Prototyping, and what makes my game unique...

Okay first things first. Changed my projects resolution to 1152 x 648. Now there's much, much more room on the screen, battles feel less cramped, certainly has improved the look of the game, check it out!

Second, changed the menu UI to include a massive 8 characters! Now it's much, much easier to keep track of all your characters hp, mp and tp! Certainly a must for a game which encourages character switching as much as my game! Had to fiddle around with the code of SRD_AltMenuScreen_Up to do so, and it took awhile to do, but now I have a much, much nicer menu for my game!

Thirdly, created a prototype for part 1 for my game, to test for gameplay balancing, switches, shops, quests and other such stuff. Probably the best advice I've heard for design, it makes everything soooooo much easier to implement afterwards. Took me 3 hours and 45 minutes to get through the 100% full prototyped game, so it's fairly sizable. Hopefully that's not too much for players, there is a lot of combat in my game. I'd like to think it's engaging combat though, what with the Trauma point system making minor encounters intense and meaningful, and magic gourds speeding up healing, and there generally being more to combat rather than spamming the same high damaging attacks each encounter. Definitely needs to be beta tested before getting D7 to play my game, don't want him to get bored...

Anyway, what makes the combat good in my game? What's all this about the Trauma point system and magic gourds? And how could've I (hopefully) made combat actually fun and engaging for close to 4 hours? Well, lemme explain...

TRAUMA POINT SYSTEM

Firstly, let me just say this: I hate Xenoblade Chronicles. Yes the core mechanics are good, the story is fine, but there's one thing I absolutely hate about it and other newer RPGs.  You heal fully after each combat. For free, without any MP drain or use of consumable items.  It sucks balls, and it is not the only newer RPG  which does this. The Siralium series does it, the Atelier series does it, Final Fantasy XV does it (although it has consumables though), they all do it. Personally a game without your party gradually getting weaker after each encounter is a boring game. It makes minor encounters meaningless and makes me feel like a cow eating grass. Good games, like Final Fantasy 12 and lower, have limited healing via consumables and mp healing, as well as special consumables which are limited, like Elixirs or Ethers.

Now my game has both, as well as a third component: TP, standing for Trauma Points. No, it's not used for fuelling special skills like in most RPG Maker games. It is accumulated when you take damage, and acts as a multiplier for taking damage. For example:

In this screenshot, Barako has 54 TP. This means that he will take 54% more damage per hit! It also means you gotta pay attention in the smaller combats, or else if TP gets in the 300s or 400s the enemy will deal 400% more damage, which could one-shot your character! It also incentivizes you to swap out characters as well, swapping out characters which have high TP for low characters with lower TP is a common strategy.

Of course... There is a big problem with this.  It's hard to balance. As Roland the Wanderer showed, poor D7 couldn't even finish my game because of the TP system. It's fine for me, who knows the system inside out. But I think I have a solution to it...

DIFFICULTY LEVEL

A simple fix to be sure, and would probably cause people to feel ashamed in their skills as an RPG player, but for those with no pride, it's perfect.  A difficulty level has been implemented in my game!  There are 5 different difficulty levels, they are:

Very Easy - Enemies have 60% of their stats.

Easy- Enemies have 80% of their stats.

Medium - Enemies have 100% of their stats.

Hard - Enemies have 120% of their stats.

Very Hard- Enemies have 140% of their stats.

I've made it so you can change the difficulty at any time, but only down a level (so from like Normal to Easy). This ensures that technically you'll never get stuck and all players at all skill levels will theoretically be able to play my game! I've personally balanced the game around Hard as well, so players playing at normal have a 20% advantage on me too!

MAGIC GOURD AND DEFIBRILLATOR

Further incentivizing character switching is a special item called the magic gourd. You get 10 uses per rest, and it heals all of your characters HP by 200, MP by 5 and TP by 15. Not only is it a much faster method of healing than individually healing each character with skills or items, it ensures that, together with the TP system, there is an incentive to swap characters. You'll heal more the more of your characters have been hurt. And considering that you get very little money from encounters, it also ensures that you don't soft lock the game like in the Eye of Vyrius. Defibrillator is a very similar item, you get 5 uses per rest, and it heals 200 hp to a single character and revives them from the dead.

UNIQUE SKILLS AND COOLDOWNS

And the final point, although this is a little less unique and interesting. No skills are just copies of each other except more powerful (Like in the final fantasy series, with Fire, Fira and Firaga).  And each character has 12-24 unique skills attributed to them! This means that characters get more powerful by having more options available to them, rather than just overpowering the enemy with more powerful attacks.  Oh, what's that you say? Just use the same skill multiple times in a row, why bother use your other skills? Well I have a solution to that as well. Most skills have cooldowns attributed to them, so it forces you to use different skills each turn.  And characters will eventually gain the ability to move several times per turn, also allowing them to exhaust all their skills at once as well.

Really hope I've made a fun, engaging combat system. Even though there will be puzzles, exploration and hopefully an engaging story, a lot of the time, you're going to be fighting a lot, so it's important that the combat system is good.