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Additions
- Battle dialogue
We had this feature working for a short time during our work on demo 1.0, but then I changed a bunch of things and broke it, and we never fixed it in time for the release. I think it will be a requirement in order to effectively tell the story for this portion of the game
- Ability for skills/items to target an entire party
We'll have at least one usable skill that can target an entire party, thus this feature will be required.
- HP recovery text will appear as green while damage continues to appear as red
Obvious.
- Full support for status effects
Status effects mostly work already. There just needs to be more support for more variety of status effects and to have them be more obvious to the player
- Ability to quickly view information about selected skills, items, and targets
Support is already almost completely there. Just the draw code needs to be implemented here
- Enemies can execute more than one type of skill
Should be very simple to implement.
- Attack points have modifiers and possible status afflictions
This is one of our original features and we still have not implemented it entirely. In the prologue, I want there to be a purpose to having attack points on our enemies.
- Ability for actors to "stun" or "knock back" one another on the status bar
This is a feature borrowed from Grandia 2's battle system. Basically when you succesfully strike an enemy, they "pause" for a little bit on the stamina bar while they recover from the blow. And certain skills can cause a longer pause or even knock back an enemy's progress on the stamina bar, or cancel a skill that they have selected and are about to execute. This is a really awesome feature and makes battles much more dynamic and strategic.
- Battle retry feature
This feature allows the player to "start over" a battle that they lost immediately. The battle is restored to its initial state and the player gets to try again. They can do this a maximum of twice, and if they lose the third time its "game over" with no more retries. Each retry, though, takes a significant penalty on the XP and drunes earned once they win the battle (say, -33% for each retry). So they can choose between going back to their last save point and fighting to that spot again, or attempt the battle again and take the penalty should they win. (This shouldn't be too difficult to implement, especially with the current state of the battle code).
Removals
- Enemy's are "leveled up" to match player party strength
This feature was unpopular and made the game very difficult to balance. It has already been removed. Enemy stats are still applied to a random Gaussian distribution though, so two instances of the same enemy will vary slightly in their strength
Modifications
- Stamina regeneration slowed down among all actors
Right now I think battles go by way too fast and its too chaotic. I'm planning to slow things down a bit by changing the stamina timer algorithm. I was thinking of taking the actor with the highest stamina (the one that regenerates the fastest) and setting them as the baseline, say for 10 seconds. Therefore every other actor will take longer than 10 seconds to regenerate their stamina. This is just a rough idea at this point and I'll tweak it I'm sure, but I do think that some change to stamina regeneration rate is needed.
- Better animation flow
Example: right now if a character is in mid-swing of their sword while attacking and another character is available to select an action, the action will "pause" completely. I'll change this so that the actors executing their actions continue to do so while another skill is being selected for a different character.
- Cleaner victory sequence
The instant that the enemy party is defeated, the victory music immediately begins blaring and the XP/drunes/items dropped window pops up. I'll improve this so that there is a smoother transition from the end of the battle to the rewards screen.
Future Plans
This is a non-comprehensive list of features that we'll implement sometime in the future, but not for this release.
- Elemental effects
- Enemy AI (enemies will continue to choose a random action and a random target for now)
- Skill graphics (showing different graphical effects when skills are executed)
- HP/SP bars that change color based on current HP/SP values versus their maximum
- Display name of skill being executed by an actor (maybe)
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Most of the features shouldn't be more than a few hours work, so I'm fairly confident that I'm not biting off more than I can chew.
