[Adonthell-devel] Battle System

[Joseph Toscano]

Taking everything into account, I'll try to make another consolidation:

First, I think our plot development will reveal a lot about how we can make
our battle/magic system. We'll probably end up changing it a bit when the
plot is more complete.

Anyway. I like Kai's ideas about magic focus, and Nezumi's hotkey idea.
Here's my take on the system, with the assumption that we already have our
plot written:

There are three types of items magically imbued with a spell: Rings,
Amulets, and Staffs. The Rings are the weakest of the items, the Amulets are
medium-potency, and the Staves are the strongest. Therefore, if you have a
Fire Ring, your Fire spell will be the weakest. A Fire Amulet will have more
power, and a Fire Staff will have the most power.

You can obtain these magical items from many sources, which we can determine
later. But, as an example: you defeat a boss monster, a big fire-breathing
dragon, in the beginning of the game. He'll be hard-coded to drop a Fire
Ring for your magicians' use.

You can have an unlimited number of magical items in your inventory, but
your "active" spells will be limited to four "active spell" slots. We'll
call this set of slots the "rack." Each of the four slots in the rack can be
assigned a hotkey (four is the number of L and R buttons on a standard
PSX/PS2 controller, such as the gamepad I use). Here's the catch, though:
Rings take up 1 slot, Amulets take up 2 slots, and Staves take up all 4
slots. I think that's a good way to prevent the player nutting off and
making the game easy by hotkeying mega-powerful spells. Example: I can put 1
Fire Amulet, 1 Heal Ring, and 1 Ice Ring into the rack. Or I can put 1 Holy
Staff into the rack. Or 1 Yeti Ring, 1 Water Ring, 1 Lightning Ring, and 1
Poison Ring into the rack. Any number of combonations can be made.

I think that's a system we can all agree on. Now, the part that remains
subjective is the part where you have to "focus" the magical items by
applying them to ingredients and stuff. Myself, I think this is a great
idea, but it *has* to be done in a way that's clever and fun. I've played a
few games with this system, and it's always been a painful bore. Such as in
Asheron's Call. It's such a pain to have to find all of these ingredients,
and have the payoff be really stupid.

So, in my opinion, I think the "gathering ingredients" scheme should be
simple if you want it to be simple, but complex if you want it to be. What I
mean is: you should be able to progress through the game normally without
doing much mucking around with the "focus" system. The magical items, when
you first locate them, will have enough power by themselves to be useful.
But if you really want to augment the power, then you can do some alchemy.

Anywho. That's enough for now, methinks. >D

--JT