Discussion About Battle
I wanted to discuss the work I'm doing on the battle system some! I've attached a screenshot, please note that this is a Work In Progress.
The battle system is what I'd call "party-based card battler with traditional turn-based jRPG sensibilities."
Basically, every turn you draw a hand, activate actions, do damage to enemies, and the battle ends whenever your party is dead or the enemy party is dead.
To better explain this, let me explain the attached screen shot.
1. Your Party - the bottom bar shows your party, and you can see their HP, alignments, traits and class. Starting with this prototype, you'll also be able to see what class passives they have active, but that work has not implemented yet. If you play an action that targets your party, each valid target will be highlighted in blue.
2. Your Hand - at the beginning of the turn, you have your choice of five actions to play, which are taken from each party member's action bank. The background color represents the alignment of the action. In this screenshot, you have 3 Fire actions, 1 Air Action and 1 Omni action. The number is the amount of AP it costs to play the action. You can use up to five AP a turn, unless a card allows you to use more. So, in the player's hand right now, you have 4 actions that cost 1 AP, and one that costs 0 AP.
3. Reserve - at any point during your turn, you can reserve an action. This is useful for instance, if you have an action that can bring a character from the dead. Once you have an action on reserve, you cannot reserve another action unless you play it. Reserve actions go away after every battle.
4. Action Info - this bar displays action info - you'll see the alignment icon, the name, the character who will be doing the attack, the description, and once again, the AP Cost. Click on actions to see this bar.
5. Play Button - this allows you to play this card, and the specified character will go through with the action. Depending on the targeting of the action, you can choose any valid target that's highlighted in cyan by simply clicking on it.
6. Reserve Action - this will reserve the action for you, putting it in your Reserve bank.
7. Ap Amount - This is your current AP Amount.
8. End Turn Button - this will end your turn. At the end of your turn, any actions that you didn't play are discarded, and you get a set of five new actions. You can end your turn at any time. If you ran out of actions to draw, your discarded actions are shuffled back into your action bank.
9. Enemy Party - here are the enemies. You can have up to 4 enemies attack you at once. This enemy's name is "Testman Weak" right now, and will soon be renamed to "Hibgoblin".
10. Enemy Health Bar - each enemy has a health bar that allows you to see your progress in defeating them.
11. Info Bar - this is a log bar that simply displays what's going on. If you're used to Dragon Quest type RPGs or RPGs like Earthbound, you're familiar with this concept.
That's basically it in a nutshell. It's a mix of card battling roguetypes like Slay the Spire mixed with traditional RPG elements. What is not traditional are the actions.
Each class gets 6 actions, which are unlocked by leveling up. Actions can do a variety of different effects. Some will damage the target. Some will add ailments to the target. Others will allow you to draw an additional card, replay cards, change your hand's alignment, or even add new cards to your deck for the battle. Some actions will have new effects depending on previously played actions. There is a nice mix of cards to progress in the battle as well as to effect the deck.
Finally, let's talk about alignments. In this game, there are two sets of alignments: An Elemental Alignment, and a Moral Alignment. Characters and enemies have both of these, actions only have an elemental alignment.
The elemental alignments are: Light, Dark, Fire, Ice, Water, Air, Earth, Omni and None.
The moral alignments are: Holy, Vile and Neutral.
When a character does an action, the alignment of the action as well as the character's moral alignment come into play. The two alignments are resolved exclusively, and then added together into a number from -2 to 2. This basically represents how weak or how strong the enemy or character is against the action. This adds some strategy - if you have a hand of water actions and fighting a water enemy, that would be more difficult then using air actions (which represent air and electricity).
A future update will allow you to tweak your deck, and being able to remove or duplicate actions up to an additional 3 duplicates. (In a future release, duplicating actions will cost gold). A future update will also allow alignments to grow in strength, depending on using them consecutively.
So that's the plan for the battle system. I plan on filming a more in depth video, not just on this topic but on the state of the game as it is. I'm hoping to get Alpha 2 out by the end of July, but we'll see about that. According to gitlab, it is 66% complete.