Okay, I'll admit that's an awful title.
The real subject of today's blog is the resource systems of Pokémon
and Tensai. I haven't mentioned it in the last two blogs, but Tensai
wasn't designed to have a single player experience; I was creating
JUST the Battler, and because of that, Pokémon's PP system, which
was designed to be a sort of dungeon attrition system like a D&D
“casts per day” or Final Fantasy 1's system simply wouldn't make
sense.
Apart from the moves in Pokémon that
only have 5 base PP, it's very rare to actually run out of uses of a
move in a battle between trainers unless you're up against a Stall
team, or you're playing 6v6 Rocky Helmet Magikarps. The only other
exception came if you had a Pokémon with the Pressure ability, but
even then, it wasn't that impactful in actually making the casting
resource feel like a worthwhile part of the battle to worry about.
Because of this, I wanted a resource
system in Tensai that would actually have an effect on the battle.
And so, “Essence” was born. Essence basically works like mana
systems in today's card games; you gain a little bit of essence every
turn (however, essence spent is gone once it's spent, rather than you
gaining even more the next turn.)
You would start and cap out at 50
Essence and most basic moves would cost around 10-25 Essence,
depending on their base power and their effects, while the more
powerful moves would cost 35-50. You gained 20 Essence per turn, and
could elect not to attack and instead use the “Rest” command to
recharge an additional 10 Essence for a total of 30, which would put
you at the cap on the ensuing turn.
Draw a Card, Play Your Opponent
This system fed directly into the
Action-Type system (see parts 1 and 2) as well, once you learned your
opponent's team. For example, if your opponent only had 30 Essence,
and you knew his strongest move was a 35 or 50, he couldn't use it
this turn. That's one Action-Type you can eliminate from the realm
of possible uses this turn. He can play Rock or Paper, but he can't
play Scissors. Better play Paper yourself for the best odds!
If you saw your opponent rest on the
first turn after hitting 0, it means he's rushing back to 50 Essence
and probably wants to immediately use his strongest attack. If his
strongest attack is a Magical Action-Type, ready up that Melee you
have equipped and go to town while you take no damage!
From the attacker's viewpoint, it also
made a player be wary on when to choose to use his strongest attacks;
if you made it too obvious, you could be countered rather easily and
use all that essence for naught. You would have to set up your
opponent to unexpect the expected in order to deliver your wrath.
Keeping smaller cost moves around so you can stay at max Essence and
leave that threat of a high damaging move available was an important
strategy.
By making the resource system actually
impactful on the battle and give soft limitations on what moves could
be used at a given time, it gave me as the designer a lot of control
over the flow of a battle and more room for the direct
Player-versus-Player Prediction interaction granted by the inclusion
of Action-Types.
Mix, Mix, Swirl, Mix!
Furthermore, the Essence bar was split
between whether the attacks were Aether (Magical) or Eidos (Physical)
– if your move was Aether, you used Aether Essence. If your move
was Eidos, you used Eidos Essence. Only one minor move in the game
took Essence from both bars.
This meant that if you had Mixed-Damage
type Sweeper with a powerful Eidos move AND a powerful Aether move,
you could use the moves in succession, whereas if you had a Sweeper
of just Eidos moves, using a 50-base power move would leave your bar
depleted and force you to rest or use only weak moves until you
recharged. While Mixed Sweepers weren't necessarily STRONGER than
the more focused ones, but because of having their casting resource
split into two bars, they could use more powerful moves more often,
which could've give them a larger place in the eventual meta-game had
Tensai ever been completed.
The separated Eidos/Aether resource
system also encouraged players to potentially invest in one of their
three moves as a Defensive or Magical Action-Type move of a different
cost type (Clarification, Not all Magical Action-type moves were
Aether. The two concepts are separate.) than their primary damage
stat, even if they weren't mixed. Defensive-type moves almost all
dealt a status effect in addition to a mild amount of damage, so it
could come in handy having the ability to inflict Unstable or Stunned
to an opponent with a Defensive move at any given time. By making
this option on your Creature not cost the same resource as your
attack moves, you could use it solely for its utility rather than
caring about its inflicted damage.
A Balancing Metric, Should I Ever
Need One
Last but not
least, the revamped resource system of Tensai gave me an additional
slider to use to balance moves, if the game had ever been completed.
Say, for instance, a move felt like it did the right amount of
damage, but its additional effects just seemed to much. But, if you
removed any of those additional effects, the move wouldn't feel worth
taking.
If they put that
in Pokémon, and attempted to reduce its available PP, it wouldn't
really affect the player-versus-player metagame too much. But in
Tensai, I could increase the Essence cost and greatly affect its
availability over the course of a battle.
I used this
pre-emptively on Stun moves (read: Flinch from Pokémon.). Any move
with a Stun except for a few exceptions costed AT LEAST 35 Essence.
In other words, if you used it at 50 Essence, you could only use it
one more turn successively before being out of Essence. This meant
that you couldn't go Jirachi Serene Grace Iron Head RNG cheesiness to
open up a battle. (Of course, since I gutted RNG, the Action-Type
system alone nerfed this strategy, but it's still worth noting.)
I also used it on
Increased Priority moves to make the majority of them cost over the
20 essence mark to ensure a player could not follow-up a Coup de
Grace 50 Essence move with a high priority move; this may have been a
heavy-handed over nerf before such a strategy was even tried, but my
gut told me it would be necessary. The world may never know!
All in all, the
resource system of Tensai was a mechanism I was very proud of how
well it fit into the rest of the design of the game, and excited to
see how it would be handled once in players' hands. That's all for
today's blog.
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