Development Update – April 11, 2017

Well, it’s been about a year since my last blog update (I’ve been keeping information flowing via Twitter), so I suppose it’s time I sat down and explained what’s been going on.

As per usual, my focus on law school has been the reason for slow development. Not a surprise. Nobody thought developing through law school would be easy, least of all me. I have summer work lined up, so my three months off school won’t have much time either.

Regardless, significant progress has been made. But one game at a time.

Generic Predictable Enemies

I believe I’ve stated this off-hand in the past: Love♥Rank uses a maximum of 12 enemy characters and 8 player characters at a time in battle. Similarly, the enemy count is never to be more than 1.5x the player count, rounded up. Yet I have not explained why, nor how these enemies would work, merely that they exist. Well, no longer.

Long Overdue Development Updates

Well, I can’t deny that it certainly has been a while since I’ve said anything on this blog about the current development state of either game project. Indeed, last time was in September, when I said law school was going to be a time drain and I may need to re-shelve The Turtle Who Had Wings. It turned out that the former was true, the latter was false. But let’s handle these updates one at a time.

How About an Update?

So, as of just over a month ago, I began living in New York City, for law school. You may have noticed that, after suddenly being on a roll with new posts, they suddenly stopped – that’s why.

Now, while law school isn’t particularly difficult yet, I’m told it will be, and it’s still a fairly major time drain due to the amount of required reading. I will post when I have the time, but the last few weekends have been pretty aggravating (especially this one that just ended).

The Challenges in Creating Movesets

Well, this is unfortunate. I’m a bit late on this, but a recent version of Google Chrome has effectively disabled the Unity Web Player. Firefox won’t be far behind. There are ways around it, but it requires having the end user fiddle with a hidden setting I’m not sure people care to mess with for my sake. As a result, all links to Love♥Rank prototypes are down effective immediately. There’s no sense in me wasting space to keep them up if they won’t work.

But that makes for a very short post, so why don’t I discuss another subject since I’m here? Specifically, the subject of character movesets and how I came up with them. I haven’t covered that topic yet.

The Turtle Spreads Its Wings and Rises from the Ashes

I’m about a month late posting this here, but it’s a good idea to put this here in a bit more detail instead of only stating it via Twitter.

Firstly, a project update on Battlefield of Love. It now goes by a new title, rather than a tentative one. That title is Love♥Rank: The “Oh Gawd, Too Many People Are Fighting and I Can’t Tell What’s Going on” RPG.

Variety and Customization

One thing I absolutely wanted to have in Battlefield of Love is the sheer depth you find with the items in Atelier games. That series has a large variety of items with a large variety of special added effects. But it’s important to remember standard player habits. The more of something you have, the less of it players are likely to actually use. Besides, the Atelier series places a lot of focus on these, and make up more of its playtime than the combat system itself. It would be a fool’s errand to actually expect to harness the full extent of that as a solo programmer.

What I’m getting at is that most items in RPGs are pointless and have boring effects, simply using images and names to differentiate between very similar items. I didn’t want to do that. I decided to take direct inspiration from Atelier to provide variety without padding the item list. This also helped with two other things: I wanted every item to be useful for the entire game, and I wanted the player to have some degree of customization.

The Allure of Random Chance

Game development encompasses a large amount of questions, and one major one is the subject of random chance. It’s not a subject to take lightly, either. As someone who’s played several competitive and/or highly-strategic games, I know full well how much random numbers can screw people over. Whether it’s drawing a random card in any given TCG, randomly-generated stats you can influence in Pokémon, or even the chance of missing with an attack in most RPGs, the more strategic player will decry one thing on a consistent basis: luck is negatively influencing their grand master plan.

There’s also good things to say about random chance, of course. Random chance allows a certain dynamism to be present if a game is to be played solo. Without it, most games would have the same results from the same inputs every time, which causes problems when you’re not playing a multiplayer game.

What Is a “Dungeon”?

The question of dungeon design came up while designing Battlefield of Love, and I needed an answer. I thought to most RPGs and found their answers to this to be fairly inadequate.

A Proper Explanation – Navigating Love’s Battlefield

I’ve waited long enough. It’s time I finally clarify what Battlefield of Love is supposed to be. All I’ve really explained so far is that it’s an RPG, as well as why I had to shelve The Turtle Who Had Wings for it.