Synzza Star - Battle System - What's the goal?
Let's talk about what I aim to achieve with Synzza Star's battle system. To describe it, we should first look at my inspirations.
Chrono Trigger
There's a lot a could say about Chrono Trigger and how much I admire from this game. Chrono Trigger has inspired Synzza Star in more ways than one, which I'm sure will be talked about in later posts to this blog; however, for the sake of brevity I'll simply discuss one for now.
Chrono Trigger's battle system is, to my knowledge, quite unique when you consider the other popular games which define its JRPG genre. Rather than your party and your enemies lined up in neat columns across from each other, Chrono Trigger's enemies roam the battlefield as you select your inputs, inching closer to your party members as a threatening reminder of their intent to damage them. Interestingly, this movement of the enemies can also present opportunities for the player - enemies that happen to find themselves lined up or bunched together are vulnerable to area-of-effect attacks which can allow for their quick disposal.
It's a great iteration on typical JRPG combat, turning what could otherwise feel like a glorified spreadsheet calculator into an exciting and cinematic experience. What I want for Synzza Star is to capture that engaging cinematic feeling while iterating on the spots in Chrono Trigger's design that I feel have some room for improvement.
One such aspect is how the player's party in Chrono Trigger are completely stationary during a battle. They may seem to move when attacking, but this is simply an animation. If you watch closely in the footage above, the orange-haired swordsman in the beginning simply walks back to his initial position after his attack.
This is certainly an intentional design choice, and I could elaborate on the many good reasons I imagine it was made for, but this can lead to some undesirable situations during combat where the player is forced to depend on luck if they want to score group attacks on the enemies, due to their lack of positional control of their own characters. It somewhat undermines what otherwise seems like very dynamic combat, since it exposes the area-of-effect abilities as merely having a chance to deal more damage, rather than the player being able to reliably strategize to take advantage of it.
This is where the "action RPG" component of Synzza Star would come into play - spatial thinking will be a much more relevant aspect of combat, as players will be able to move their characters into position to attack and away from enemy attacks which they may predict are coming.
This would deepen the strategy of combat significantly, but it does beg the question of when and how the player articulates this more complex intent to the game. To begin answering this, I'll cross-reference another game which I think is a good starting point for discussion.
League of Legends
While certainly not an action RPG in the traditional sense, League of Legends does achieve similar goals to what I'm aiming for. Players direct their champions to do certain actions in certain locations rather than control their every movement directly. This allows players to split their attention to the other aspects of the game, but it has the side-effect of giving the game its own kind of cinematic feeling - the player is more analogous to a movie director or choreographer, giving their AI agent interspersed commands to then watch the scene unfold before them on its own.
I'll need to be careful how much inspiration I take directly from this game. League of Legends is an extremely complex game to play and is notoriously difficult for newcomers to grok. I would guess this has a lot to do with everything on Summoner's Rift happening in real-time from the moment the game starts, so players who haven't internalized the game quickly get overwhelmed with the amount of different systems demanding their attention.
This is why I plan to implement a pause mechanic in Synzza Star, making the game "turn-based" despite having action RPG elements. Battles play out with player-given commands to each AI agent party member, and when the player's party are all done the battle pauses, giving the player a new "turn" to provide input for each party member individually. This gives players more time to think through the positional implications of each action, and it also should let the player orchestrate combat with a full team of characters rather than just one.
So what will this look like?
To give an example of this, let's briefly go back to Chrono Trigger. You can pause Chrono Trigger by simply pressing start at any time, but this halts the game completely and therefore isn't useful unless you need to put the game down for a while. The visual effect this has is similar to what I have in mind, however, and I think it gets the idea across. The indication that the game has been manually paused is when the screen goes dark and everything halts.
In Synzza Star, imagine these dark-screen pauses being automatic in the middle of battle, and the player is allowed to give input during them. The darkened screen effect would be kept in, but some shader magic will be used to clarify which party member or enemy the player is selecting for their inputs.
That's essentially the plan. For now, no actual stats will be given to abilities or battlers. Instead, I plan to focus on input and hit registration, as well as implementing AI agents to take commands from the player and from enemy AI controllers, depending on the type of battler.
If you're interested in the technical details of this implementation, then stay tuned for future updates. For now, take care.
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