Dreamlogic & Game Design: Figuring out related functionality
So, I've been working on this RPGMaker MV RPG I'm call "Dreamlogic." I've written about it before, and I'm going to assume you know what I'm talking about so I don't spend paragraphs explaining the game. Yeah. >_>
Anyway, I have a world themed after Ocarina of Time. I want the player to be able to collect the spells from the Great Fairies: Din's Fire, Farore's Wind, and Nayru's Love. Two of these are pretty straight forward to implement.
Din's Fire simply becomes an AoE fire damage spell, and Nayru's Love grants a buff that reduces all physical and magical damage to zero. Like I said, that's pretty straightforward.
Farore's Wind, however, is not. Granted, it'd be pretty easy to make something that on the surface seems similar. I can simply make a common event with the option to place a warp point or to warp to the placed point. That's pretty easy using some variables to store the map and the x/y positions.
Only, that isn't what Farore's Wind actually does. Rather, in Ocarina of Time, Farore's Wind can only be used in dungeons, and rather than take you to where you cast it, it instead takes you to the portal you used to enter the current room, typically a door.
Duplicating this exact functionality is a bit of a pain, because you have to make the spell not work in most maps, figure out where the player entered the current map from, etc. It's also questionable whether or not this functionality is even desirable in the first place.
I have a few reasons why I didn't want either of the two above proposed solutions, largely related to them creating all sorts of wonkiness in the overall design. So my initial design of the spell was simply an "Escape from battle" button.
Except a Smoke Ball (for those familiar with Pokemon items) is an extremely underwhelming spell. It also doesn't at all do what Farore's Wind actually does, which is another strike against it. But I didn't have any better ideas.
Until I did.
I have a system in the game for handling game overs. Rather than forcing the player to restart from their last save (a system I generally hate, ESPECIALLY in a game without autosaves) I'm using a plugin that let's you call a common event to handle game over in whatever way seems best.
For this game, I have Resurrection Points. When you step on one, it becomes active. If you have a game over, you'll simply respawn at the Resurrection Point.
And so my idea, which may be obvious at this point, is to have my Farore's Wind spell (called Rexia's Wind) allow you to warp to any Resurrection Point you've activated. I like this functionality a lot more. It's still restricted in a way, just like the original Farore's Wind spell is. It has a general (and useful!) functionality.
And because maps with Resurrection Points should be set up a certain way (like managing screen tints and weather), I don't have to worry about this causing weird corner cases to come up that otherwise shouldn't. All around, yay!
Anyway, that's my post. Take care, everyone!
Anyway, I have a world themed after Ocarina of Time. I want the player to be able to collect the spells from the Great Fairies: Din's Fire, Farore's Wind, and Nayru's Love. Two of these are pretty straight forward to implement.
Din's Fire simply becomes an AoE fire damage spell, and Nayru's Love grants a buff that reduces all physical and magical damage to zero. Like I said, that's pretty straightforward.
Farore's Wind, however, is not. Granted, it'd be pretty easy to make something that on the surface seems similar. I can simply make a common event with the option to place a warp point or to warp to the placed point. That's pretty easy using some variables to store the map and the x/y positions.
Only, that isn't what Farore's Wind actually does. Rather, in Ocarina of Time, Farore's Wind can only be used in dungeons, and rather than take you to where you cast it, it instead takes you to the portal you used to enter the current room, typically a door.
Duplicating this exact functionality is a bit of a pain, because you have to make the spell not work in most maps, figure out where the player entered the current map from, etc. It's also questionable whether or not this functionality is even desirable in the first place.
I have a few reasons why I didn't want either of the two above proposed solutions, largely related to them creating all sorts of wonkiness in the overall design. So my initial design of the spell was simply an "Escape from battle" button.
Except a Smoke Ball (for those familiar with Pokemon items) is an extremely underwhelming spell. It also doesn't at all do what Farore's Wind actually does, which is another strike against it. But I didn't have any better ideas.
Until I did.
I have a system in the game for handling game overs. Rather than forcing the player to restart from their last save (a system I generally hate, ESPECIALLY in a game without autosaves) I'm using a plugin that let's you call a common event to handle game over in whatever way seems best.
For this game, I have Resurrection Points. When you step on one, it becomes active. If you have a game over, you'll simply respawn at the Resurrection Point.
And so my idea, which may be obvious at this point, is to have my Farore's Wind spell (called Rexia's Wind) allow you to warp to any Resurrection Point you've activated. I like this functionality a lot more. It's still restricted in a way, just like the original Farore's Wind spell is. It has a general (and useful!) functionality.
And because maps with Resurrection Points should be set up a certain way (like managing screen tints and weather), I don't have to worry about this causing weird corner cases to come up that otherwise shouldn't. All around, yay!
Anyway, that's my post. Take care, everyone!
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