Time to talk Cosmic Star Heroine design. Disclaimer – game is a work-in-progress, anything discussed here could end up not making it in the final game, etc.
All of our RPGs so far have featured a very simple stat system. In addition to the standard HP & MP, we have…
Strength – Determines effectiveness of “Attack” command and physical-based abilities.
Magic – Determines effectiveness of magic-based abilities.
Speed – Determines turn order in Breath of Death VII & Cthulhu Saves the World and turn frequency in Precipice of Darkness 3 & 4.
Vitality – Determines defense against physical attacks.
Will – Determines defense against magic attacks.
The equipment system in our games has also always been very simple with just 2 slots for equipment – typically a weapon + armor or weapon + accessory. Stats from equipment were just added directly onto stats from characters so there was no real difference between a character with 100 Strength wielding a 50 Strength weapon and a character with 50 Strength wielding a 100 Strength weapon.
This stat & equipment system was simple & easy to understand but it lacked depth & was abuseable by choosing one stat & stacking it (characters that had decent stats overall tended to be weak compared to more specialized builds). Individual stats weren’t all created equal – Strength & Magic were both very good, Speed was either amazing (Precipice 3 & 4) or okay (Cthulhu/BoDVII) and the defense stats were weak (especially Will since there are usually more enemy physical attacks than magic attacks). And equipment upgrades didn’t necessarily feel as exciting since the equipment bonuses were just added on top of your Stat + Previous Equipment totals and so usually weren’t a big enough difference to really notice (like a +10% or +15% to a couple stats) if you were upgrading every chance you got.
With Cosmic Star Heroine, we’re hoping to fix these problems while still keeping things fairly easy to understand. Let’s start out with the 4 main stats.
Body – Modifies effectiveness of weapons & weapon-based abilities. Improves physical defense & overall Max HP.
Mind – Modifies effectiveness of items & tech-based abilities. Improves Force Shield capacity.
Psyche – Modifies effectiveness of magic-based abilities. Improves magic defense & MP (starting & over turns)
Cunning – Modifies effectiveness of team-based abilities (beyond any bonuses they already received from Body, Mind, and Psyche). Lowers cost of variable MP abilities (like ailments). Determines turn order in battle.
As you can see, we have fewer main stats than we have in the past, but each one would give multiple effects. Although each stat boosts the associated abilities, stats also have additional benefits that can beneficial to all character types so stacking one stat isn’t as overpowered as it was before.
The equipment would be a bit different as well with each character having 3 equipment slots – Weapon, a Force Shield, and a slot that varies from character to character (for example, Alyssa’s extra slot would probably be for the various satchels where she keeps her spy gadgets). Actual power of various abilities would be more heavily based on the character’s current equipment, with the main stats giving a percentage bonus so that equipment feels more meaningful. And though equipment would get more powerful overall the further into the game you get, it wouldn’t always be a clear cut choice on which pieces of equipment should be used.
Now let’s talk about the one type of equipment that can be used by all characters – the Force Shield. Shields are the most interesting & complex piece of equipment in the game, so let’s take an in-depth look into them.
At the beginning of each battle, everyone’s shield is active.
If a character takes fatal damage while their shield is active, the shield saves them, become inactive, and they’re left with 1HP. Exception: If the attack dealt a TON of extra damage beyond that necessary to drop them to 0HP, even the shield won’t save them.
There are also some powerful special abilities (called Shield Burst abilities) that can only be used while the shield is active and make the shield inactive when used.
Various shields have different stat bonuses, passive abilities, and sometimes even active abilities that they bestow on the character while the shield is active.
Shields have slots which can be equipped with buffs (any buff abilities that any of your characters knows how to use; it doesn’t have to be the character currently equipping this particular shield). As long as the shield is active, that character gains all benefits from equipped buffs.
Shields have a capacity value (which gets a bonus from the character’s mind stat). The total value of all equipped buffs can’t exceed this value.
Inactive shields will automatically reactivate after X turns (where X varies from shield to shield & can be reduced with passives & abilities).
So there you have it. Shields provide a great way for the player to customize each character with various bonuses & abilities, a nice risk/reward aspect in the form of the Shield Burst abilities, reduces the role of luck in combat (shields give an extra safety buffer from random unlucky attacks), and add a nice sci-fi flavor to the gameplay. They will require a bit of rebalancing (for example, since everyone essentially gets a free revival, we’ll be making other forms of revival in combat harder to perform than they have been in our other games), but I think they’ll add a fun and unique aspect to the gameplay & the game’s world.
Everything looks good and I have enjoyed all your previous games but for me the best solution I can see to the whole prioritizing a certain stat for characters, is go the route of many other RPGs where, when you level up your characters just gain set boosts all over, so that each character you can use has their own specific role in the team. That way if there is someone, who storywise, is clearly a “mage” type character you cant just sit keep putting every point they have into body and suddenly this mage who are generally weak to physical attacks and low hp, can sit and take a beating and dish it out if they want
I would highly recommend having a video demo version of a fight showing these effects in practice for your kickstarter. These are very complex and a complete change from your previous games so having a clue what they are and seeing that you all aren’t biting off more than you can chew with such a small team would increase faith a lot.
Thanks for your comments, Étienne. What you suggested with separate Energy Shield Points & HP was something I played around with, but in the end, I decided it added unnecessary complexity without enough added depth to compensate.
As far as Body inherently being the best stat, that can be easily avoided by tinkering with the balance of various things. For example, the more useful high MP abilities we include in the game, the more important the Psyche stat becomes.
The way I see it, here’s a REALLY general stat role breakdown:
Physique (originally called Body) – This is the reliable stat. It increases your default attack & your general survivability, but it lacks much of the flair of the other stats.
Hackitude (originally called Mind) – This is the versatile stat. More (and better buffs) from shields, improved item use, and various tech abilities give you a great deal of versatility in how you approach things.
Sparke (originally called Psyche) – This is the power stat. More MP means more frequent use of the higher tier abilities, which (if they’re magic-based) will also be inherently more powerful due to the bonus from this stat.
Cunning – This is the sneaky stat. For the player who prefers to take the clever route and use a bunch of indirect abilities rather than rely on raw strength.
First post here, so I have to start by saying that the battle system in Rain-Slick 3 and 4 is probably one of the two best RPG battle systems I have ever played (the other one is from The Spirit Engine 2, which I think have been made free by its author).
Anyway, after the praise, the critique: I personally see two flaws with your current stat system idea.
1- Body seems to be an obvious “best” stat, since I can see characters that only focus in it being better than characters that either focus only in another stat or those that don’t focus in any single stat. This is because it govern everything that pertains to physical damage (mainly dealt by weapons): increases your attack strength, decreases your opponent attack strength, and increases the number of attack you can absorb before dying. Since body governs health, it means than character with low Body will be much more vulnerable to attacks from those with high Body than vice-versa.
2- Shield being damaged only after normal health has been depleted seems counter intuitive to me. Pretty much all games I know of which use a shield + health system have the shield be damaged first, and serve as a easily-recovered buffer for the normal health.
If I was to suggest one solution to both problems, it would be to reverse the role of “HP” (from Body) and “Force Shield” (from Mind). So instead of the Shield serving as a last ditch measure, have it be damaged first. And make it serve the same purpose as HP serves in your old game by making it much easier to heal than HP. HP would then serve as that buffer that only get depleted when your Shield is down, but is much harder to get back up once it’s damaged. You could also make it so that if the Shield goes down, it stays inactive for 2 or 3 turns (not allowing it to be healed by normal means), and then go back to active at full (or 50%) strength.
An additional idea if the first one is to be implemented would be to make it so that getting your shield knocked out of commission a big deal by making most debuff effects only work against unshielded characters. Then instead of the usual RPG strategy of:
1- Buff and Debuff at the beginning of the battle
2- Attack and Heal until the end of the battle
You could have:
1- Buff at the beginning
2- Attack the enemies until their shield goes off
3- Debuff the unshielded enemies
4- Finish them off / Switch to another enemy
(For some reason I don’t think I have ever seen a RPG combat system where you are encouraged to deal damage before using your debuff abilities.)
Another huge post of my thoughts and critique! Hopefully I’m not being too forward? I’ve still got another post on levels to do after this, it looks like.
On Stats:
I’m not sure I agree with the idea that stacking one stat was “abuseable”. That was the natural flow of the game – specialized characters are almost always going better than middle of the road ones, and are usually more fun. That’s the point of having an entire party.
I somewhat disagree with your assessment of stat usefulness. Strength was… next to useless in Precipice 3 – Crabomancer and Cordwainer let you substitute stats that actually did something useful for it, which somewhat broke any parity. In Precipice 4 it was significantly better due to those absences. Magic was a step above even then, generally providing more useful effects or at least being able to exploit weaknesses better. Speed was dominant in P3, but the inability to convert it to damage in 4 made it a fair trade. Vit was in the same boat, but suffered a lot more in the transition – Defense is only helpful when it’s on the character getting hit. You provide more options than usual for taunts, but it’s still fairly out of control. Will has all the problems of Vit, but had none of the skill bonuses, AND came up less often.
I’m not sure that changing to derived stats is the right solution for this, though. First off, it wasn’t a huge ‘problem’ (except for Tycho in Precipice 3 because he was intentionally middle of the line, and sort of fell behind at everything.)
–Actually wait, it’s not a solution because you still stack one stat? Let’s say we remake Precipice 4 using these stats – Instead of Mr. Beaks solely getting Str, he solely gets Body, and it’s straight up better, because now he has higher Defense and HP, too. Goomez only raises Cunning and Psyche instead of Speed and Magic; Vendorr has to get some Mind in addition to his body because item power isn’t fixed anymore, but he’s way more capable at attacking now. All this does is make characters more versatile, not have more evened stats. And more versatile characters means less challenge in figuring out how to use the limited abilities you have to overcome a challenge: basically the core of the fun in an RPG with character customization? Quoting myself from yesterday: “specialization means you’re more dominant when you can apply it, which is viscerally more fun; and figuring how a limited toolset can effect a situation is more interesting than picking out the most obvious tool for the job.”
Ignoring all that, though, names. I’d pick… “Vigor / Savvy / Spirit / Cunning” if they all had different initials. Psyche’s workable, I guess.
On Equipment:
First off, Arc Rise Fantasia. If you haven’t played it
fix thateach weapon in the game had no inherent stats, only a 4×4 grid in which you could place Arm Forces, which were 2-6 tile pieces that provided various effects; from basic stat bonuses, elemental damage or status effects on normal attacks, starting with buffs, increased critical chances or followup attacks, elemental and ailment resistance, auto-defense or auto-potion, or even active abilities like Taunt, Cover, Steal, or Attack-All. The only difference between weapons (besides visuals) was the Arm Force that came on it by default – meaning you were limited to exactly one copy of each – and the one activated when the grid was completely filled.There are basically three main lessons: A – Flat stat bonuses are boring. B – Picking a selection of things that complement each other is better than getting one best choice. C – Not being able to use an effect more than once forces variety and making tough choices. (Also D – Block puzzles are fun, which I might honestly be underrating.)
Moving the conversation back to you, the biggest problem with Equipment has been finite resources. Spending money on something that would end up getting replaced felt like foolish decision? That’s already fixed, supposedly, so.
Past that, you don’t go into enough detail for me to give meaningful analysis. Would each weapon have an independent base power for each skill, or what? I’m not sure what you were getting at there. I guess I could comment that I’m going to miss shared armor – prioritizing resources is something I found fun, as mentioned.
On Force Shields:
I think this is a really cool idea, but I question a few elements of the execution.
I’m not sure there’s a need to make them individual pieces of equipment. It seems to me they’d work better as inherent elements of the character that are frameworks for equipment, but I’m quite possibly just influenced by my thoughts above.
Instead of just having buffs that your party can cast already (The point of those is to use them in battle! Would you be able to relayer them? How about apply them while the shield is down?) I’d have all the passive and active abilities (including bursts) you had planned as customization parts you could equip up to your capacity. The amount of time shields stay down for would be dependent on which burst ability you used or how much overkill it tanked, possibly modified by Mind.
On that note, giving them all Undershirt native is a little odd, but I can accept it. (On the other hand, point C above.) I’m not sure how much it “reduces luck in combat”, if you really wanted that, you should work for giving more options to funnel damage where the player wants it. That said, adapting to that kind of luck is one of the major elements of difficulty and skill, so.
Actually, Ingenuity seems like it’d be a good name for the Mind stat.
I agree with Tekkaz, “Mind”, should probably be “Tech”, or “Skill”, or (dare I say it…) “Smatrz”. (Ouch) Or you will need an in-game description of “Mind” as ingenuity rather than raw psychic power.
I really like the idea of the passive versus active “bursts” on shields. A thought on a “medical” shield, have an aura that heals all friendlies a small amount each turn, with a burst for a large single character heal, but at that time, not only is your shield gone, but the healing aura is gone till it reactivates. (hmm, you could do damage shields that do the same to)
That integrated stats system reminds me of the versatile base stats in Torchlight II. I know that you probably don’t enjoy TL2 as much as I do, but I’m very intrigued by that basic stat setup.
I can’t wait to reach the midgame of CSH and see what all the variety of shields present. Builds for high survivability and buffs; builds to blow your shield for massive damage; I’m pumped.
Sounds great. I love the way the different stats interact with eachother, and the shield system sounds quite interesting.
I definitely don’t envy the task of balancing the whole thing, though.
Sounds really cool. I like the integrated stat approach (reminds me of Shadowrun, in a way, probably just because I’ve been re-familiarizing myself with the ruleset lately). Shields sound nice too.
I might consider renaming psyche and mind, possibly even switching them, to avoid confusion.
I love it, such an insightful article. Man you guys are killing me, I can’t wait for the kickstarter