A first game design experience

After implementing the basics of the architecture of the game, the networking and such, I wanted to do something more relaxing. So, I decided to experiment with ideas on the gameplay of the game.

It has been surprisingly funnier than expected, and here is a first draft of how FyS Online battle system would work.

Inspiration

The reason why I decided FyS Online to be turn per turn game (during battle) is that I have unconditional love for the previous final fantasy games. It is then normal that I use them as base for FyS Online.

I named the battle system of FyS Online SCTB (Side Conditional Timed Battle) which is strongly inspired from the Final Fantasy X battle system (CTB: Conditional Turn-Based Battle) but has notable differences in order to make the game playable in a multi-player game.

A reminder of CTB (FFX battle system)

Explanations took from finalfantasy.fandom.com

CTB is a turn-based system which does not operate in rounds, instead, it uses an Act List that is affected through various means and thus does not guarantee that each participant in a battle will have an equal number of turns. Units with higher speed take more turns than slower ones, making speed more important than in other turn-based battle systems. Players can substitute party members mid-battle adding a new level of strategy.

In other words

It is a fighting system based on an ordering list of the player based on the speed/statistic of each player and monsters. Which means that a fast character will have the right to attack multiple times before a slow monster fight back.

Why creating a new battle system?

First, because it is funnier to invent an original thing instead of copying an existing concept. On top of that, while I loved FFX, I think some issue in the gameplay makes it a little bit too easy to play. Final Fantasy X is not particularly famous for being hard. And I try to solve those issue while also adding some elements making the gameplay may be more enjoyable in an MMORPG context (multiplayer).

I would like first to thanks CarNage64 who has a twitch stream on which he speedruns FF7. He gave me advice on how and why the FFX battle system is imperfect and how it could be improved.

What are the downsides of CTB?

The CTB has been designed in a way that presents several issues:

Infinite time turn: Turns are potentially infinite, everything is based on the priority list displayed on the UI which is calculated based on the speed of your characters (and enemies). Which gives you all the time you want to elaborate a strategy, to heal your hurt characters at the last second (knowing perfectly that the opponent won’t attack before you heal). This last point being important as the “stress of potential death” is almost not present. This point is certainly the biggest flaw in CTB.

Too easy to change characters: In CTB, you have 4 characters fighting and many more are waiting behind and can replace your character currently in play. This is a nice thing as it increases the number of playable characters making the game more interesting. But the issue is that there is no penalty changing character in-fight (the turn of the switched character not being lost). This also makes the game easier as you can retreat your hurt character before the enemy attack and makes him come back afterwards basically for free.

Not adapted for multiplayer: CTB has not been thought to handle multiplayer and would require changes, in any case, to do so.

A new battle system SCTB (Side Condition Timed Battle)

Side Condition Timed Battle is a mix between CTB (FF-X battle system) and more classical battle system based on timers.

Let’s peel the SCTB acronym in order to understand the basics of this battle system.

Condition Timed

Even if FF-X condition list, which makes you able to know the ordering of the characters/opponents turn, made the game easy. It was a pretty good idea as it gave an interesting strategic aspect to the battle, making you able to better play with the “limit” of your character’s resources (nearly dying, nearly out of magic power and so on…).

SCTB has the same condition list (based on characters/monsters speed), but in order to remove the easiness of FF-X battle system, the turn of each character are timed. Plus a configurable difficulty mode makes you able to change this timer to be shorter (harder) or longer (easier). At the end of the timer, the character turn is skipped and the next character in the condition list takes its turn.

This “Condition Timed” part of SCTB remove the Infinite time turn problematic explained above.

Side

Here is where SCTB makes a difference compared to other turns per turn battle system. The real challenge of this battle system is to be able to make multiple players playing a turn per turn game together.

To do so, in SCTB, the battlefield in which you fight your opponent(s) is not flat like in Pokémon (or Final Fantasy 1 to 10). But is composed of a total of 18 possible angles. The gaming board could be represented as 3 hexagons stuck together (see ASCII art below).

Your team of characters (4 characters) will be on a side of the below hexagon, same for the monster(s). Your characters can move independently from one adjacent side to another to fight monsters.

_____ / \ _____/ B \ / \ / / A \_____/ \ / \ \_____/ C \ \ / \_____/ 18 possible playable sides 6 possible ambush sides [A_NorthEast, B_SouthWest, A_SudEast, C_NorthWest, C_North, B_South] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ____ _ / \ _____ / B \ / \ / / A \ _____ / \ / \ \ _____ / C \ \ / \ _____ / 18 possible playable sides 6 possible ambush sides [ A_NorthEast , B_SouthWest , A_SudEast , C_NorthWest , C_North , B_South ]

Little monsters (the size of your character) are going to be able to be on only one side of one of the three hexagons (the same as your character). Which means that when a character changes sides if the monster doesn’t follow you, this character won’t be able to reach this monster from the new side.

You can think of each side as a separate battle happening at the same time. There can be 18 battlefronts in total, and your characters can use a turn to change battlefront (side) instead of doing another action (attacking for example).

This aspect adds some strategy as some monster could have a very powerful area of effect spells that would touch everyone on a specific side.

You can find bellow a very sketchy draw of example:

In this state the player is in the at the south-west of the hexagon B, if the player decides to move all his characters to the left, the characters will be on the northwest of Polygon B (as shown below). In this other side of polygon B, another monster will be present.

Large-sized monster

Monsters can be big enough to be attacked from multiple sides. For example, a big Hydra Boss monster could be on the 6 faces of the Hexagon A at the same time. Some characters of your team would be on the border north-east of the Hexagon A to fight one of the Head, others could be on the north border of the hexagon to fight another head. Or even at the back of the hydra (on the border south/south-east) where the characters would fight the tail of the Hydra.

Multiplayer adapted

18 battlefronts possible is really a lot, way more than any usual encounters that will be usually generated in the game (1 to 3 battlefront for random encounters). So why that many sides? The answer is simple, in MMORPG, two things are really appreciated by the players, the PvP (player vs player) to show off the individual skill of each player. And the PvE (Player vs Environment) to play in a team and make successful strategy against the game’s traps. FyS Online is focusing on PvE for now, and the SCTB is particularly interesting for it as it would be the first (as far as I know) turn per turn game that would allow multiple players to play at the same time in a very good pace (not having to wait long before playing).

A Massively Multi-player game in which you must wait your turn? : Yeah, sounds horrible right? if there is a maximum of 18 battlefields with, let’s say 2 players by battlefield, then there are 36 players. You should wait for 36 players + the monsters turn before playing. It is not playable if kept as such.

But, what if each side, each battlefield, have their own turns? Then it means for each battlefield (each side of the hexagon), you just must wait for 1 player and the monster present on this specific side to play before your turn. And this is how SCTB works, there is one timer and one priority list by hexagon side, which makes it playable even with a lot of players playing at the same time.

The fact that you can move from one side to another is not inconsequential as most of the spells you can cast are limited to the current side your character is in, so strategy can be put in place in order to have healers coming to heal and protect themselves on a side that is less dangerous (for example).

Of course, if every player is present on the same side, it will have the waiting issue explained above. But it shouldn’t be the case as the only reason to have a lot of player fighting together is to beat a boss that will be a “large-sized monster”. Whom will have multiple sides to fight on, and adds (monsters that could spawn during the different phase of the boss), also on other sides.

But a player can move its characters from side to side independently: Yes, making each character owned by a player able to move independently is the goal. It would increase the complexity of the gameplay for the players (as they will need to handle multiple turns at the same time on different fronts). But it can have the issue of making too many players on one specific side and thus slowing down the pace of the game greatly. Additional work on this part is required to make the gameplay fun.

Conclusion

The gameplay presented above has the advantage of making it possible to have a turn per turn game that we enjoyed but in a multiplayer context. This draft is enough for starting a proof of concept and enjoys the coding, but it certainly requires a lot of changes in order to be able to implement PVP (player VS player) for example. It is my first time trying to design gameplay, it certainly has a lot of issues and if you think this concept can be improved and have ideas to do so, I would gladly read your opinion and exchange with you on the matter.

You can follow the progression of FyS Online on github.