Displaced: Combat (Patreon)

The combat system is my arch nemesis. Every time I touch it, I end up spending eternity on it and it happens to be very limiting and disappointing to me. Makes me slightly jealous how some engines (mostly rpg maker) have inbuilt combat system, but those likely wouldn't be sufficient for my ambitions after all. 

In Displaced I'm still sticking to the turn based combat, firstly because I generally prefer it to action sequences (plus they can generally be played with 1 hand with more ease), and naturally because they are easier to work with. You might wonder, why would it be hard to make a turn based combat, but even turn based combat is very 'timey'. You can't just say 'click this do that', you also have to take into account what happens after every action on many parts, what should trigger next and so on. Without a good plan or experience this can quickly lead to disaster. And then you would want to add sfx/animations on top of it...

But enough of my complaints, let's talk a bit on the details. For the sake of convenience we will be using a fighting GUI instead of full body sprites again. Maybe we will make an actual combat sprites, but for demo only portraits will have to perform. The battlefield will feature a 6 by 6 spots which are separated with front and back rows. Melee attacks won't be able to attack back rows until front rows are killed. Most of the time, at least in the start, both player and enemy parties will be lesser in size though. Besides normal attacks you will also be able to use items and special attacks which might cost mana. 

I have a tendency to overly design many mechanics, especially combat related, since I always had a big thing for very deep systems with lots of options and counterplays, but lately I make plenty of cuts to make it firstly as straightforward and easy to grasp as possible. My original thought was to let player hire different class adventurers, who would be able to learn different skills and use different equipment. I'm not entirely against that, but figured out, it will make for a much better immersion to let player fight with story characters at least in a demo version. As for the classes, most likely we will stick to 1 class and couple of skills for the demo. 

I also plan to provide much better details to the whole thing, making it feel like a real game: besides making whole system from the scratch I want to make custom sfx and sound effects, which to my opinion, provide a far greater experience. 

As a bonus for today, here's main settlement background for day and night!