The galaxy needs saving, and your 11 party members have the skills to do it. But where to begin?

Cosmic Star Heroine has been a huge undertaking for us at Zeboyd Games. With today’s launch, we wanted to share some of the ideas behind the battle system.

Fast-paced battles are key elements to all of our games. While some of our previous games provided stationary, visible encounter points in maps, you were always taken to a separate static screen for battle gameplay. For Cosmic Star Heroine, we decided it was finally time for enemies to move around the map you explored, who would battle you right where you encounter them.

This lends consistency to the game world, and has the advantage of jumping straight into battles immediately. It also provides the simple but fun mechanic of being able to narrowly skirt by moving enemies to avoid some encounters. It keeps the pace up, it keeps the player grounded in the game world, and it provides opportunities to fight or avoid some battles.

We needed a complex, fast-paced battle system to go with it. Cosmic Star Heroine provides the player with up to 11 characters to choose from for their four-person party. For each character, there are eight ability slots; you can equip from a large variety of abilities and then narrow it down to eight for use in battle. This has the advantage of focusing players’ attention and diversifying their battle options without overwhelming them, while also speeding up battles by removing lesser-used abilities.

To ensure that players would use a variety of combat strategies, we devised a simple system to encourage use of multiple abilities in battle, including the oft-overlooked “Defend” command. Players are able to choose any ability available — there are no mana or magic limitations — but can only use an ability once before it is locked out. The “Defend” command recharges all abilities. Think ahead: which abilities should be used at what time, depending on the turn order, such that they are not locked out at a critical moment?

To further emphasize this mechanic, we implemented a Hyper system — each character is granted a powered-up mode that increases the effectiveness of abilities for one turn. The player can see when these Hyper turns become available, so they are encouraged to time their Ability and Defend commands to maximize a powered-up Hyper turn!

By providing a wealth of battle options for customization and depth, but employing a system that focuses and simplifies elements towards strategy, we believe we’ve achieved the goal of a system that is easy to learn, fun to master, and keeps the pace of the game smooth!

Our two-person team at Zeboyd has been working on Cosmic Star Heroine along with the super talented audio experts at HyperDuck SoundWorks to deliver what we feel is an incredibly varied, deep, approachable, fast-paced RPG with limited filler and tons of exciting moments. We’re excited to finally give the world a chance to prove their sci-fi super-agent skills!