision to make... Lets give it some time.

Basically, 3D rendered dungeons are way more awesome and rare but we give away a good amount of freedom in development to roll with that. After the tagger fiasco, decision might not be as simple... we're not in any rush so lets give it some time

[DarkTl]

First of all, I'd say we should use several layers to create a world.
For example, something like this for the global EE when moving between cities and other locations (it's a global map from Agarest):

I believe there is a similar BE in renpy, we probably could adapt it. Almost no resources needed as well.


As for the local EE, you probably right about availability of resources. I'm still sure that we should use RPG-Maker tiles though, maybe forest-type EE (hidden tiles + VN view) is everything we need.

And I still think that we should try to use first person view for BE. No need for battle sprites, more backgrounds available.

[Xela]

First of all, I'd say we should use several layers to create a world.
For example, something like this for the global EE when moving between cities and other locations (it's a global map from Agarest):

I believe there is a similar BE in renpy, we probably could adapt it. Almost no resources needed as well.


As for the local EE, you probably right about availability of resources. I'm still sure that we should use RPG-Maker tiles though, maybe forest-type EE (hidden tiles + VN view) is everything we need.

And I still think that we should try to use first person view for BE. No need for battle sprites, more backgrounds available.

Global map might be a pain, it's not easy to find a decent one.

Why do you need a BE for global map I didn't understand. I imagine we use our forestlike exploration to move around locations (world), our normal BE for encounters and some form of a dungeon (3D/RPG-Maker type).

[DarkTl]

Because if you need to go through 30 screens of the forest maze every time you want to go to another city, or some cave for example, you'll think twice before even trying? And then another 30 screens to return home...