Game Mechanics Part 1

So, instead of dropping everything and all things into the game description, aside from the fact that there is probably a character limit, I have decided I am going to release a weekly Game Mechanics blog highlighting several mechanics each week.  This post is to get Itch caught up to the RMN page so I am combining the first three together.

These will be in-depth looks at the various systems that will make up the core of the features for Legend of Emilar and how, in a non-spoiler way, they will be used. Gifs of the systems will be present where available. If they are not in a showable state, gifs will be added to these posts when the reach it.

While I would love to jump right into some of the big boys, I am going to leave those for later. This week we're going to talk about three interesting evented systems.

These blogs have three purposes. The first is to detail out the mechanics in a way that doesn't clutter up the main page too badly. The second is for you to offer suggestions and feedback on these systems; quite often as I am working on things like the game mechanics on stream, a viewer says something or suggests something that I would not have thought of.

The third is to ensure a stream of regular content. Nothing is more damaging to a game than to be considered "dead" or "vaporware". By providing a constant drip of information on both developed and in-development mechanics, it will help keep you informed and also allow you to learn about lore and history of the world the game is placed in.

What is an evented system?

An evented system is a game mechanic system built entirely in-engine, no plugins or minimal use there of required. I don't have too many of them, but these three make up a handful that I do.

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Lantern

If your first thought was A Link to the Past, your head is in the right space. This mechanic was inspired by LttP, though there is a bit more to it than Link's trusty lantern.

There will be several areas in the game where traveling through an area will be made easier by being able to shed some light on the situation. While not full-dark (I am a firm believer in all things "movie dark"), you will still be able to miss things unless you have eagle eyes.

There is a solution; the lantern!

You can get the lantern early on in the game. It is a useable key item that opens an option select menu. From this menu you can pick the type of fuel source you want to fill the lantern with.

The fuel source determines the amount of time the lantern will cast light for as well as the distance it will cast light. The more rare the fuel source, the longer the lantern will remain lit and brighter the casted light will be. Some field sources will even have a different color of light based on the materials being burned.

Example, once you find some unrefined Verandium you can have it refined into a lantern fuel source. Verandium fuels will burn for 8 and 16 minutes, cast 1.5x the light as the oil-based sources, and cast a greenish-hue light.

Once the fuel source is used up, the lantern will go out so make sure you stock up before heading into a dark area.

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Build them bridges

Ever seen two sections of land in a game and wondered "Why can't there be a bridge there"? Well, I have a solution for you (kind of)!

Throughout the game you will run into bridges. Some may be long, some may be short, but you will also find bridges that are incomplete or broken. You can repair/finish these!

All you'll need are some Bridge Materials and a little bit of time. Repairable bridges will be used as an exploration gate mechanic that will open up new areas of a map for exploration or create a convenient shortcut for you to make your way through an area more quickly.

Bridge Materials will be a commodity. You will either have to find them out in the wilds or get them, for a premium, from shops that carry them.

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A secret secret detector?

Well, not so much a secret now I guess. At a certain point in the story, you will have the ability to find the Amulet of Iskandour. As with most of my game mechanics, there is lore behind this item. I will be posting those up at a later date though.

For now, the important thing about this amulet is that it can detect secrets! Here is how it works. Like the lantern, this is a useable key item that opens up a select option menu.

From this menu you have the following options:

• Detect Secrets
• Scry
• Feed
• Put away

Detect Secrets allows you to use the amulet at your current location on the map. If you are close enough to a secret it will start vibrating (contemplating adding in controller vibration support for this as well) which will be visible via an on-screen UI element. The stronger the vibration, the closer you are to the secret.

At first, Detect Secrets can only detect Minor Secrets (secrets of level 1-3). You might find an item or two, or a secret area of a map with slightly stronger monsters.

Over time the amulet will become more powerful and be able to detect Greater Secrets (secrets of level 4-6). These represent treasure areas with multiple chests, stronger enemies that may drop better items or more Exp and Gold, and potentially special areas where you can find information thought lost to time.

Once the amulet is fully energized, it can lead you to Legendary Secrets. These locations will present you with many rewards and possibly also great dangers.

Scry requires you to have a Magi-Crystal, an item you can only find in areas with a high concentration of magic. Special tools are required to harvest these crystals.

When used, and the crystal fed to the amulet, it can tell you how many secrets are present in a map. At varying levels, it can also tell you what the types of those secrets are and detect higher level secrets. So when you first obtain the amulet, if it says "No secrets found" it may only mean that there are no Minor Secrets as it won't be able to detect the other verities yet. Something to keep in mind.


Feed allows you to feed Magi-Crystals to the amulet without using the scry ability.

Put Away closes the menu.

Secrets can be found without the amulet, but will require you to "Metroid" the game which can be time consuming given the number of areas.

Game Mechanics Part 2 & 3

Alright, it is finally time. We have a double header this week due to me fudging up the release for Part 2 due to time related issues. So tonight, we will be looking at 7 game systems, in this order:

• Fast Travel
• Codex
• Overkills
• Random Encounter System
• Threat System
• Weapon Skills
• Enemy Levels

This blog is going to be THIC. Let’s start from the top, a humble yet soon to be no-so evented system.

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Speedy travels

This is kind of a must in modern, large-scale RPG games. We have it too! This will be transitioning from an evented system to a plugin soon, as mentioned above, because the javascript coding to make the system work through events will be too hard to maintain once more maps with FT points start getting created.

It works just as you would expect. Each major town and each province/state/region has a fast travel point; this means some areas will have two. You can travel from point to point from these locations, provided you have been to the location you want to go to and registered with the Fast Travel operator.

This is necessitated for lore reasons; a strict control over access to fast travel points is always maintained after an incident 106 years ago when a country used the Fast Travel network to invade an enemy nation.

There is a small fee for registering; once paid and registered you can fast travel to your heart’s content, except where prohibited due to story reasons. Though, for story reasons, accessing the FT nodes in countries other than your home nation will require some extra questing and access may be revoked under certain story-related conditions.


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All of the informations

If you are an RPG Maker game aficionado and have played large RPG Maker games that have lore and world building, what is an annoying aspect of those games related to those topics?

Right! Keeping track of everything. Problem solved for Legend of Emilar. I have been working on an extensive Codex plugin. It allows for any lore that you find to be tracked, keeps track of what's going on in the story, keeps track of everything you have seen, found, fought, bought, learned, or unlocked. From an item collection tracker, down to a living bestiary that updates as you find stronger versions of enemies.

It even has support for third party plugins used in the game too. Let’s break this monster down system by system starting with the external features, or the features that are not part of the Codex proper.

Notifications
This is a new-ish feature still under development. It will notify you through an unintrusive pop-up somewhere in the UI that you have either learned a new bit of lore or that something was updated. I am still toying with several ideas around this.

For example, what should this show? It might be a bit overindulgent to have it updated for every thing that is found including weapons and items picked up. Should it highlight the specific entry updated/added in the notification or just say “Codex updated”.

How should multiple entries at once be handled through this notification system?
See, lots of questions. I am leaning toward creating an options section for the notifications so you can tailor it to exactly what you want. Want to get spammed by everything under the sun? Go for it. Don’t want any notifications? Covered.

The other problem is going to be when these UI notifications can be generated and what kind of overhead they will generate. If you find a new enemy in battle, can I display the notification there? That kind of thing.



Text Hints
This feature will color certain terms in dialog text if they are related to a topic and that topic has been updated or is new. New topics will show in red, updated green. If you have viewed those topics, then the text color is the default white.

This is to help you know, in addition to the notification system, if there is new information available in the Codex. This will happen mid-dialog so if an NPC says something important you will know right away if something related to the topic is brought up again.

Balancing how much text gets highlighted will be a task and a half though and I am always looking for easier ways to achieve this. Right now I am using one of YanFly’s message plugin extensions, but it requires a lot of extra text to be added.



Scrollable Windows
Many of the information windows within the Codex will be scrollable. This is also a feature I have incorporated into many of my other plugins. Currently scrolling is only supported via mouse. You can either hover the mouse over the info window and use the scroll wheel to scroll through the window or you can, in some cases, activate the information window and scroll through it with the arrow keys.

My goal will be to standardize these to mouse scroll only over time and I am figuring out how I can implement controller support for scrolling these windows or if this will be a “partial controller support” situation, to borrow the parlance from Steam.



First/Third Party Plugin Support
One of the things I am most proud of about this plugin is that I found ways to incorporate other plugin features into the information for the related objects. This is accomplished by parsing the notetag data included by the supported plugins and generating several mass objects that contain the relevant information in data form and are then converted into text information for the Codex.

Below is a list of plugins supported:
First Party:

• Magic Crafting

• Magic Schools

• Item Crafting

Third Party:

• Enemies Level Up (YanFly)

• Skill Cooldowns (YanFly)

• Element Core (YanFly)

• Steal/Snatch (YanFly)

With more planned to be supported.



Other uses for the Codex
Before we start digging into everything, I wanted to take a moment to talk about how the Codex will be used outside of its intended purpose. Obviously, it will be used to track information, but several other game systems combine with this to enable some spiffy built-in Quality of Life features.

QoL is one thing I am very focused on. If you are not putting in QoL stuff DURING development, not tacked on as an afterthought; you are doing your players a disservice. To that end, the Codex acts to implement some cool stuff.

First, and most importantly, the Codex, when paired up with the Fast Travel system, will act as a grinding guide for late game. The Bestiary keeps track of every enemy you have encountered, where you found it, the exp and gold these drop, and also the items along with the drop rates for those items if you have gotten them before. It will also track stealable/snatchable items and the rates for those as well.

Using these systems together you can plan out material, level, and other types of grinding during the late-game phase where it will be required to unlock Grand Classes and to prepare for fighting the super bosses.

Speaking of super bosses, many of them will be found through a series of quests that you must uncover on your own. As you play through the game you will find scraps of information scattered around the game world. Once you have enough information about a potential super boss you can begin hunting it down. You will have to determine if the lore you have obtained is about a real creature or not, the Codex will probably not explicitly state it although I am considering an accessibility option that will make it clearly mark if something is related to a super boss.

There will be certain quest lines that will require you to keep track of information within the Codex to complete them as well as there will be no actual quest tied to these; strictly just lore.

As mentioned previously, the Codex also acts as a progress tracker. The progress tracker can be turned off or made more verbose. There will be options to turn on “Granular Progress Tracking”. We will get to that in a minute.

How the Progress Tracker works is that, when enabled, it takes the place of the empty area when the Codex is opened to the main menu screen. It will show your overall completion and then below that will be each major category. Each of those categories will have a completion percentage.

When “Granular Progress Tracking” is turned on, each of the major categories is broken down into the subcategories at each level. Here is an image of how each mode will look in the final version of the plugin; though I do have the beta version of the feature made, it isn’t cleaned up enough to showcase yet.

Codex Information
Alright, let’s dive into the Codex proper. We will go over each major category and talk about what information is tracked.

Below is the main menu for the Codex. The major categories are horizontally aligned and an arrow will be added to the edges to indicate when there are options that are hidden in those directions. This is also where the Progress Tracker will show when enabled.

Each major category is broken into subcategory lists. If those subcategories have subcategories configured under them, they will lead to another list window as shown below. This continues until you reach the bottom of the subcategory tree where the individual data items can be found. In the image below, Locations is a subcategory that also has subcategories (Dungeons & Towns).

Lore display is the simplest. All that these have is the name of the lore entry and then the text for that entry. No fancy bells or whistles. In some cases, names in the selection list may be shortened using an alias for the actual name if the full name would not fit into the window space. An example of this can be seen in the image below.

Equipment is easily the densest category. As you can see in the image, Armor and Accessories are treated separately. Each of these subcategories splits into further subcategories.

In the image below you can see the initial information shown for weapons and you can see that the Hazsdarth is highlighted in red because we have not viewed that entry yet. The weapon information displayed includes the stats the weapon gives (or takes) from the character, the traits applied to the weapon, and the Codex also can parse note tag information for supported first and third party plugins as noted above. The images below will give you an idea of what this looks like in-game.

Items have been given custom types. If you have worked with RPG Maker before, you will know that item types are hard coded into the editor and new ones cannot be added easily. The codex uses some notetag magic to add these in. Unfortunately I cannot show anything more off for this as the item category is broken at the moment.

The Class category is a bit interesting in terms of the information it shows. One of the major features here is that the Codex tells you how much, on average over all of the levels, you can expect your stats to grow. This does not consider alterations made by stat growth increasing items. It will take into account the difficulty you are playing though.

The information included also has a skill list and the level needed to learn each skill/spell, a list of all of the types of equipment the class can use, and a list of various traits associated with the class. All of these are showcased in the images below.

The Abilities category is probably the most complete at the moment in terms of visual styling. As you have probably noticed in the images above, some sections of the information look more detailed than others or seem to have been given an extra polishing. I will be trying to get icons for all of the things so that all of the information is consistent and standardized between each category.

Skills have a lot of interesting information displayed for them; things you won’t normally see games give you like damage and invocation information. In addition, more third-party stuff is implemented here. Images below.

Some more powerful skills will cause other skills of even entire classes of skills to be placed into cooldown. Most magic will function this way where stronger versions of spells will place the weaker ones into a cooldown. This information is shown on the skill information page as well; see below image.

As mentioned, the Bestiary will play an important role within the game. It tracks enemies you encounter and will update their stats when you find higher leveled versions. It will also record the drops you have found, their rates, stealable/snatchable items, and the location(s) where you have seen the enemies at. See the below images for examples of these and more.

Finally, to round out this section, we have the Misc category which will contain status effects, a list of all of the Fast Travel points you have unlocked and if they are active (if you are able to travel to them), and I will probably shove some other stuff in there too. Images below.

Whew, that was way too much information.


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Overkill is acceptable, encouraged even

Inspired by systems like the one from Final Fantasy X, when enemies are killed by damage over a certain percentage of their health, they will drop more rewards. This is done via a third-party plugin though I will be looking to modify it to allow adding rare items to the dropped item pool on overkill for certain harder to obtain items.
Overkill will be indicated by an “Overkilled” image that will display above the enemy.


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Random Encounters for a Modern Society

Random encounters can be annoying, even worse they can be a turn off in the modern era of fancy on-screen enemies. Well, we don't have that fancy stuff. What we do have is a modernized encounter system.

It breaks down into two related systems, so technically you are getting four mechanics this week. Just as well, we got like 50 of these things to go over. I might be done by the release date....


The main system is the Random Encounter System (RES). This system overhauls encounters for RPG Maker, allowing for the setting of a limited number of fights in a map. Once you have reached that limit, no more encounters until you switch maps, certain events happen, or an amount of time has elapsed.

Which one refreshes encounters on a specific map will vary. Not sure yet if you will be told which one it is either. There will also be items to cut the encounter rate or to disable encounters for a time too; or to increase if that is your thing.

The other system is the Threat System. This allows for maps to have Threat Levels which can be used to indicate that either there is an increased number of enemies in the area, stronger enemies will appear, or that there is a strong variant monster lurking around somewhere.

The Threat Level for a map can be changed under numerous conditions; perhaps a quest has spawned a strong enemy, maybe you sat around for a long time and decimating the monster population so fewer and weaker enemies will spawn for a while.

Normally this will happen randomly as you enter a map and all it will do is increase the level of monsters you fight by one to two levels. In certain situations, related to quests or story events, it may signify that a powerful enemy has appeared on the map or that stronger enemies can be found. Normally this will also increase the maximum number of encounters you have to fight before the limit for that map is reached.

The reverse is also true, if you consistently clear out a map, the threat level will be reduced and the number of encounters you can fight will also be reduced. Reducing the threat level means lower-level enemies, and if lowered enough it means weaker enemies will replace the normal ones.

The threat level will reset over time based on game-time played. Considering adding in items to artificially increase or decrease the threat level of a map so if you are finding an area hard to get through, you can lower the enemies levels a bit, or make them harder if you like that kind of thing.


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Skill Spamming Begone

One of the major focuses for Legend of Emilar is to make battles much more tactical. In a lot of RPG Maker games you will find battle systems that essentially amount to normal attack to win. That isn't going to fly in normal or higher difficulties (next week).

Part of the systems being put into place to make battles trickier is the addition of skill cooldowns. A skill cooldown is a wait system that is applied to a skill once it has been used. Until the number of turns indicated passes, that skill cannot be used again.

To add some additional layers to the system, certain skills can cause a host of other skills to cooldown when used. Powerful physical skills may cause similar skills to cooldown, or for magic, higher elemental spells will cause all the spells of that element that you know to go on cooldown. Ultimate skills will restrict all your characters skills when used.

There are also going to be warm-ups; the same as cooldowns, but that are applied as soon as battle starts. This applies to the ultimate skills and stuff like the Lancer Jump abilities. There will be some more systems we talk about on a later date that will also be geared toward elevating the combat in the game.

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Enemies.... Have Levels Too??

Another Final Fantasy inspired system, this time FF8, in Legend of Emilar enemies will have levels. This is so that as you progress through the game and return to areas from earlier in it, enemies will not be pushovers for you to steamroll (in some cases).

Enemy levels are calculated based on the average level of your party. They also have a slight randomness applied to them so they can fall within a range of levels and in most cases, there is a maximum level that an enemy can reach.

Enemy levels impact their stats, so the higher the level the higher the stats for that enemy. It also increases the rewards they drop too.

There will be spells and items that can be used to increase or decrease enemy levels and several other game systems will be able to modify the levels of enemies, such as the difficulty system, the Threat Level and Random Encounter Systems, and a few others.



That's it for this week. Next week we will cover the Difficulty system, the After-Action Status Effect system, and we will talk about the class systems (oh boy, another wall of text incoming). See you then!