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I’m working on a brand new battle system for our next game. I’ve come up with a few ideas for additions as well as issues that I would like to address.

Streamlined Battles

The first thing I decided to cut was evasion. When an enemy evades your attacks, it just wastes time. It means you’re just going to have to choose another move.

I want to make a streamlined battle system where your time is used very efficiently. I’m removing things like the pre turn choice of “fight” or “escape”. This is just one more button press every turn.

Random good things happening

Random numbers can be really frustrating, things like evasion and strong enemy moves that are set off randomly. I would like a battle system where the only random things that would happen are good things.

Perhaps you randomly get an extra turn, a critical strike, an extra item drop. Things like this would serve to make the battles more fun and less tedious.

Spell Variety

Very few games get this right. Either you don’t have enough spells and you just use the same one over and over or you have too many spells and they all just do the same thing.

If the only difference between a fireball and a lightning bolt is the graphics then what’s the point? It’s only fun to see the pretty graphics a few times, after that it’s just a chore.

Even with the right combination of spells you still have a problem. If each spell has one specific use then there’s only one strategy to use. This again just leads to boredom.

Unlimited possibilities

The goal of this new battle system is to offer many possibilities. I want to give the player a whole bunch of tools and let them choose how they want to use them. I also want to add more variety to battles. It shouldn’t just be choose 4 moves, wait, then choose 4 more.

Lessons from Dawn’s Light

When we were designing the battle system in Dawn’s Light we felt very limited. Even after making many changes to the battle system there were still a lot of things that just could not be done.

We tried to make the battles interesting by offering moves with unique effects. We added a combo system for some of the characters to encourage the player to use different moves.

In the end I think we succeeded in making the battles more interesting but there’s still a lot more that can be done. With this new battle system we can do anything we want. So if it doesn’t work, I can’t blame it on the limits in the existing battle system.

So what would you like to see in a new battle system?

This is a feature that is often debated among players. Of course most of the debate comes from those who prefer to have the ability to save the game at any time and in any place.

My personal preference is save points which is why you’ll find them in Dawn’s Light. They can be misused but if done properly a save point system will always be better.

A great reminder

If you’re at a big point in the story or in a new and exciting place, often you will forget to save. Save points act as a reminder that you should probably save.

The OCD problem

If you can save anytime then I sometimes feel like I have to and it becomes a habit to save after every tiny thing that happens. This is of course very disruptive to the game experience.

Breaking the game

From a development standpoint, a save anywhere system can be dangerous. There are points in Dawn’s Light where if the player were to save and reload their game, terrible things would happen. One could argue that the save could be disabled temporarily but since I value consistency this is not an option for me.

Extra Features

Save points also give you the option to offer things like health refills before bosses. These work well when they are themed to match the save point. In Dawn’s Light we use books for a save point and golden ink to restore your health and mana.

Conclusion

Often when players start asking for save anywhere, it indicates that the save point system is not working how it should be. Perhaps there aren’t enough save points or the save option isn’t the default.

As long as the save points are generously placed and easy to use, most players won’t even think about the saving system and that’s exactly how it should be.

So what do you think about save points?

Here’s the top 5 things that will make me stop playing a new rpg:

#1 – Too much backstory before the game starts

When I start a new game I don’t really care about the backstory yet, unless of course it’s an established franchise. I despise long text sequences about the world and ancient wars and political nonsense.

I would much rather start playing as soon as possible. In Dawn’s Light we just have a quick opening scene before you’re in control but I think it could be even better. I think the best solution would be a very short scene to grab the player’s attention and then a fun sequence to start off.

#2 – Random Battles

Random battles are an outdated game mechanism. Personally I cannot play a game with random battles for more than a few minutes without being annoyed.

Adding visible enemies is not at all hard and it doesn’t even take that long. When we put in the enemies in Dawn’s Light it was really just a copy/paste job that didn’t take much more than an hour.

# 3 – Nothing but fighting

When I play an rpg I want to be entertained. That means I want some variety. If all I ever get to do is fight enemies in a dull cave I’m going to be bored.

This doesn’t mean I just want a block pushing puzzle every 3 rooms either. I want content that matches the setting. I want to explore an interesting environment, collect items to build a solution or at fight enemies in a different way.

#4 – Too much blah blah

Sometimes characters just go on and on about nothing. If there’s an emergency, why are the characters standing around talking about it for 12 minutes instead of doing something. If somebody has something to say I think he or she should just get to the point.

#5 – Stalling

I absolutely hate when I feel like my time is being wasted. If you don’t have 20 hours of content in your game please don’t try to stretch out what you do have. Many games are guilty of this. Things like random battles every 3 steps, dialogue that just goes on forever, unnecessary 2 second pauses after every line. I would much rather play a short fun game than a long boring one.

I also don’t understand games that boast 50, 80 or 100 hours of gameplay. They are lying. There is quite simply no way to create that amount of content for a game unless of course you have too many battles or giant empty maps to run across. I would like to see play times measured after you remove all of the fighting, that way you could really see how much content there was.

The worst example of this in Dawn’s Light is the slime island which I’m really not a big fan of. The sole reason we put it in was to offer something for players who do like to fight a whole bunch of enemies.

After you finished though you always seemed to have some spare tickets. We decided to put something in that would cost a whole bunch of tickets that most people wouldn’t bother to get. I think we underestimated people’s desire to get 100% because quite a few people mentioned that they were frustrated by the grind. I have since lowered the ticket requirement by a whole lot.

By the way, has anybody gone back to slime city while wearing the slime outfit? We wrote new dialogue for pretty much every slime there just as a bonus for anybody who got the slime outfit.

I accidentally wrote too much in this blog post…

So what are your Rpg Dealbreakers?

Dawn’s Light has been out for a couple of weeks now and at this point I’m quite confident that I have taken care of the bugs. Now it’s just a matter of getting lots of people to try the demo. We’ve got reviews from RpgFan and Gamertell, both of which were very positive. So it seems I know how to make a good game but do I know how to sell one? Time will tell.

Work has started on the new game, it’s not a sequal to Dawn’s Light but an entirely new game. It’s going to be awesome but I can’t tell you too much just yet. I’d rather wait until I have something to show.

We’ve listened to all of the feedback from Dawn’s Light and here’s the main things we’re going to work on improving in the next game:

- No more time based anything

- More information in the journal

- More focus on the main story ( still lots of side quests though )

Keep reading the blog to find out more…