For Fate
by arkeus
I don’t think I’ve given too much information on For Fate yet, so I wanted to give a higher level overview of the various things I’m planning for the game. I’ve been working on various systems, planning things out and so forth, so now is as good a time as any to talk about it. A lot of this is subject to change, and perhaps I’ll do more overview posts as I get more things locked down, change my mind about features, etc. So here goes!
Story
Kal and Elle have long waited for the day they can visit the Temple of the Makers and read their destinies from the Book of Fate. The book, granted to the citizens of the world by its Makers, contains a destiny page of every person to be born into the world. High Law states that upon a citizen’s 16th birthday, he or she may travel to the temple to read their fate. As Kal and Elle reach their 16th birthdays, they travel to the Temple to read what the Makers have in store for them. While Elle finds her fate to be more frightening than her worst nightmare, Kal finds his fate blank. Circumstances set them out, each with a mission: Kal to discover his unwritten destiny, and Elle to protect herself from her unwanted Fate. Their paths lead them through war, death, and a secret of the Royal Family. Only together can they conquer their fates and uncover the secrets of Project 4f7.
[Disclaimer: This is a brief introduction as the story currently stands. There is an incredible amount of flesh out before anything is written in stone.]
Battle System
The battle system will consist of a typical turn based battle system with a party of up to four characters at once. As you explore the world you’ll see enemies wandering the map, and upon touching them you’ll engage in combat. A lot of monsters will be avoidable, some will wander aimlessly, while others will attempt to engage you if you get to close. This allows you to attempt to avoid monsters if you choose. However, the battle system is intended to be a fundamental part of the game, and attempting to avoid all monsters will result in your party getting crushed from lack of power.
Casting an Icicle spell
Moves are based on a modified version of an ATB system. Each character has an active time bar that fills. Once full, your character will be eligible to attack. However, rather than waiting until your bar is full, pausing all ATB bars, choosing moves, and then continuing, you can immediately choose the attacks for your character before the ATB bar is full. This allows you to queue up all the moves for your characters ahead of time, so they are ready to unleash the attacks as soon as the bar is filled. This drastically speeds up the pace of combat, making it feel more faster paced. If a character reaches a full ATB and has not yet chosen moves, then the ATB bars will pause. This allows you take all the time in the world to plan out your attacks without penalizing you for not being able to decide on moves fast enough, but still gives you the freedom to queue ahead of time if you know what you want to do.
Each turn you will choose multiple attacks for your characters. This system is heavily influenced by the battle system found in Final Fantasy XIII. Each character begins the game with 2 command slots which you can fill with moves. Basic moves will use only 1 slot, while other moves will use multiple slots. An example of this is early on you might choose to fill your bar with 2x slash attacks (each using 1 command slot) or 1x icicle spell (which does aoe damage, but takes both slots for the turn). As you progress through the game, characters will gain more slots (the current planned maximum is 6 slots, and I expect skills to take between 1 and 3 slots each).
For each character you’ll be able to define 3 command sets. This is a preset of commands that you can use to quickly fill your command bar. This allows you to define a set of moves that you use often, and choose that set for the turn with 1 click, rather than choosing all the spells every time.
Skills will range from single target magic damage, to heavy aoe attacks, to buffs to your characters, to heals, to attacks that deal damage over X number of turns. See the character system for more information on skills.
Duh duh duhhh duhhh duhhhh duh duh duh
World
As you progress through the world you’ll visit various areas. You’ll encounter towns, forests, caves, mountains, and more along the way. While there will be a main storyline that you follow as you progress, you’ll encounter hundreds of side quests to complete. Some of them will be incredibly simple, such as exploring a mountain searching for a flower to help cure a character’s illness. Others will be much more in depth, and may span a large course of the game. While these are completely optional, you’ll find tons of story, powerful items, and special bosses as you do these quests.
An example of one of the many detailed maps you'll explore
Character/Class System
At any time in the game you can have up to 4 characters in your party, but you’ll find other characters to join you as you complete both the main storyline and side quests. You’ll be able to swap these characters in and out of your party whenever you are not in combat.
There will be 5 classes in the game (Knight, Archer, Cleric, Wizard, and Rogue). All characters will have a class, and you’ll be able to change your class at any time. When you win battles as a specific class, you’ll gain experience for that class. All 5 classes will have a separate level. For example, you might have a character that is a level 7 wizard and level 3 cleric. Each time you level up a class, you gain access to choose 1 of 2 skills for that class. One example of this is that when you hit cleric level 4 you can choose between a spell that does shadow damage over time to a target enemy or a spell that slightly heals each member of your party. This allows you to customize how your characters play, even if you want multiple characters of the same class.
When a character is currently in a specific class, they gain a bonus. A character who is currently a Wizard might gain +40% wisdom stat, -20% magic damage taken, but also -30% defense stat. You can level up characters as a single class (up to level 10), or level them up in multiple classes in order to mix and match spells. However, your character level (which defines how much stats you have) is separate. So even if you are constantly leveling up different classes you get different skills, your main combat level will continue to rise, and you’ll still become more powerful as you level. That way you aren’t forced into a single class until you max it out.
In addition to class stats, some characters will be tailored towards certain classes. Each character will have a trait which defines a permanent bonus they have. One optional character, might, for example, have a “Wise” trait that increases their wisdom by 10% and mana by 10%. While it won’t shoehole them into a single class, you might find the bonus worth it to focus on classes that rely a lot on spells (wizard and cleric, for example). The main characters will likely have more general traits that will apply to all 5 classes.
Item System
Rather than a typical JRPG item system, I expect to have a very customizable item system. Items that drop will have randomized enchantments (possible in the form of affixes). That way, if you’re fighting in an area and you get 3 Short Swords, you might find that one of them comes with +strength, one with +agility, and the other with +gold find and +haste. I’m also debating other forms to further customize items that you get, such as an enchantment system, to add additional bonuses to items, along with a socketing system, in order to place gems in items to give them further effects.
Not all items will be randomized though. Special items (in particular, very powerful items) will have set stats, though you may be able to customize them through gemming and enchanting. The game will include many dungeons for you to search for these items, some dropping from powerful bosses, others hidden through treasure chests scattered throughout the land.
I’m also playing with the idea of a crafting system. The idea I’m currently playing around with is that you don’t need to spend time leveling up your crafting skill to craft anything, but if you do level it up, you are likely to get better bonuses to the items that you make. This way if you ignore crafting through the game, but want to craft some powerful weapons towards the end, you’ll be able to. But if you invest the time into leveling up crafting, you’ll be able to get those extra little bonuses that may help you defeat the extra powerful boss.
Other
The game will include a large number of goals. There will be a giant collections of achievements to go after, minigames (currently setting my sights on also included a card game that you will discover cards for as you explore the world), side quests, dungeons, and much more.
A house with test dialog/test avatar
While I am actively working on the game, I expect that this will take quite a long time to finish. I’ll probably be taking weekends off to participate in Ludum Dare, and maybe even putting it on hold for other projects (for example, if I feel the urge to work on Diamond Hollow 3 or Trisphere 4.0). However, feel free to ask any questions you have about the game, and I’ll do my best to answer them!
Looks great so far! I really like the sound of the battle system, the idea of “action when you’re more on the ball, strategy when you want to slow down” is a very tricky concept, and I think you really nailed it with the way you described how combat will work.
What’s your goal for length of content, like 5 hours, 10 hours, more? Also, what language/engine is the game being made with?
My current goal is between 5 and 10 hours. However, it’s definitely too early to tell how much content it will have. It’s something I’m trying not to think about too much consciously, since I think I’d rather add the content that makes it feel fun, rather than trying to chop or pad content to make it a certain length.
As for the language/engine, It’s written in flash (as3/flex using the flixel engine), so it’ll be up on most major flash portals.
Wow! Sounds fantastic!
I’ve enjoyed other games you made, specially both Diamond Hollow and Arzea. I’m a big fan in metroidvania-tipe games, but I think I would enjoy something more classic-rpg-like.
Keep up the good work!
Oh wow! There are other people that actually visit this site?
The game looks like its been progress very well. I have a few concerns regarding some of the systems. For the class system that may be implemented, is it set up so that level 10 is the max meaning you can make a level 10 Knight or have a character be level 2 of all five classes that have the level 1 and 2 skill of those classes? Since characters will have traits/attributes that point them in the direction of a certain class, as you mention “Wise” boosts wisdom and mana, I think most people will make a purist character team such as level 10 Knight/Archer/Cleric/Wizard/Rogue because having the trait boost and the level 10 final skill of that class could be overwhelmingly be the best option. Maybe it’ll be better to have it so classes level together. So that someone who put 7 levels in Knight will get the first 7 Knight skills and then switch to 3 levels in Cleric can choose to grab the level 8-10 Cleric skills or opt out and choose a lower level Cleric skill (Already level 7 with Knight then hits level 1 with Cleric can choose from any cleric skill level 8 or lower). Just a suggestion. Also I read that you had your sights on planning out a card game. I was wondering is that going to be a simpler card game like poker or something FF inspired like Triple Triad or even a full blown CCG type of thing> A CCG would be a huge undertaking, but maybe it will result in a cool spin-off game that you’ll do in the future. Anyway the game looks great and good luck with this project.
The class system will be set up in a way that you can get level 10 in all 5 classes if you want (though that would take a long time, much longer than is needed to beat the game). I’m expecting right now, that you’d probably end up with about level 10 in one class and level 5 in another if you go through the main story, probably maxing 2 classes per character (unless you swap a lot) if you do a lot of the side quests. That way, if you for example you want a more DPS heavy party, you could level up a character in Cleric just high enough to be able to heal enough, and then have everyone go full DPS. I’m sure I’ll run into some balancing issues, but I think it should provide for a lot of customization, and the issues I do hit won’t be too hard to get around.
The way I want it when you pick skills, is at level 2 you pick from 1 of 2 skills. The one you don’t pick, you can never get. So at level 3 you have to pick from one of the two level 3 skills. This way, you kind of branch out your character. So rather than picking your favorite 10 from 20 skills, you are choosing a path at each level. Do you want the spell that buffs your entire party with haste, or do you want the spell that puts a magic shield on your party? You can’t have both. This gives a bit of a unique feeling to your characters, so you could have 3 of the same class in your party and none of them would play quite the same.
As for the card game, I have very little on paper (actually nothing on paper) but I expect it will be somewhat similar to Triple Triad. I had to google how it works since I’ve never played far enough into a FF game to see it (and I just realized the acronym clash here… that’s gonna suck), but it seems to have some of the same ideas I have. You’ll have different cards you can collect from quests, monster drops, shops, etc, and you will build a deck. However, I expect the gameplay will be quite different. I’m aiming at something like a simplified version of MTG or various other CCGs. One idea I’m toying with is that your deck has a hero card (which may improve as you win card games), stone cards (which give you element stones that are required to play other cards), monsters (which you use to attack, most will be dropped from monsters in the game), and spells. Your goal would be to reduce the HP of your opponent’s hero card to 0. However, as I said, I have nothing on paper, as I haven’t gotten far enough to really start fleshing out the details there. Hopefully it will be in depth enough that it could pass as it’s own side game, in order to give more depth to the game. 🙂
I realize this is sort of off-topic, but Trisphere 4.0? That’s quite a leap from the current version of 1.4.1, and I’m curious as to what the story is.
The current Trisphere is version 1.4.1 of Trisphere 3. I don’t actively refer to it as Trisphere 3, but it’s the 3rd rewrite of it over the past 10 years. I wouldn’t refer to the next one as Trisphere 4.0 after release, that’s just to recognize it as the 4th rewrite (but would be 1.0 at launch most likely, unless I change my mind on that).
it is ssssssssssooooooooooo essea