Hello everybody,

I'm working on a tactics game with RPG-like elements and I am creating the skills (and skill-trees) for characters. To anyone that has worked on similar projects:

What is your creative process to do this?

Do you create a large list of possible skills and then cut to get only the most interesting ones?

How do limit the number of skills available per character? (maximum, minimum)

How do you try to avoid possible loops (or combos) that make the game too easy? (Only through playtesting?)

Thank you for any contribution.

Hi Tomato Head, Your suggestion to start with a list and then remove some seems fine - the skills/powerups that you keep should be what works best in gameplay, not what seems most interesting.

As for the rest of your questions, you should be trying them out. Paper prototype, if coding them differently takes too much time. Paper prototyping will help sort out other matters, too.

Hey Tomato Head,

I recently began work on an RPG which I then abandoned due to scope problems. But as I was planning it out I hit the same problems as you.

What I did was start with the story. I thought that building the skills to fit with the setting and characters made a lot of sense.

From there I thought about doing “choice” or “combine”. If you're not familiar with it, it's an idea that I heard somewhere about with mechanics, you can give the player a choice, for example between abilities or you can combine them.

Magic the Gathering is one such example. Amazing to combine mechanics into cool things. However keeping power levels sensible is hard, like you say, it's important too.

I know that's not a lot of help, but if you want to get more specific with questions I can try to help some more.

Deckhead01 said:

Hey Tomato Head,

I recently began work on an RPG which I then abandoned due to scope problems. But as I was planning it out I hit the same problems as you.

What I did was start with the story. I thought that building the skills to fit with the setting and characters made a lot of sense.

From there I thought about doing “choice” or “combine”. If you're not familiar with it, it's an idea that I heard somewhere about with mechanics, you can give the player a choice, for example between abilities or you can combine them.

Magic the Gathering is one such example. Amazing to combine mechanics into cool things. However keeping power levels sensible is hard, like you say, it's important too.

I know that's not a lot of help, but if you want to get more specific with questions I can try to help some more.

Yes, certainly starting with the story and world seems what makes creating skills more plausible to fit the aspect of roleplaying (also should consider the specific character personalities/archetypes).

I don't really understand what ‘choice’ and ‘combine’ mean but I will research them out. Does it mean synergy between skills (or cards in that example)?

One aspect I thought might be interesting is to create synergy between different characters skillsets, that would reinforce the idea that these people are really a team and comrades. On the other hand this might make things a little bit mechanically tiring because of having to switch between characters to execute an more complex action.

Tom Sloper said:

Hi Tomato Head, Your suggestion to start with a list and then remove some seems fine - the skills/powerups that you keep should be what works best in gameplay, not what seems most interesting.

As for the rest of your questions, you should be trying them out. Paper prototype, if coding them differently takes too much time. Paper prototyping will help sort out other matters, too.

I guess that in a sense a small team can never find out all the exploitative mechanics in a game and you just hope you haven't made things so complex that you can't see the most obvious ones.

So basically the difference is like this:

Choice

Player has some limited resources, money, slots, time etc; and has to choose which mechanic to use. For an RPG this could mean choosing which to equip for battle later.

Combine

Player uses smaller less complicated skills together to produce more interesting ones.

For example in Choice, I may equip “Fire Spell” or “Fire Sword” (or both). In Combine, I might have “Fire Spell” and “Inbue Weapon with Magic”.

Choice is simpler, both the player and developer know what skills will do. Combine means, in the above example, what happens when you try to “Inbue Weapon with Magic” and a “Portal to Home” spell? Maybe that means we need several categories of spells.

I wrote more about this here https://indiegamedev.net/2020/01/20/choice-vs-combine/ just because I thought it's an interesting topic to talk about.

Its very interesting to hear your different approach. Compared to my previous game engine, i have removed most of the traditional RPG elements from my new RPG game maker engine. As bruce lee said once, the sculptur removes from the material, and not adds into it. I tought the game creators will be able to work faster if they dont have to worry about scripting the battle system and complex events, and they can concentrate creating the game itself.

I dont want you to convience about anything, but i think modern gamers will not care about these features - gaming is very different than it was like 15 years ago. You maybe want complex game mechanics, but the users will not favor it.

Geri said:

I dont want you to convience about anything, but i think modern gamers will not care about these features - gaming is very different than it was like 15 years ago. You maybe want complex game mechanics, but the users will not favor it.

I think the success of Hearthstone, Factorio, Minecraft and about a million other games proves you wrong. They all utilize combination in their mechanics and it works. People love it.

I suppose what you call “skills” is in Diablo 2 meaning alternatively called “Special ability”

You can work from other side:

What effects You want to have in game ( fire ,ice, impact, harm from weapons, AoE, cone attack etc.) ?

What actions of the character you have ( hitting the target, hitting multiple target, dodge, run, jump, teleport)?

With this list You can go and decide which effect needs skill.

With amount of skills the first question is how many skills interface will allow to use in single combat? Next question is do you want a player character specialized and player needs to do another character to try something different or do you want character to have many skills to select from to make new build?