1) "Characters"General info: Characters are something I'm going to use to tie together the walkaround and battle systems. As it stands now, each sprite in the walkaround engine is essentially just a extension of Flashpunk's Sprite class (IIRC - I haven't looked at the code in a while.) With the characters system, each character would have an associated walkaround sprite throughout the entire code, and there could be a global "active character" variable so that you could constantly switch throughout the Gristmas Flash. Each character would also have their own inventory, stats and battle data.
Inventory: The normal Homestuck walkarounds probably only pretend to have an inventory via changing flags and such -- for example, I don't think there was a "John's Inventory" container object in Enter Village, nor were the items in Alterniabound actually stored as an item object somewhere once gained. However, the inventory thing is somewhat necessary for Gristmas, as a couple of puzzles, I think, will require the trading of items. Moreover, the inventory itself will be actually accessible from battle. This probably won't benefit the Gristmas flash's secret much, but if I ever use this engine for another forum game it will be mandatory.
I'm debating on whether or not to add an "Inventory Screen" where you can scroll through your items. If this goes in, I doubt it'll be for Gristmas.
Stats/skills: Currently, I don't plan to add an equipment system, but I may in the far future. Instead, each character has a variety of skills (which include their basic attack) that may or may not cost SP (still debating on this, see below). Each skill is augmented in some way by one of the basic stats:
HP - Pretty obvious. You lose this, you get the KO status. Yes, there will be other statuses in the future.
SP - I'm not sure about this yet. The way I see it, I could be creative and have each character's power be the same as HSRPG, with Encounter powers only usable once per battle. On the other hand, that might be completely stupid. If so, stronger/cooler powers will cost SP, and you can recover it (after battle|each turn|something else).
Mangrit/Imagination - Will probably determine the strength of physical attacks and mental/magical powers, respectively. Scaling them up via level (if I ever do a walkaround that includes level grinding) would be an excellent way to make your current skills stronger. Mangrit also determines your physical defense and Imagination determines your magical defense.
Acumen: Your evasion, accuracy and speed. That's pretty much it - if your enemy has high Acumen and you have low Acumen, you will miss quite a bit. This can be overcome by some skills which ignore Acumen (or increase/decrease it). As for speed, whoever has the highest speed goes first once skills have been chosen.
Pulchritude: The luck stat. I wasn't sure how to integrate "Presence/Force of will" into such a simplistic system, so I figured I would make Pulchritude determine your other miscellaneous stats like critical hit chance, chance to nullify magical attacks (since a lot of these ignore Acumen) and chance to resist/recover from status effects.
2) Flow off battle/battle screenMore on this later. Basically, the flow would be:
1. Turn start
2. First player controlled character chooses their move
2.5. Said character chooses target
3. Repeat from step two for each PC in order (note that this is based on party order, something I'll cover later, not on speed)
4. Enemy decides on skills and target
5. Character with highest speed acts (in case of ties, the priority is highest character on the party order, then the next highest if any, etc. until the same thing happens for the foes)
6. The skill animation plays, a text box announcing the skill appears and the effect is applied
7. Repeat from step 5 for each combatant in order of speed
So basically, like Final Fantasy I with a slightly different speed mechanic.
Animations? ANIMATIONSSSSWhoa man I suck at animating sprites. Especially human-shaped ones. If I get better, though, each character will have six separate battle animations: idle, physical skill use, mental/magical skill use, taking damage, KOed and battle won. Additionally, each skill will be coded in with an effect animation to use during/after the associated character's skill use animations. All of this would be relatively simplistic, style-wise, but still quite a bit more complicated than the regular walkaround animations.
As for sizes, characters will likely be 16x32 each frame. Battle backgrounds will probably be 320x240 (unless I decide to base them around the size of bottom menu.
Other stuffStill working on it. If anyone's got question fire em off.
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Topic: Homestuck RPG v1.2 build thread (Read 80259 times)