Week 38 updated: other than some minor eventing done for the party, I basically vegged out this week and played (er, researched, yea thats it) Shining Force 3 (I took notes, so it counts right?).
Quick overview and thoughts: game has some elements that haven't aged well, but I still like the feel of it. I absolutely hated the random-stats on level up thing now though, as it basically encourages save-scumming in order to get a perfect character (or in some cases, just a character that doesn't suck). The AI was meh but at least had some interesting events (and otherwise normal patterns: CHARGE, FORM UP, ADJUST, etc). The weapon skills thing was interesting, and simple; it certainly was no Disgaea. Weapons also had a sort of rock-paper-scissors thing going on, and certain characters had both ranged and melee weapons they could swap between in the very, very limited inventory space (4 slots, a spare weapon takes 1 slot so anything you bring better count). While I kinda like this limited space, it sucked at times because you find items on the battlefield and if you had no inventory space they were gone for good (so better make the person with space open kill the final boss, or find the secret on the map (which was plenty annoying at times in a system where you cant go back and search)). The friendship system seemed almost non-consequential, but it did seem interesting at least (hit something someone else hit, or heal someone to get points, people grant minor stat boosts when near a friend: hard to take advantage of unless you basically stack up in a wall). Also... extreme hatred for hiding incredibly valuable things in town barrels, or a shelf, or a goddamn rock in a corner of the town... ugh (the 3d-effect / camera moving and the way the menu came up if you didn't find anything when pushing a button to search made this even worse)
My take: Limiting space can be good, but limiting acquisition sucks: make sure people have opportunities to grab stuff later (and since its a persistent dungeon crawler I'm making its essential anyway more or less) or stow stuff they find immediately (which reminds me, while Grimrock (1 &2) was more in person and in depth, sorting thru all the shit you found and having to drag it all to storage piles where you have to pick up and move shit around to find anything also sucked.... and you were SOL if you dropped a key somewhere in a corner and forgot it!). Any AI worth its salt also needs to assume ranged weapons exist. Weapon skills were sort've planned anyway, this is just more fuel for the fire. I don't exactly plan on friendship junk but I can certainly do straight up buffs on stack-up and proximity (and I can make more interesting options here since I can do things for both stacked and non-stacked strategy). I still need to figure out a leveling system that works in the long run, but random stats seems like not the way to go: I want characters to be something you build up, not something you get lucky with (or just reset over and over till you do). Since I plan for mooks to be killable, I also need something that lets you get new ones up to speed quickly as well, so I'll have some sort of checkpointing based advancement options (or straight leader ability or shared xp or something to do with the bones of the old character, etc).
Whew. Anyway, maybe this week I'll finally finish that event thingy eh?
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Topic: Tactical Dungeon Crawler: resuming updates soon: asking questions (Read 11200 times)