I have been messing with some ideas for a story-driven battle system in the past, and I’d like to share them with you.
The base idea is that the stats of your allies are based solely on the degree of friendship they have with them. In a gauge, it would be metered between the like of “Arch-Nemesis”, passing through “Fragile Alliance”, and maybe even, in extreme cases, er, “Forever Lover”.
You’d gather friendship (or hardship) based solely through dialogue through out the story.
In a battle, when you choose your allies, the highest the level of friendship they have, the higher their damage. Be careful to choose allies with low friendship, as they can even turn against you in the battle! Conversely, the higher the hate you gathered from the opposing team, the higher the damage they will inflict.
Our own personal stats would be based solely on our background, and our leveling based on the friends and battles we decide to make.
I’ve been writing it down for some time, and as writing a GDD can be tiresome sometimes, I decided to take a break and share it here with you guys.
Sounds interesting. For such a different mechanic I’d strongly suggest taking a break from the design docs and building a prototype.
Some interesting implications of the design:
Mercy healing, where a player attempts to convert an almost defeated opponent by healing them.
Pacifist mode, a hardcore mode where players attempt to win without killing anything, just conversions.
Various attacks designed to manipulate alliances
In a way it’s vaguely similar to something I’m working on for Tree of Life. A RTS where the units are not under the firm grasp of any individual player, but can be influenced by multiple players. Working on a prototype now, not confident how well the mechanic will work.
The gameplay should fit somewhere between 7 kingdoms and Creeper World. Both obscure games, but the best comparisons I could come up with.
Hello I just read your idea and I really like it. One of main reasons I love my top games Is because of the characters with ritch stories behind them and their conversations and relationship with main character. If you care for the characters in the game you will remember them and the game they are in for long after ending. Keep it up. I realy admire people like you for realizing that kind of ideas for story telling.
Sounds really interesting. Have you looked at something like http://twinery.org to help with plotting the story flow? I haven’t used it for anything as complex as what you intend but people have added scripting into it to simulate dice rolls etc for things like the old make your own adventure stories I had as a kid.
Good luck & keep us posted, I’m interested to see how it goes.
I made a video of the first prototype in the WIP section, I hope you like it. It’s turning out to be a bit of interactive fiction, RPG and visual novel.
Story-driven gameplay is very interesting to me. I think something integral to this type of system is having a large variety of inter-character dialogue in combat based on character relationships.
I suggest thinking about a way to hide the math behind your system. As long as everything is displayed in numbers and players can easily base their choices on the mathematical optimal way the focus on the story and relationship between characters or parties can easily get lost I suppose. If you remove the math from the pool of information that is visible to the player and go with other means of conveying information through dialog I’d expect people to make decisions based stronger on their own emotions instead of calculating the optimal way and in return I hope players will find the experience more engaging and rewarding.
