Fae Tactics Game Play Dev Pt.3

It has been a long time and, as some of you know, a lot has happened. In this post I will go over some of main changes/developments that have happened to Fae Tactics.

Upgrade!

First off, the game has been moved from GM Studio 1 to GM Studio 2. The Process was relatively painless but it did require a good chunk of time to go over every inch of the current game to find what/if anything was broken.

Team vs Speed

There was a bit of back and forth about which type of turn based combat we wanted to go with. Team based being what you would see in a game like Fire Emblem or Advanced Wars, and speed based like what you would find in Final Fantasy Tactics. I made quick tests of both styles and weighed the pros and cons of each against what we wanted to achieve. While team made it much easier to set up combo attacks, a single strategic mistake was brutal to sit through as you watched the entire enemy team do their turn and proceed to jolly stomp one or more of your units. Speed based required a good bit more conscious effort to perform combos since you had to watch the turn order or potentially have your target move out of position, but it allowed for the possibility to react to a bad decision and change strategies mid turn.

We eventually settled on speed based turns because of the versatility it offered. One thing we wanted to avoid is the easily exploitable nature of speed based turns where if you jacked up a units speed enough they could get multiple turns before anyone gets to do anything (while this may be fun/broken when the player does it, the enemy getting multiple turns can be rather frustrating). So what we have is a sort of hybrid where the combat is still locked into rounds and each unit only has one turn per round. The Speed stat determines where they are on the turn order, so having a higher speed gives you the advantage of going first or the flexibility to delay your turn until you feel the moment is right to make your move.

Spell Talisman

Currently you can equip up to 3 Spell Talisman to use in combat. We currently have about 40 or so spells planned with 29 of them already functioning in game and more than half of those already acquirable in the current build of the game. There a variety of offense, defense, and support spells that can really alter the effectiveness of your party composition. Both the player and the enemy can only use one spell per round. Once used the spell has a cool down period (different duration for each spell) before it can be used again.

I’ll try to catch up on some of the other things that were done later. I’ll just dump some of the other work we’ve posted in other places here. Seeya later folks.