Going Full Turn Based RPG - Devlog || Project Bloom 

Just found your channel because it was recommended to me by the holy algorithm. Good luck man! I love what I see

been there, the IQ bell curve meme is way too real. glad to see you're not too discouraged about the tough decision

alright bro now you can finally cook

I'm also making a turn-based RPG, and saw this channel in my feed, and you're struggling with something very similar to me! Battle system design is really hard, for sure. I also am trying to figure out a turn system where different abilities take different amounts of "time", but mine was always turn-based, just that abilities eat up time on a meter, similar to the Digimon Card Game, until it goes over to the opponent's side. So you can use a bigger ability, but the enemies get a longer turn. It's hard though, I keep running into how difficult it is not to have that meter just hover really close to 0 every time it switches over. Subbed! It's cool to see how other RPG devs are tackling these problems!

Experimenting as you figure things out is definitely valuable. But yes, nailing down a fun battle system seems important for your game. At least timeline turn-based is 'tried-and-true'. Originallity isn't important on it's own; you just need to build systems that fit the ultimate cohesive vision of your game whether they are original or not. The game looks great, by the way. Aesthetic is the thing I have the hardest time with.

I think it's both very honest and insightful that you say of yourself that you could learn to "fail faster". It's definitely a good skill to have. If it makes you feel better, it's probably something most people struggle with though. The thing is, when one creates something, there are so many behaviours and psychological concepts that go into it, like the sunk cost fallacy, or the idea that if only this was tweaked to perfection, it would actually work. I think especially the latter is really hard to take into account.

Interrupts could still be useful in a turn based system if you treat them like a status effect. Maybe on a critical hit, or tied to specific spells/skills the enemy will get knocked back in the turn order a bit. Affecting turn order is pretty powerful so you could even make a show of it with the enemy icon sliding back in the turn order.

I love your devlogs because it shares the least seen part of game development and that is game design. Design is the most difficult part of developing a game and what takes the longest. Finding the magic formula for every game is different and takes experimentation. Seeing someone go through this process helps others reason about their own struggles with design and has helped me a ton! Mechanics mean nothing without proper design!

Great video, good luck brotha! Keep it up.. We trust your decisions!

Very inspirational, and I like the visuals of the game

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rewritten combat in my game. You’re doing fantastic and you don’t seem to discouraged! It happens to all of us lol, hang in there your game looks great 🙏🙏🙏

Very proud of you man! Sorry I haven’t seen a stream in a couple of weeks, but I’m keeping my eyes out for when you’re live next! Keep up the good work, and keep cooking!!!

Hey, love the project. With all due respect, its ok to be like other games. Don't be ashamed of the mechanics you want to pull from other games. The market shows that games succeed even better when the inspiration behind them is clear to the player. If you really like Child Of Light, you should go all in on "How can I add to the Child Of Light battle system?" and not your current "How can I be different from the Child Of Light battle system?". Players will not fault you for being very inspired, in fact they'll applaud you for your passion towards the source material. From experience I can see that you're falling into a classic trap many starting game developers fall into, leading to a project that will never be finished, or eventually scrapped when you see something completely different and shiny to do. My recommendation is think of a game you love, plan it out, then commit to that idea until the project is done however long that takes. Hell, sign up with a publisher. I took forever to release my first commercial game, so eventually I gave in, signed with a publisher and that gave me the pressure to just commit to the game, a publisher won't look favorably on you flip flopping around with ideas. Without a publisher, maybe you should define what you want your game to be, put it out there as a checklist and let your viewers keep you responsible for keeping to those ideas. Maybe instead of scrapping the whole battle system one more time, really commit to finding ideas on how to make it work, even if that means pulling from Child Of Light. The most successful indie games we all love pull heavily from their inspiration (working best when their inspiration is just one or two specific games rather than a whole genre like the entire catalogue of JRPGs), so why can't you?

I think you made the right choice ! Great video once again

Changed the whole Game 3 times in 6 months... but now I am so happy with the whole scope. There is honestly nothing that I am sceptic about. I think that is the most motivating part to me

Very inspirational. Thanks for your experience.

You're probably already aware, but Bravely Default has an *amazing* battle system. I'm not a big fan of JRPG-style turn based combat, my last two games that lasted more than a couple hours in the genre are Child of Light and Bravely Default. Since it sounds like you want risk to be more intentional, maybe you could take some inspiration from BD. Rather than just shuffling in basic attacks from party members that aren't important in the current battle (due to type matchups or just the current status), sacrificing those party member's future turns for a big payout now on your big hitter (or healer) can feel really rewarding. But when you didn't read the enemies' moves right and get punished, you definitely remember it for next time. I'd love to see more variations on this system in the turn-based space. Good luck with whatever system you end up going with!

Fun video cheers for making it. I did find it weird how you worry about copying Child of Light, when it copied it's own combat wholesale from Grandia. Especially as you clearly know about Grandia from your ATB video.

If the timeline mechanic is too reactionary for players, you could give characters more dynamic control over the timeline. For example, in Final Fantasy 12, you can cast spells like Slow and Haste to affect action speeds. Applied to your game, it's not just about interrupting enemy attacks, but also surpassing enemy attacks by speeding up your own attacks or slowing theirs. For example, you could speed up another ally’s attack to interrupt an enemy or you could speed up an enemy’s timeline to put them into casting phase and then interrupt them to reset their timer. You could also speed up an enemy's attack if they're confused and will attack themselves or another enemy, or if attacking your characters would trigger an effect like a counter. An interesting idea would be creating tradeoffs to give players more control over the timeline at the cost of something else or vice versa. So you could buff an ally with increased cast speed but reduced damage. Or you could slow your attacks to deal more damage. Party members could also work together by using time to defeat the enemy. There could be an ability that reduces the next ally's casting time and if they attack it has a chance to reduce the next ally's casting time, which could create a chain of combo attacks. So if several characters are close to each other in the timeline, that could unleash all their attacks in one turn. Some of these abilities could be character-specific, or one or two could be a core mechanic that's always available to every character, like a defense option typically is. But the point of using abilities to affect the timeline means the player has more options to leverage the pacing of combat to gain a strategic advantage. This should avoid the dominant strategy of attacking the enemy that just started casting, because you can potentially interrupt any enemy caster by speeding up your attacks or slowing theirs. Another idea could take weaknesses and flip them into resistances, so enemies that are resistant to certain attack types could have casting armor so they'd need to be hit twice or more to be interrupted. Full resistance to some attacks could make enemies impervious to being interrupted. That allows the player to plan certain attacks to avoid resistances or brute force through partial resistances with multiple attacks to interrupt them. In reverse, characters could skip defending if they know the enemy's attacks won't likely interrupt them. Or, mixing two ideas together, an ability could slow a character’s timeline down but increase their resistance to certain attacks.

Sometimes in software you just need to pull the plug and sometimes you need to refine and iterate. To determine what is appropriate at which time is the really difficult task. As long as you inform that decision based on what you want to achieve, you can’t go wrong. Congrats on not being afraid to explore a new angle to your combat system!

I think there's plenty ways to keep the child of light like system in tact, but you have to really zone in on what your goals are. Rubbing an enemy to delay them isn't the only means to get interrupts off. Slow/Haste like spells (or side-effects) to manipulate turn order, multiple action points to either hold or spend (bravely default style) or a limited number of interrupts per battle to make the player consider where they can afford to deal with a skill going off and when they can't. You don't even need any additional systems. If only specific characters can interrupt specific abilities, you ask the player if their default role is more important or the breaking is. Only your healer can break the incoming spell; but that also means they don't get to heal this turn. Only your mage can break this other ability, but there's a bunch of bombs enemies on the field that will explode after a set amount of turns and the mage is your prime source of AoE. Or there's two enemies charging an ability at the same time, but the warrior can only break one of them in time. Etc. YT just randomly recommended me this video so I'm not sure about the exact nitty gritty of your system, but the point is that general fight design can also fill gaps here. You can design scenarios that may or may not be more pressing than interrupting, or scenarios in which other party members have to pick up the slack outside of their role when both a break and the breaker's role are essential.

keep it up bro

Do you know Fuga Melodies of Steel? In it, enemies have 1-3 weakness tokens of different affinities (or maybe multiple of the same, so youd need 3 elements for one enemy, or multiple of the same element) which when hit send them back in the turn order, and these tokens only refresh after the enemy acts once. AoEs of an element become vital to delaying enemies that come in large groups (thus the game divides some into only hitting grounded enemies or flying enemies for balance), some characters have attacks that count as any (or every) token and auto-delay a turn, if you have strong enough attacks you can kill an enemy by rushing them instead of caring for the weakness, so on and so forth, so you can have multiple approaches to tactics with a simple system (fuga rewards you better for less actions and little damage, so both dealing maximum damage to end a battle quick and delaying enemies so you dont get hit are viable and rewarded) saying this after you say youve dropped it might be pointless, but i think your vision can work with enough references of what can be done with it, you have plenty already you showed, and I think Fuga could be the missing link to what you want.

Maybe the part thats actually not letting you cook is the "turn based" part of the game. Maybe you should redefine what a turn is in your game. Rather than having characters taking turns. have a turn be a window of time without pauses. I think it can give you more room to play with castings. like having other defend/interrupt enemies while it takes effect and instead of showing the attack in a time line, attacks could be more visibly telegraph

Yes, turn-based please! Personally I don’t like any gimmick in turn-based games. Personally I would even hide the casting (like solar beam from pokemon. It’s a cast but not wrapped in any specific system).

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Stumbled upon this video. looks really cool! But just wanted to let you know there was a spelling error in the Steam page. In "About this game" it says "rouge-like". 🙂

Did you go to school to become a game dev? I just medically retired from the army so I want to learn how to make games like these I can use my gi bill for school but I'm not sure if it's worth it to major in game design and development or something else

Hey! This looks awesome! Do you need music for it? I am an audio engineer and composer.

Man if you got to rip off a turn-based combat system for your game, you could do a LOT worse than the Trails games.