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Tag: Mechanics

Action Commands!

avatarCJ 0 Comments

Hey, It’s CJ again! I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on the action commands for the combat, and so while I briefly talked about the action commands in my last blog post, I wanted to go a bit more in depth into what we’re planning for them, and give a couple examples!

2 quick warnings before you read ahead:

  1. The art in the screenshots are not final, ESPECIALLY the UI. It’ll look prettier in the end, promise!
  2. The action commands haven’t been tested extensively yet, so they may change or be entirely swapped out – this is just to give an idea of our current direction!

How will they work?

For the action commands, we want to make them quick enough so that they don’t disrupt the flow of the fight, but still be fun and unique – without getting too repetitive! These are some hard things to juggle, and so we’ll probably have to go through a lot of iterations to balance everything just right. Another big challenge is that we want to have a bunch of different phantoms that the player can catch, and we want each one to have unique moves and action commands – and with each phantom having multiple abilities, the amount of action commands really starts to add up!

So, how are we going to have unique action commands for each phantom? In short, the way we plan on setting them up is to have one type of action command for each emotion type, and then have variance in the command for each individual phantom and ability. This means that two phantoms of the same type will have similar style of action commands, but will still have a unique differences for each move – so that every move will be it’s own unique action command. To do this, when making action commands, we set it up so that each ability can have different settings for the action command. It’s a bit hard to explain without examples, so here are some of the different types of action commands we plan to have!

Joy

The Joy Action command – a straightforward ‘press the button when the thing lights up’

For the Joy action command, the minigame is a simple ‘press buttons with timing’ kinda deal. The meter will fill up, and once it lines up with the target, you gotta put in the input! This is very reminiscent of the basic hammer attack in Paper Mario, just with a slightly different approach. The basic idea of this minigame is pretty straightforward – in fact, the only input is just pushing a single button! However, there are quite a few things that can change in between different versions of joy abilities. To list a few:

  • Have different button inputs, or make the required button random each time!
  • More than one button – needing to press the same button at different times, or different buttons!
  • Different speeds – some filling faster, some slower

And so, by changing these variables, we can make a ton of different versions of the same action command! One Joy phantom might have some quicker action commands but with random buttons, while another might be slower, but with multiple buttons required for each!

Fear

What are you talking about, I didn’t steal anything from undertale

For the fear minigame, we wanted something a bit more different from action commands in other games. We also wanted one that reflected the emotion of fear – and thought that a bullet-dodging style of minigame would be perfect! For this action command, the name of the game is survival – avoiding the projectiles that fly at you, and successfully using your ability if you survive. Because we want the action commands to be quick, we plan on making the timer for ones like this short – and so we’ll instead add some difficulty by having different ways of launching projectiles at you! A few variables that the fear action commands will have include:

  • Modifying the speed/movement of the player (Maybe restricting the movement to only one axis?)
  • Changing how many projectiles/how fast they are/where they come from/how big they are/
  • Giving the player room for a few extra hits, if needed 🙂

So yeah! Hopefully you have a better idea now of how action commands will work in The Phantom Keeper. We’re excited to keep experimenting with new variables and new styles of action commands, so stay tuned for probably more blog posts about action commands in the future!

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Battle Time!

avatarCJ 0 Comments

Hello again! It’s CJ. This week, I wanted to take a bit of a dive into the gameplay of The Phantom Keeper – a bit of a continuation on the post that talked about the inspiration games. While I won’t go into detail about every aspect, I do want to talk about a few of the fun features we plan to have in our current battle system.

Type Matchups

The first thing I wanted to share about our battle system is something that a lot of RPG players are familiar with – type matchups! Adding in type matchups is an easy way to add a bit of complexity into battles, without being too confusing. While we wanted to keep the basic formula of type matchups the same (rock does more damage to scissors, scissors deal less to rock) one thing that we are experimenting with is what the types are. While usually types are based on elements or damage sources, we chose to use something more thematic to the setting of our game – emotions!

The full list of types in our game, as they currently stand, are the following:

Note – this list may change! We may add/remove/rename some of these in the future.

The idea behind this is that because phantoms are a culmination of a person’s feelings, their form is based on their most prevalent emotion in life. Because of this, some phantoms are stronger against other types – a calm phantom will be better to deal with an anger one, but anger is strong against love – or other anger types! We plan to play around with these matchups, trying to keep an even mix of both making the matchups make sense logically, but also making sure no one type is too much better than another – at least not without drawbacks!

Action Commands

The other fun mechanic we are bringing into our battles is action commands! Action commands are basically a quick-time event, or mini-minigame that occurs after you select an attack or ability. The result of your attack is then modified based on how you did – if you messed up the action command, your ability won’t be as effective, or it might not work at all. However, doing it perfectly might reward you with a bit of extra damage, or another free turn on a buff-type of ability!

The reason that we wanted to add action commands was that we felt it made combat more interesting. It adds a bit of risk with every move – you might calculate out that a certain move will do exactly enough damage, but only if you do the action command correctly. It also helps to break up the monotony that turn-based combat can have, making the battles feel more interactive than just picking a move. In general, action commands make you feel more like you’re the one fighting instead of just giving orders, while still not being as stressful or intimidating as real-time combat can be!

For our game, action commands are going to take many forms. Because we plan on having lots of different phantoms, each with their own set of abilities, we wanted to make it so that the action commands could always feel a bit unique to each phantom. To do this, we plan on having a few categories of action commands, assigning them out based on the phantom type! For example, anger attacks will be all about mashing buttons as fast as possible, while calm attacks will focus more on balancing things! We’re excited to try and add as many different kinds of these action commands as we can, both to keep combat interesting and to help make each phantom feel unique!

I don’t have another picture to add so here’s a pic of my family’s dog, Moose, who is a good boy

And that’s it for this post! I’m sure I’ll share more about the game’s mechanics in future blog posts, but I wanted to give some insight on where we are taking things so far. I also felt like this was a good continuation to the post about our inspiration games, showing how we are taking ideas from both, then combining them and adding our own twist!

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