Re: Full-Fledged Audio RPG: Seeking Help
be warned that you are probably underestimating the level of code reuse here. The only games that are likely to be made with the engine you end up with are games exactly like yours. This is why I actually think that releasing engines to this community would be a really bad idea: unless the engine is general beyond belief, the engine isn't actually an engine, it's some preset game mechanics in a can. You then end up with 50 games that are the same save for the sounds. There are some more advanced techniques that make the engine more general, one of which I am applying to my current project, but the benefits therein remain to be seen and they don't work so well for turn-based stuff.
Before I go on, I must confess that i came to audiogames through sighted gaming; my vision used to be good enough that I could do it effectively by sending the computer and the console through the same headphones, using the keyboard below the desk with the TV t
o read walkthroughs on the internet, among other things. As a consequence, I've played maybe 1% of audiogames, and think that most of the remaining 99% are very, very, very lacking-my measuring stick is the sighted games I've played and beaten (ocarina of time, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, couple others fall into the beaten category). So anything I say on game mechanics may be...uniquely flavored.
That disclaimer out of the way, however, I don't actually think I've ever found a game with turn-based combat where grinding is actually fun, at least not to me. All of the games nowadays with turn-based combat and for which people say "play this for the combat system" add gimmicks and play more like an RTS: turn-based combat was very definitely a product of the hardware as far as I can tell. That's not necessarily a problem, but you'll either have to spice it up with something or you'll have to carry the entire game on
the story. I mentioned limited movement because that seems to be one of the common ways to do it now-we're talking something like a 9-by-3 grid or maybe a 9-by-5 where each party gets a3-by-3 square. This is not hard in terms of programming; there is basically 0 math involved. But unless you do something we're back in the era of Final Fantasy VI; unless it's a boss, you pound attack over and over and level strategies include rubber bands to hold buttons down overnight (really, you could do that in Final Fantasy VI). You absolutely have to do *something*.
My advice for grinding in a turn-based system is to make combat fun somehow. Then kill the grinding. Make character bonuses not based on level; make them rewards from doing quests. This moves the focus from your combat system. I don't care how good it is-6 hours with it will make it a horrible, horrible thing, and you don't have any online social interact
ion going on. You can turn character advancement into equipment, too: it's not about your level, it's about your sword and your ring of power. You can then move the entire thing over to puzzle solving and world exploration which is better for a single-player RPG, at least in my opinion. You can get some leeway out of realtime combat--Dark Souls is a good example of this in the sighted world--but even then, you've got to carry it on something else (Dark Souls used, well, a super dark and depressing world and a huge dose of ambiguity and god how I wish I could actually play that game past the first boss to actually experience the story myself).
So maybe the ice spell isn't level 15, it's helping an ice elemental get rid of a fire spirit inside a volcanic dungeon that threatens its habitat, and maybe the fire spell that you wanted to put at level 15 is helping the fire elemental get rid of the same ice spirit that you helped for the ice s
pell by going into the plane of ice and destroying the portal through which it pulls power-and you can only get one. And then you add in some plot that makes one obviously good and obviously evil, but when you start reading between the lines or find some other piece of lore or happen to know something specific about how ecosystems or something works in the real world (which you put in that piece of lore for the players who don't) it's suddenly ambiguous who you should side with. Doesn't this sound way more fun than 5 hours of turn-based combat?
this is where I have to knock my own idea down some-it's also much harder to code an engine that can cope with story and one-off puzzles. It's also the kind of thing I'd not particularly want to try in BGT-you probably want a level editor that includes scripting, so you're probably going to need lua or something, and I don't believe you can even talk to such things from BGT.
Otherwise, you'll always be at the mercy of the programmer, and hard-coding these one-off quests into your engine instead of into your maps on the scale I am suggesting will just give everyone a headache (was it in quest_behavior_51, quest_behavior_512, or quest_behavior_5218? O no).
Maybe I'm wrong and there's a significant number of people who find vanilla-flavored turn-based combat to be super fun and exciting, but it's certainly a dying breed in the sighted world at least.
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