So, since I've pretty much beat the
core combat system to death for these Tensai blogs, I thought I would
cover something a little lower-impact but, in my eyes, equally
important to setting up a Pokémon clone for competitive success.
And that's individual monster customization.
I already touched on the equipment that
can be equipped and swapped to modify and adapt strategies on the
fly, but there's an additional bit to the Pokémon formula that
competitive players love to tweak, but it's covered in such a
horrendous mess of never-really-explained mechanics and bits and
pieces of information that were hidden from the player until the most
recent generation.
I'm talking Effort Values, Individual
Values, Natures, et cetera. In Pokémon, your monster gained “effort
points” or “stat exp” each time it defeated another Pokémon,
which could build up to boost your effectiveness in that stat. This
was a sort of under-the-hood customization option that wasn't really
clear to players until Generation 3 where the formula was adjusted to
be a stat point for every 4 Effort Points you accumulated with a max
of 255 effort points (the formula in generation 1 was the square root
of the stat EXP you'd gained, with a max amount of 65,535, so 63 stat
points just like the latter system). An individual Pokémon could
not accumulate more than 510 effort points (which meant if you got 63
points in 2 stats, you had only 6 points, or 1 stat point left to be
acquired).
If you didn't already know any of this
stuff, there's a chance you're confused right now. And that's a big
problem. The EV system is a convoluted mess that's hard for a player
to learn and track. Furthermore, since the Evs in a stat could max
at 255, but the point yield stopped at 252, there was an ability for
players to “waste” a stat point they could've acquired had they
not stopped training a specific stat. This is not true in Generation
6, but the fact that three generations existed with this limitation
is a rather depressing notion.
When it came to the competitive scene,
EVs were generally used either to boost offense or defense depending
on whether a Pokémon was a sweeper or a wall, with EVs being
assigned to Speed to reach certain break points to out-speed certain
common match-ups the monster may face. Overall, this is a great use
of the customization stats – players could choose to risk going
second against a bad match-up for an extra punch against match-ups
where speed was irrelevant. A meaningful choice had to be made in
team building for what the player wanted out of their Pokémon's
capabilities when building their EVs.
Then we have Individual Values and
Personality Values. These have effects on your Pokémon's stats, appearance, and which
ability (passive) it gains. IVs affect which version of Hidden Power
your Pokémon gains, and whether or not your Pokémon can truly max
out their stats. And yet, if you read the Bulbapedia pages I linked
for them... it's an even more convoluted mess than EVs I described
above. I'm not even going to attempt to describe how IVs work,
because the system is so needlessly complex just for the sake of
adding grinding to the single-player game for completionists who want
the perfect creatures.
Well, Tensai's original designs were to
be a standalone battler; no single-player. The grind is unnecessary,
so variations in stats between different creatures of the same type
were not a requirement for the game. Leveling up was also not
present in my game, so having additional stat bonuses (like EVs)
gained from battling other creatures was another unnecessary
inclusion. But I still wanted the level of competitive
customizability offered by natures, EVs, and the like, as well as the
inclusion of a Hidden Power-like move with a variable element based
off something other than the element of the creature using the
ability.
Fortunately, Tensai was set in a
fantasy world I've been world-building for years, and one of the core
concepts of that world happened to fit perfectly into what I was
looking to do in order to emulate Pokémon. So now it's time for a
bit of a fantasy storytelling about the world of Astral Gate.
I mentioned back in the first blog the
world had seven elements: Fire, Metal, Ice, Wood, Air, Water, and
Earth. In addition to this, there is a duality of the spiritual and
the physical, which I borrowed from Plato and labeled Aether and
Eidos. Each of these seven elements pair with the duality for
fourteen signs of their astrological Zodiac. Some examples are the
Eidos Fire sign, a flaming bear known as Guiredaro, the Aether Wood
sign, a giant rooster with leaves in place of feathers known as
Cockatrees, or the embodiment of terror from the Eidos Metal sign,
the Razor, a creature made of sharp bladed edges with the body of a
scorpion and the head and aggression of a wolf.
With the existence of this concept, I
not only had 14 creatures ready to add to my game, but also the
ability to compress EVs and Natures into a single menu option that
players could change when setting their team in order to determine
which stats were boosted, by setting a critter's star sign. Each
Zodiac would boost one stat by a reasonable amount, one by a small
amount, reduce one by a small amount, and another by larger amount in
my initial designs (there was a distinct possibility these would've
been changed, especially stat penalties, which are generally not
well-received by players, even with the positive trade-off of gaining
the stats they want.)
I mentioned Hidden Power as well, a
move that in Pokémon, could be any type depending upon the user's
IVs (and prior to Gen 6, had variable power as well). For the sake
of porting this move into Tensai, I simply created an attack move
called Zodiac that took the element and essence depending upon the
star sign assigned to the creature using the move, enabling some
creatures to use moves not of their own element (but with a lowish
base power). This was great for those who wanted to use a Health
Pack or non-elemental weapon but still wanted the additional option
of elemental coverage. Whether the move was physical or 'special'
(in Pokémon terms) was determined by whether the Zodiac sign was
Aether or Eidos as well.
In the event that this system was
oversimplified and caused player frustrations between stat
customization and the assigned Zodiac move element, I had the option
to more deeply mimic the Chinese Zodiac and its use of Inner Signs
and Secret Signs (since the primary Chinese zodiac is based off the
year in which you're born, while Inner is based off the date, and
Secret based off the time of day.) where a player could assign a
second sign solely for the purpose of determining the element/duality
of the Zodiac attack move.
For the sake of a standalone battler,
this Zodiac sign based system (which, admittedly, isn't a unique
idea; Final Fantasy Tactics has used it, and I'm sure others have as
well.) happened to fill all the needs of the stat customization
options of Pokémon with none of the grinding or needless complexity
from the original iterations.
That's all for part 5, regarding
simplifying the tangled web of numbers and bits and bytes and nibbles
of hidden or only partially communicated information that is the
Pokémon IV EV PV LV DV R2D2 system of values that create the
variations between monsters in the game. Not sure what the next part
will include; I still have to talk about the passive abilities in
more depth, but I've nearly covered the majority of the core design
of the game at this point. Hope you enjoyed the read!
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