dungeon encounters

[Ωbright]

Re: dungeon encounters

You can't change anything about random battles, period, once gameplay starts.

Um...huh? SURE you can! You can increase OR decrease the encounter rate to NOTHING with items and/or skills...you just can't do it via an event, that's all. I admit that that is pretty disappointing, but it doesn't mean the random encounters are totally inflexible.

However, you can't change the levels of the enemies you encounter, or change the parties associated with a specific area/terrain in game, and I think that's what the original post was asking.

[Perversion]

Re: dungeon encounters

Yeah, coding the attribute increases was a breeze, as was the levelling/skill gaining, but I've kind of put the game on hold for a while, for the exact reason you mentioned. It's gonna be a LOT of work to balance this thing.

[Crythania]

Re: dungeon encounters

Yeah, coding the attribute increases was a breeze, as was the levelling/skill gaining, but I've kind of put the game on hold for a while, for the exact reason you mentioned. It's gonna be a LOT of work to balance this thing.

I think it would be the most fun with a party of three or four. You start out with a party of very generic characters, and you can customize them any way you want (by spending each guy's Xp on attributes). The guy who's a powerful mage isn't decided for you. You get to decide who becomes a powerful mage, who becomes a powerful warrior, and so on.

And now that I'm giving it some more thought, I think the point of it is for it to be unbalanced. If you want one guy to be a strong melee fighter, you can do that by purchasing Strength increases for him above all else. Purchasing lots of Strength increases for him would come at the cost of Magic, Defense, and other things, but your strong warrior would be able to pwn the opposition. Same goes for a powerful mage. Or you could purchase Defense increases and build a guy into an unstoppable tank. Or if you want, you can keep the entire party balanced so that they don't have any weaknesses. The point is that we (the players) are making decisions that continuously unbalance the game, be it to our favor or otherwise. Each decision you make is creating a new situation where your characters develop new strengths and weaknesses. The strategy of it is to play up whatever strengths you choose while trying to cover your weaknesses, and live with whatever decisions you've made.

"Raiders Of Lekunder" is a balanced game. It's full of decisions that I've already made for the player (who belongs to each element, who gets which spells, who has which strengths and weaknesses). It's gonna have two sequels along the same lines (same style of gameplay). By the time I'm finished with all of that, I'll be ready to see this new style of gameplay, for better or worse. If it works brilliantly, that'll be great. If it sucks... oh well, I tried. But the point is to unbalance it any way the player chooses.

[Dusk Raven]

Re: dungeon encounters

Um...huh? SURE you can! You can increase OR decrease the encounter rate to NOTHING with items and/or skills...

I stand corrected.. slightly.

[Perversion]

Re: dungeon encounters

Yeah, Cry, in the original version of Series 2, it was gonna be like that with four characters. Unfortunately, for the idea I mentioned above with only one character (Ep. 1 of Series 4), I've already got the storyline all worked out for both episodes, both teasers, and the prequel. It NEEDS to only have one player character for the story to do what I need it to do. If I grafted additional party members onto it, it just wouldn't work right. So yeah, I'm kinda stuck.

[Crythania]

Re: dungeon encounters

Yeah, Cry, in the original version of Series 2, it was gonna be like that with four characters. Unfortunately, for the idea I mentioned above with only one character (Ep. 1 of Series 4), I've already got the storyline all worked out for both episodes, both teasers, and the prequel. It NEEDS to only have one player character for the story to do what I need it to do. If I grafted additional party members onto it, it just wouldn't work right. So yeah, I'm kinda stuck.

Just a thought: Perhaps a customizable character (in the sense that we're talking about) just won't work for Ep 1 of Series 4. I had some really fun-sounding ideas I was going to incorporate into "Tales Of Valasia", but while I was working on it I realized that the ideas wouldn't work very well in that particular gaming environment. They might work in a different game with a different style of gameplay. Not every idea is well-suited to all styles of gameplay. Ideas need to be paired up with gameplay styles that they fit in with.

Just a thought.

[kamekaze77]

Re: dungeon encounters

yes, i still intend to use random encounters...don't kill me

i'm wondering if there's a way to increase the levels of monster parties, or alternatively if there's a way to change the encounter settings with event coding? i havent seen anything there, but i'm probably not looking in the right spots. any ideas?

I suppose If you had lots of time you could have an Autoevent trigger after ten battles are reached, teleporting you to a feild map exactly the same as the previous one. Talk about teidious.

[ReverendWolf]

Re: dungeon encounters

Tedious indeed. I think I'm going to have to do some real thinking about what I'm doing as far as my battles are concerned. I having troubles designing some balanced encounters, and I was hoping I could do some dynamic leveling Elder Scrolls style, to keep things interesting.