TERRA design notes

[Manibrandr System]

Figured I'd show you what i had written so far about the game.

--Stats outline--

HP - Self-explanatory, outlines the amount of damage a character can take before going down.
SP - Skill Points, using a combat tech would deplete the SP count, trying to use more than the current remaining SP may result in fatigue.
MP - Mystic Points, using any skill with magical attributes would deplete the MP count, trying to use more than the current remaining MP may result in dizziness.
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Str - Base measure of offensive abilities, used for inflicting physical damage and its associated effects.
Con - Base measure of defensive abilities, used for reducing physical damage and preventing its associated effects.
Wit - Base measure of mental acuity in hand-to-hand combat, used for blocking, critical hits, recovering from damage and reducing the time gap between attack/skill chains.
Agl - Base measure of physical speed, used to increase running speed and dodging attacks.
Sta - Base measure of physical perseverance, used for increasing SP recovery rate and decreasing SP consumption.
Men - Base measure pf mental perseverance, used for increasing MP recovery rate and decreasing MP consumption.
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Chain - Acquired and trained ability to chain skills together. Bonus +1 Wit, +2 SP and +1 Sta for each level increase.
Block - Acquired and trained ability to use different defensive skills together. Bonus +2 Con and +16 HP per level increase.
Counter - Acquired and trained ability to deliver quick and deadly ripostes. Bonus +2 Agl and +2 Wit per level increase.
Enchant - Acquired and trained ability to combine the forces of nature with one another or with special skills to form deadlier attacks. Bonus +1 Str, +2 MP and +1 Men per level increase.
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*Attack* Lv - Proficiency with a certain mode of attack. Each attack type has its own associated bonuses. Some skills require certain level criterions to be reached in order to be learned.
*Element* Lv - Proficiency with elements. Each element type its own associated bonuses. Some enchantments require certain level criterions to be reached before it can be unlocked.

- Map - There will be no overworld map in a conventional sense. Instead, a more detailed map will be brought up with a pointer to select the region in which the player/s wants to go to, this eliminates the tedium of needlessly going through regions several times over. To prevent the player/s from going to regions they're not supposed to go to, (ie. selecting an unexplored region not adjacent to the current region, adjacent regions currently blocked off, etc.) only regions accessible to the player/s will show up and/or be selectable, known regions that are blocked off will be greyed out and not be accessible. This leaves for many possibilities of hidden reward regions accessible to player/s under specific circumstances.
- Regions - There will be 2 types of regions, field and town. Both regions will take place in a 2-D side-scroller environment with parallax backgrounds.
- Field - In the field, while everything is in a side-scrolling environment, the the plane of movement isn't always in one direction. There will be branches from one area that would lead to another area facing a different direction. To handle this, a compass will be used to tell the player/s what direction the viewed area is facing and a grid will be used to show the areas explored and where the player/s is located at. Later in the game, multi-tier areas/regions will be introduced that would give rise to more types of field puzzles. All characters have a different set of field actions that leads to certain areas only accessible/unblockable by certain characters. To handle this, the party will be split accordingly with one group staying behind and another group waiting behind or doing other tasks. The party choices possibly affecting the exploration path in that same area. Areas like this are marked with a [color1] icon at the entrance as the player/s approaches them while areas accesible to all are marked with [color2] . There are also field hazards like traps, pitfalls, gas spouts, magma flows, ice-sheets etc that usually impose a detrimental effect to the party. they are marked with a [color3] icon. All party members will show up in the field lined up in the order specified in the formation menu. Player/s can also freely switch between field and battle mode. Although events may force-trigger a battle sequence and may even lock the player out of switching to field mode as long as the battle is still running.
- Town - Self-explanatory, it's a place where the player can do any number of the following : Buy items, equipment, arms, defensive armaments, relics, skills, etc. rest at a hotel/inn to restore health and energy for a nominal fee and gather information. on top of that, most towns have services unique to that area. Battles in towns are usually event-based, and so, there's no problem to let the game cut in to a battle screen when it happens.
- Battle - Follows a scheme quite simillar to that of fighting games, but simplified greatly for ease of use. Battles can be triggered by the player, force-triggered by an attacking enemy or by being trapped in a room full of enemies. Some battles cannot be escaped from. this includes, confined battles like in traps and arenas or 1 on 1 matches, boss battles and endless battles. Endless battles is a special type of battle in which a large amount of enemies are constantly entering the combat threshold at a set rate, usually with a max number of enemies currently battling. An endless battle is won by defeating all the enemies or surviving for a set amount of time.
- Food - Food is made by combining ingredients and using the needed cooking tools to make them. For some recipes, a fire is needed, which can be made with a field action when an area is cleared. Food is vital when going on extended trips, starve them and their performance will drastically decrease, in some extreme cases, the character will pass out if starved for too long. Moderation is also important when it comes to food, eating food in excess can also lead to temporary loss of performance. The lifetime of the food should also be considered, different food products expire after different periods of time, and some food products will ripen into another food product. Cooking proficiency in certain recipes will lead to discovery of more powerful combination recipes. A character's proficiency with certain elements can also modify or reverse the effect of certain recipes when eaten.
- Displays - The following will be displayed when the corresponding situation is at hand. Town : Nothing, the currency value will be brought up when financial transactions are to be made. Field : Field actions currently assigned, compass, map, character's HP, status and hunger meter. Battle : Enemy names, formation orientation, simplified diagram of party and enemy positions, character HP, MP and SP meters + status.
- Time - Ingame time follows a compressed scheme in which the field cycles between day and night in a matter of minutes. Certain things can be accessed during certain times of the day/week and it gives openings for possible time-critical quests. (Creating and handling backgrounds to reflect on this, as well as lighting and shadows is gonna be a bitch.)

--Combat Outline--

- Encounters - Combat is not random, nor does it whisk the player to a battle screen while they're in the field. Most areas in a field region are filled with a randomly-generated mob native to that region/areas and they're engaged as soon as the enemies or the player make contact or entered combat mode.
- Maneuvering - All characters start off with basic movement abilities like running and jumping etc. Later on, depending on performance in combat, characters will learn new maneuvering abilities that may carry over as field actions.
- Attacking - All characters have several attack types with either one of the 2 concurrently available attack attributes. Multi-hit combos can be then achieved by stringing together different attack types in a chain. The attack attributes available to the character at the moment depends on the weapon type that character is wielding. Usage of attacks builds up the related attack attribute levels.
- Defending - All characters start off with one defensive skill, blocking which, if sucessful, would reduce physical damage to one-quarter. The sucess rate of blocking is determined by a calculation involving derivative stats Acy and Evd. As the characters' various combat performance levels increase, they will learn new defensive skills.
- Skills - Skills are learned when certain levels of mastery over certain attributes are reached. Different skills are defined with two different classifications which is determined by the property of the skill. The first type of classification puts techs into four different categories depending on attributes ; Regular, Rising, Aerial and Special while the other puts then into three different power tiers ; Normal, Sacred and Divine.
- Chaining - This is an important skill which involves the player's ability to link different attacks and techs together to form a destructive combo. The type of chaining depends on the weapon equipped, and there are two types of chaining which follows one or the other of the classifications. The first one is related to position and follows like this : Attack combo - Regular - Rising - Aerial - Special and certain special techniques can have an extra technique chained after it. The other is related to the power tier level of the technique and goes like this : Attack combo - Regular - Sacred - Divine and Divine techs can only be unlocked and/or executed under certain conditions.
- Ability to Chain - The ability to chain techniques also comes with the Chain Lv of the character, as the Chain Lv is increases, the time gap between executing techs and the recovery time after a chain decreases and the timing range of extending a tech to the next in a chain is widened. For some techs, a better extend point may be opened up.
- Parrying - It occurs when both attacks clash together. When it happens, both player and enemy are knocked back and stunned for a short period of time and in some cases both may recieve a small amount of damage. The stun time and damage amount is directly proportional to the power of both of the attacks combined. There are two types of parrying, offensive and defensive. Offensive parrying is defined as trying to break through the enemy's attack/tech with a more powerful one of the player's, this has it's risks as the player may find themselves overwhelmed themselves. The sucess of offensive parrying is determined by calculating the total damaging potential of the player's tech against that of the enemy's. When sucessfully executed, the enemy recieves damage equal to the difference in power and they are knocked back and left wide open for the player to attack with a new chain. Defensive parrying is executed with regular attacks only, and can only be sucessfully executed with precise timing. The result is the enemy's attack being binded and frozen for a short while, leaving the player is free to deliver a riposte. Damage dealt by the attack chain following a sucessful defensive parry is markedly increased.
- Status effects - All status effects lasts for at least as long as the combat mode it is inflicted upon lasts. After combat, the status effect may disappear immediately or after a set period of time.
- Knock out - Occurs when the character hits 0 HP, this can be remedied immediately by expensive potions or healing techniques, or after an extended period of time where the character eventually gets up but with a critically low fraction of their max HP. While the former has the side-effect of a temporarily reduced max HP which slowly disappears after a short while or immediately after battle, the latter carries no side-effects. Also, any allies who are knocked out would immediately get back up with 1 HP when combat ends. The game ends when all allies are knocked out.
- Gameover - When all allies are knocked out, the player is given the option to either load from a save-state, restart from the entry point of the area with 1/4 of their [currency] gone and with all allies with critically low fraction of their max HP or to quit the game.

--Puzzle Outline--

- Frequency - The occurence of puzzles falls under 2 types, regular and auxilliary. Regular puzzles are required to get forward in an area/quest/part of story and thus could pop up anywhere...in towns and in fields. Auxilliary puzzles are puzzles that isn't required to be finished before moving on to the next part of the game, due to the nature of the puzzle, they'll only crop up in the fields randomly and is triggered when you walk into an area.
- Presense - Regular puzzles, since their presense is fixed, may or may not exclude enemies in that scene, depending on the nature of the puzzle. The random puzzles, however will make its presense known in the form of (most-frequently) Rube Goldberg machines and it clears the areas of all monsters, unless a particular monster is a part of the puzzle. Auxilliary puzzles cannot appear in areas where there are regular puzzles.
- Types and twists - Auxilliary puzzles are chosen randomly when it appears and how that puzzle is previously solved (or attempted to be solved) will affect the puzzle and ultimately...how the puzzle would be solved. That way, the same solutions cannot be used more than twice in a row when the same puzzle pops up.
- Difficulty - There are three ways in which I could handle the difficulty curve and I am still deciding which one to pick. The general idea is that the puzzles start off easy and then get harder as the game progresses. Regular puzzles, having a fixed appearance would also have a fixed difficulty curve, set by the actual design of the area itself. The difficulty of auxilliary puzzles, however, could be decided by either performing a check (or multiple checks) on how far in the storyline the player had progressed, the player/party's average combat exp level or the player's track record in solving puzzles. The idea here is that certain puzzles would be unlocked as the player completes more parts of the game.
- Risk and reward - For regular puzzles, the risk is loss of time, which can be painful when doing time-attack type quests and the reward is getting through the area, or acquiring an item required to progress to another area, or a secret entrance to bonus item/money rewards. For auxilliary puzzles, the risk is time if the player chooses to persist until he solves it, or money if the player chooses to "escape" the puzzle. Sometimes, the risk can even be in the form of the players' allies' physical wellbeing. The reward is often in the form of money, potent/expensive items, party restoration or later in the game extremely rare and possibly exclusively acquireable items.

--Element Outline--

- Duality - Every mystical element has its polar opposite. They are as follows : Water (It's more accurately described as any conductive fluid)(Material Flow) <-> Electricity (Energy Flow) Wind(Turbulence) <-> Earth(Stability) Fire(Heat)<->Ice(Cold, or lack of heat) Light(Life, regeneration) <-> Shadow(Death, decay) Space(Spatial Dimensions)<->Time(Temporal Dimensions)
- Effectiveness - Every element pair has a different effectiveness value which varies slightly depending on periods. Space and Time, remains at the same extremely high level of effectiveness regardless of time period. The effectiveness is measured in terms of percent, with the effectiveness of physical force of the same power fixed at 100%.
- Weakness and resistance - They are measured by percent which can protect the target from recieving damage by a fixed amount relative to the effectiveness percentage of the elements. Weakness is denoted by -% and resistance by +%. Healing works in a simillar way, but with resistance augmenting the healing effects instead of shutting it out.

--Gameplay Progression Outline--

- Mechanics - Introduces the basic maneuvers, comboes and techs at first, as well as simple recipes.
- Duration - Quests will start off short, and then progressively get bigger.
- Ancilliary Rewards -
Cut-scenes, monuments, titles.
- Practical rewards - Items for completing collection books, exploration is rewarded with rare items useful for field and combat, completing a certain amount of puzzles unlocks an puzzle minigame, then a separate puzzle mode. Completing the game unlocks a master mode. Completeing a battle tournament unlocks a more flexible and challenging control scheme, completing it in master mode unlocks a multiplayer brawl mode. Equipment acquired in the game is carried over to the multiplayer brawl mode. Completeing all the time-dependent missions is rewarded with access to a dungeon filled with treasure, completing them with an excellent score is rewarded with a multiplayer dungeon crawl mode. Downing an enemy is rewarded with Exp, shared by party and currency. Clearing an area of enemies is rewarded with health, stamina and mental restoration. Good performance in battle is rewarded with extra EXP and a higher chance of acquiring items.
- Difficulty - Enemies start off slow and with weak comboes with long gaps between attacks, they rarely block attacks. There are also simple obstacles in the field at the beginning. Puzzles also start off simple, straightforward and easy to solve.

Gameplay progression may seem trivial, but crafting gameplay progression carefully can mean the subtle difference between a game that keeps you hooked and wanting for more and a game that alienates players by introducing too much too early and bores them since there's nothing new introduced throughout the game.It's exactly what makes most Zelda games damn good.