Wow, I thought I was in the minority with being a owner of every FE game. If you could, make it in the vein of FE8 (Sacred Stones) Short Story, but infinite replayibility. Btw, the first game I ever bought was FE7 at Costco. Want to geuss how many times i beat it? I'll give you a hint, it's between 18 and 20 . (P.S. Not kidding)
Congrats on remembering developers =) I'm sure it makes them happy So while there are quite a few advance wars clones, I've yet to see a HOMM like game. So I think for now I'm gonna try and make something of a mix between the two. Individual Units have turns instead of turns organized by players. I think I'm gonna try and go with the individual named units, as opposed to generic units with a quantity of them. As of right now i'm trying to think of how to create a single player experience that has branches, or if I should keep it all linear I figure I'll only have 2 modes probably, Campaign - Single Player Story mode Vs/Melee (Ya Star Control) - Select your units play off against another group of units (computer/local multiplayer/ (Online/Wifi) when I learn more about it) I plan to include exp/stats/agi/str/hp/blah. One question though, How important are things like equipment in battle to you? I want to be able to make the game somewhat casual/simpler as well. To me when I watch tactics/fire emblem, all these menus of choosing/equipping every little thing is annoying to me. Something I was considering is perhaps having units have multiple attacks, which they can either select from, or that it randomly picks from the set, just so battles aren't such of a hassle and also more dynamic/flowing ie, my character doesn't just cast/use the same strongest attack over and over again. Also have anybody played Ogre Battle for the SNES? what do they think about that game?
To me, weapons are beyond important. But if you are going for a casual audience you might want to just have certain classes each only be able to handle one weapon. But def don't do the individual units having turns, organized by players is better. And to the guy above me, I think I also beat fire emblem at least 19 times. Sacred stones was pretty good the first time, but I liked the second one a bit better. The later levels kind of fell flat to me and I enjoyed the first one on gba a bit more. I didn't have as much motiviation to go through the story in sacred stones, almost cuz I didn't feel like doing the later missions where there was no guy as an antagonist who talked throughout the levels, it was just monsters. That's just me though. And every time I played sacred stones again i used to cheat. Cuz if you remember that traitor with ephraim in the beginning of the game, don't remember his name. You got to do one mission with him on your team, so what I would do was strip him down of the amazing weapons he had like a silver sword that early in the game, and give them to one of the two cavalry with you. I actually managed to have that guy killed in that mission too. I put him next to a dark mage and just had him repeatedly hit him for like forty turns until he died. It was lolerific Back on topic, to the dev: please play fire emblem on a gba emulator. You will fall in love with it. The gameplay is just incredible. You should use some of the details in that to help you wit your game.
Well the reason I don't really want weapons is I'm not a fan of the rock/paper/scissors advantage type play it involves. As for having individual units go for turns I feel it adds complexity, (yes I will go try out FE, and if you haven't you should try HOMM2/3, you'll see what I mean about having turns giving complexity) as well as, movement will be like HOMM/Advance Wars, ie you can't pass through your own troops, hence the speed/agility of your characters matter in determining the order of actions. As for story, do people feel it's better to have a hero and his party, or multiple groups and things going on at once?
Two protagnists with their own groups, and then they meet up later on. That would be beast. I'm kinda stealing stuff from FE though. And I like the not being able to pass through your own troops thing. And definately make sure you have squares for movement. I wasn't a fan of that uniwar hexagon thing.
Alright I can try that. One thing I'm going with though is Hexes, sorry but hexes make the most sense since they're a closer approximation to a circle movement, as opposed to making diagonal movements cost the same as a horizontal on a square map, or making them cost root(2) compared to 1. One thing I'm debating on is, if you the player should be a character in the battle, or if you should be an overseeing presence, or have some other kinda outside influence, I'm leaning towards outside non targetable, but can still affect battle
it would be nice if the player had his own combat character. not many games in this genre has the player have a combat character of his own. as for the hexes, i'm all for it. only thing though is that diagonal travel equals 2 hexes, it may be more of a hindrance than a tactical aspect. oh and maybe you can add something from wild arms, like where certain formations with certain characters surrounding the enemy can initiate a special attack.
I know which is annoying cause technically it should be root(2) times as much as a horizontal movement I dunno personally it's just something that's always bothered me with tur based games that use a square grid, real time game it doesn't really matter, assuming they code their movement correctly. so an idea for the whole lack of weapon things I was thinking maybe As well as like attack and defense stat, instead of weapons, creatures just inherently have an attack type/defence type, kinda like RTS/TD games. Mage has a magic attack good against "heavy" armour Also, I plan to have a lot of different creatures/units, like I don't just want human type things. Assuming I go the fantasy route, I'd want you to be able to hire/pick up like trolls or constructs and things.
but it's not root two cuz you're not going diagnol you're going one horizontal then one diagnol. other stuff sounds cool though
turn based rpg. my favorite genre of all. controls can be so easily done on the touch. Id say go and recuit a team make the the game higher end(2nd sprites, full story, hours of play, etc etc.) and release the game for around 20 dollars. i honestly believe that if a good amount of time was put into a original rpg and it had enough content it could sell for that.
002 013 000 The distance from 1 to 2, is root(2) assuming the distance from 1 to 3 is of 1 unit. as opposed to -0 0 0 1 0 -0 0 1 to 0 is all of equivalent distance. And yes while it would be nice to recruit a team, I don't quite see that happening, it'll mostly be friends/family helping me out. Though I'll gladly take support from the community in the form of purchases of my other games when they're released =) hopefully soon.
Design Question How long do fights take you in FE(sorry still haven't had time to play it) I know advance wars fights can sometimes go fairly long. I'm trying to think of how big the map should be, should everything fit on one screen, or prefer scrolling? I'm thinking right now, smaller scale. From a user perspective it allows fights to be shorter, or generally shorter, don't gotta spend a lot of time moving around far, more of how you move (essentially if it were a big map it would be like starting troops closer together). From a lore perspective if you're only gonna be a band of say 7 people (at once, that's the scale I'm thinking of, you could have a roster of more, but for whatever reason only 7 at once) the 7 of you would generally be closer together. Once again the smaller scale is something from HOMM as opposed to larger to AW, but also looking at most of the turn based strategies on the iPhone so far, they all seem to be grandish type scale. I was thinking if I really wanted to make a "big" fight I could always chain 3 fights together, In the woods, to castle gate to the throne room. Question 2....should I start a new thread just for the whole design of this?
In fe you work your way up a map with your troop, rather than tug of war gameplay in advance wars. And dude you got to stop with the root 2 diagnol stuff. Just do squares
Right, I was just wondering what kind of scale do people prefer and why? and also what will appeal to the general audience. Alright here's what I got (literally code) for a unit's stats/attributes: NSString *unitName; NSString *unitClass; NSString *race; int size; // 1/2 number of cells the unit occupies (might just keep it as 1, but 2 would be awesome for scale) int lvl; // current level of the unit, at lvl 10,20,30 chance to upgrade unitClass int exp; // current amount of exp for the unit int maxHP; // max hp of the unit (ie, full health/cap) int curHP; // current health of the unit; int morale; // -3 to 3 higher number the better the chance of the unit going again int attack; // dmg of the unit (might change it to min/max attack) int attackType; // 0 - Slice, 1 - Pierce, 2 - Magic etc int defence; // def of the unit int defenceType; // 0 - Light, 1 - Medium, 2 - Heavy, 3 - Magic etc int speed; // 0 - 10(20?) Higher number indicates priority within a round int movement; // number of cells the unit can move 1 - 3(4?) int retaliate; // Number of times the unit can fight back BOOL ranged; // Yes if the unit shoots BOOL defending; // Yes if the unit is in a defensive stance BOOL waiting; // Yes if the unit is waiting for a better time to attack (First in Last Out Queue) BOOL finished; // Yes if the unit is done it's move/turn int abilities[30]; // Each index 0 or 1, representing if the unit has that ability /* 0:flying/teleport - ignores pathing obstructions (units/immoveable terrain) 1: attacks twice etc */ Anything people see missing or a cool feature that they'd want to see? (That's what I'm saying, hexes allows every distance travelled to be equivalent, hence I'm not going with squares, because square are either having diagonals as a horizontal and up (2 moves) or calculating root 2, both which I find annoying)
Hahaha well I think I still prefer a story-based or some kind of tbs or rts even with the abundance of simpler sit-down-and-play games
Any genre except for First-Person shooting and Driving games Puzzle games being my favourite and Platforming games close behind
