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Making a good turn based battle system is pretty tricky. A lot of games resort to having 100 moves that are pretty much the same except one does more damage to ants and one does more damage to trees but that’s not something I want to make.

So what we have made is something quite different. I said a while back in the blog that I wanted to streamline the battle system and this is how I plan to do that.

This is the move select menu. The reason it has this shape is so you can reach any move with just one key press. So instead of pressing down three times you just press right. The options are quick attack, heavy attack, special, use item and use a team move. You won’t choose skill and then choose a move any more.

Quick, Strong and Special! That’s it?

So you may worry that there’s only 3 moves you can use but there’s more to it than that. Your quick and strong moves can be changed by using runes. You’ll have slots in your equip menu to place these. So instead of choosing from 11 different moves in battle you’ll set up your moves before battle. It also means you can set up synergies between your characters to work off of each others moves.

Runes will do things like add splash damage to your attack or heal you for part of the damage done. I’m trying to make a lot of them so you’ll really get to build your own strategy and not just use the one I designed.

Special Attacks

So now you might think that all characters will be the same except for the runes they use. That’s not true at all. Each character will have different stats which make some runes better than others. Each character also has a unique special move which is always more than just a damage attack

Team Moves

Then you’ll have your team moves. There’s a party meter that builds up each time you do attacks. When it fills up you’ll be able to use a team move. This means selecting another character to team up with to do a more powerful attack. Each combination of 2 characters will have a unique team move.

Trinkets

The final thing affecting your moves will be trinkets. We had these in Dawn’s Light but now we can do a lot more with them. You’ll just have to wait and see what they are.

Fingers crossed

Hopefully all of this will work as well as it does it my mind. Most of the battle system is done but I’d need to play with it for a while to try out all of this stuff. We’re also having difficulty settings this time so if you just want quick easy fights you can have them.

Next time I’ll talk about stats and armor.