Hello! My name is Arthur. I'm from Brazil, and together with a couple of friends, I'm developing an action rpg using xna.

I'm looking for feedback concerning game design in general.

You can find some info in our blog. http://lotusdevblog.blogspot.com.

Its in Portuguese, but you can use the little uk flag > to google translate the contents. (not ideal, I know, but we don't have a lot of foreign attention yet)

The game is a PC single player action rpg, but we are trying to design it in a way that we could possibly make an online rpg with it later.

Two small video demos of work in progress:

"> Video 1 -

"> Video 2 -

Obs: I am aware of the poor formatting below. Excuse it for a while, as I have yet to format the text.

Lotus

Our world focus on 4 nations. Each of them based in a nation/civilization/region on earth. We do not have names for those nations yet, so Ill refer to them as:

Egyptians, Africans, Greeks and Asians.

Each region has 3 basic classes that can be played:
Warrior, Hunter and Shaman.

Warriors are bruteforce melee units, going face to face with death.
Hunters live in the wild, know how to use the nature in their favor.
Shamans are in contact with the other side, communicate with spirits and energies.


Each of the 4 nations also have a particular class.

Egyptian - Cleric
African - Tribal Warrior
Greek - Bard
Asian - Shinobi

The Clerics live among the dead in the pyramids, and hold thousands of years worth of knowledge.

African tribal warriors are human beasts. Tattoos and scars cover their bodies, showing the history of their battles.

The bards hear and live everything that goes on in the cities, even in its darkest places. They are storytellers and men of trade.

The shinobi are a deadly force. Silently taking away lives, leaving nothing behind.

I will add more as time goes on regarding history and classes.

Mechanics, Battle and stuff

Each character will have around 20~ skills acquired by level and quests. Skills will be class specific. They will cost a determined amount of mana points or have another kind of cost, depending on the skill.

Characters will be able to physically attack with the current equipped weapon.
Weapons will be held within a given number of slots, that can be increased, up to five. So the player can switch weapons without having to open the inventory.

Characters will also have a determined amount of stamina, which will be used mostly with physical attacks, to avoid pure button smashing.

There will also be a delay between actions. A minimum delay which may be increased, as a cooldown, for certain skills / attacks.

Thats it for now. I know that there's a lot of poorly formatted info here, but I just tried to say a lot about it, trying to make the idea clear.

Thanks for taking the time reading this stuff.


#Edited several spelling mistakes

[Edited by - arthurviolence on September 18, 2010 12:41:09 PM]

It s a nice concept but of course more elaboration is needed.
Due to the poor translation it wasn't clear if the player can choose from one out of seven classes ( 3 base classes plus the 4 nation specific classes) or if he chooses one of the three base classes and depending on his nation his class is enhanced with one of the four nation specific classes. If the later is the case then I believe its a very good idea with a lot of potential.

Also it would be nice if each of the three base classes used different resource system but this depends on how much time you are willing to spent on the game.

Moreover you should consider that you may need some global basic skills like skinning, lock picking etc. to make quests more interesting.
Thats all for now, keep up the good work!

Thanks for the reply. I would like to know what do you mean with each base class using a different resource system.

We are designing this small game as a way of storytelling. There will be eight chapters, one for each class, and a final chapter. They will tell the story of 7 characters that are an essential part of the history of the game, which will unravel on the eighth chapter, in which the player will be able to choose one of the seven classes to play.

So theres no thought of evolution to the nation specific classes, as I believe it wouldn't make much sense for a warrior to become a bard, considering the different playing styles, but I could be wrong.

During the seven first chapters, the main character will be of a certain class.

We expect the gameplay in them to be very short initially, just as a sort of tutorial, and at the same time, telling the story of the world.


So, to resume:
Eight chapters.
1-7 The player controls a hero. He will get to know that person, and see what made him be who he is. There will be a character of every class and of every nation.

In the final chapter, the player will create his character and play in that world.

[Edited by - arthurviolence on September 18, 2010 12:54:20 PM]

With different resource system per class I meant that instead of using the classic mana pool which depletes after each ability each class ( or a group of classes) can use a variation of this system. For instance warriors can have a stamina pool of 100 stamina points and each time they use an ability the stamina cost is subtracted from the pool and the damage output or the magnitude of the effect of the ability may depend on the remaining stamina points.

For instance a warrior may use the ability "Heavy Attack" which costs 10 stamina points. After he uses it he has 90 points remaining. The damage output of heavy attack may be 300 + remaining stamina point or the attack has 90% chance to stun the target.

For the other classes similar resource systems may be created. Of course using a different resource system for each class may be difficult for small projects so two or three at maximum can be enough. The advantage of using different resource systems is that you can transfer the lore of our world into the gameplay, making each class fell different.

I really like the idea of playing with all classes and each class telling a different tale. It tides the gameplay with the story very well.

Finally what I meant was not a warrior who became a bard ( that as you said wouldn't make sense :) ) but a warrior with bard philosophy or training. For instance a "bard warrior" would get less hp than a tribal warrior but would have more magic resistance or use better buffs. Still some combinations may sound a bit odd.

I 'm looking forward to see more of your project.

Oh, thats indeed interesting, thanks! And also its something that, if I implement around 3 kinds of "resources", they can work basically the same, with different little effect possibilities on the player and the target, but having almost the same mechanics.

Another thing is the class evolution, I really thought about that, first in a way that a warrior could be trained with oracles (I really like to think about Greek shamans as oracles, wth...) and acquire some of them abilities, but that can really be taken further to create a sort of hybrid class!

Would be pretty fun, maintaining about the same gameplay, but with a twist, some versatility.

Will definitely bring that to the table to my friends.

We have all classes defined, whats their history and whats their role, all the class specific skill written, of course, still not implemented. I will probably post the class definitions, their roles and stuff, that might help to understand a bit better. The history of the world too.

Thanks a lot for the feedback! Would really like if more people replied. (really, something I should change about my post so people will actually reply? :()

[Edited by - arthurviolence on September 18, 2010 12:10:34 PM]

I m happy I could help you. Since I m new around here too I don't know how a post should look like. Probably people who could reply too you didn't notice your post or something like that.

Mechanics!

We're thinking about a simple attack / defense mechanic that works kinda like this.

The character has the stats: agility, dexterity and strength (and others not relevant at the moment)

His equipments will give him: damage reduction, damage bonus, dodging capacity, blocking capacity.

His weapon has an attack power.

The damage formula currently looks like:

damage = ((atk_power * strength) + dmg_bonus ) / (max(dmg_reduction,1))

I made this with the idea that a really really really strong weapon would have like 150 atk power and an endgame melee character could have around 1.1k strength. And made a little calculator to play around with values, and test the possible outcomes.

1.1k str and 150 atk VS 200 def = 825 dmg

Just playing around with numbers, the concepts of the formula and stuff, and want to know what you guys think.

Also considering shields and dogging, like, you have a certain chance to block with the shield, and how much you block would depend on the shields defense and your strength or something like that.

Any input? Thanks

First you have to determine what you want from your combat system and how you want your characters to progress. Stuff like the number of hits to death, variance, power growth and so on.

Without knowing any of this, I can tell you that your characters will grow exponentially in damage against the same creature. This means the game will get much easier the higher level you are. It also means an underleveled character will have a rough time until he gains levels.

Also, dmg_bonus may cause balance issues because it is added. This value will need to grow exponentially to fit the atk_power*strength part or its balance value will change through the game.

The goal of + damage is to be useful in small attacks with a low cooldown, and to be just a little increase to big attacks, like meelee with strong weapons.

Armors and equipment will give strength and also a small damage bonus, just to make things interesting, Id like to know your opinion on that.

As the player grows, things around him grow too, I mean. As a creature fought at level 1 can have at most 50 health points, a creature fought at endgame should have a high health value and a high damage reduction value. The power curve has to be available for the creatures as well as the players.

Player fights easy creatures, trains, kills easy creatures, grows, fights harder creatures and so on

That is standard for an RPG, but there are issues which may arise based on that formula. Because of exponential power growth, the challenging range of levels for a particular encounter will be narrower than a system with linear growth. If the player is underleveled or overleveled, the game will become impossible or too easy. It could be difficult to keep the player in that range throughout the game to keep the challenge. It may be fine and if it is what you want, then that's great, but you gave us too little information to find flaws in your formula based on your design goals.