Inception

Another inspiration, another new project.

I have a bunch of prototypes listed here on itch, and often my projects remain in that "prototype" state. Oftentime, that is because I feel like I'm developing for my own entertainment, and the project itself has no audience - which is natural, given my absolute lack of audience development efforts. Soo.. This time, I'm gonna do it a little bit more "right". I'll do devlogs! Baby steps.

I have a small ARPG project I worked on over a year ago - I think it's published here. Yeah, that's a very barebones page, I know - I only used it to share the testing build with my friends, and the latest one doesn't even have the "tutorial" section of the game.. But I digress.

After working on this for a bit, I encountered Rabbit & Steel, and thought - "Damn, this game achieves whatever I wanted to achieve with my prototype, but also has co-op and a roguelike builds system." With that thought, I put my work on pause - and played a ton of Rabbit & Steel.

Recently, however, I stumbled upon a little something called Abyssal Blade. Best $4 spent this year. It's a shame it only has 5 bosses, the experience was amazing. It really captured the essence of FFXIV raid design, and managed to cram in some DPS optimisation opportunities - loved every bit of it. In fact, it gave me something that the current(m5s-m8s) FFXIV raid tier failed to deliver - more puzzle-y and knowledge-based mechanics. That really made me think about what's different in the current designs of these three games - FFXIV, Abyssal Blade and Rabbit & Steel.

As I mentioned, Abyssal Blade has more puzzle-y mechanics, where it teaches you the behavior of something, and then iterates on it over the fight, adding layers and increasing the complexity. A "memory game", which becomes a "memory game, but it makes you memorize 2 sequences at a time, revealing a false sequence halfway through". A "dodge pattern" mechanic and a "get hit by opposite color" mechanic combining into a mechanic where you need to alternate between being in a safe zone and getting hit. You get the idea.

Rabbit & Steel, in essence, is a bullet hell. And while I'm not familiar with bullet hells, I know that this one is pattern-based, but despite being that, it has plenty of structured mechanics. Most of these mechanics, however, are interlaced with heavy randomness, and are moslty just visual patterns - "be where the bad is not", without much depth  and nuance to the mechanics themselves. Because of that, some of the complex mechanics are really cluttery on-screen. I think one of the segments of the Mouse boss took me a few minutes to simply figure out the movement while looking at the video of the mechanic. There was also a certain part where you get repeating 1 and 2 indicators on screen, and it's quite confusing when a "2" on-screen goes off before a "1" does. Regardless, amazing game, got 250 hours in it.

FFXIV current raid tier.. People seem to love it, but I can't get behind that at all. The mechanics require a lot of faster movement, which doesn't seem right for a game with a heavily desynced snapshot/animation system. And there was nothing to learn/understand - besides, maybe, m6s adds phase, and a tiny little bit of tether magic in the end of m8s. I loved stuff like High Concept, Acts, Caloric in EW raid tiers, I'd love top p5 if it wasn't 9 minutes into the fight, UR and CT in FRU were great. It's not that I dislike simple visual mechanics.. It's just that for me, there was a huge lack of more complex stuff this tier, of mechanics that require  me to make an informed decision - even if completely dictated by a strat - rather than just be in my assigned spot and not touch bad. Oh, right, and floor patterns. Loved when they carried information, but now that's gone too.

After thinking this through, I decided to give it a shot and see what I can come up with. The goals for Extreme Raid Progression (yes) are as follows:

• A 2D coop lobby-based boss battler (perhaps with a hub area to foster a snse of community and give weight to achievements)
• Focus on 1, 2 and 4 player encounters. 1 to have solo content and let a new player have a taste, 2 for "show/try with a friend", 4 for truly challenging encounters
• Try to strike a similar complexity and diversity of mechanics to EW encounters, similar to how Abyssal Blade did
• A class system akin to Rabbit and Steel, but without the roguelike build component. Maybe minor gameplay customization options.
• No Holy Trinity, but keep some vestiges of it. For example, if the boss moves or has a filler attack pattern, there should be a way to control which player it follows/attacks.
• Gear. Great reward for any raider. And I'd like to come up with something more engaging than "+5 mainstat +5 crit".
• Robust and flexible encounter creation workflow.

So far, I've been doing some dabbling in Unity. I tend to be system-oriented when it comes to making games, I aim to create a system that will support any complexities I desire - usually in terms of builds/skill alterations/modifications. This time, the core complexity system is going to be encounter orchestration. I've spun up a system based on Scriptable Objects to dictate projectile/mechanic targeting, spawning and other behaviours.

With Mirror as my networking framework, I've gotten the basic down, with movement and projectile spawning/interaction working between clients and server. After I finish this post, I willgo ahead and try to implement this:

Which is the first encounter I want to implement, designed to introduce the basic concepts of  "areas you don't want to stand in", "areas you need to stand in", and a touch of player control over the mechanic placement, and how it affects the other player. Yeah, I know, the picture makes a lot of sense, does it not? Although, to be honest, there should be another "mechanic" between the first and the second X mechanics, but I'll get to adding that. For now, it's also a first pass on the encounter design/implementation workflow, and a test on my encounter system flexibility.