With our first week behind us, we spent our second week beginning to execute on many of our decisions from the first week. However, the team’s primary attention was devoted to coming up with a foundation for our battle system.
Our week began by revisiting ideas generated from our pre-production phase: elemental-based, beat-em-up loadout-based, RPG class systems, and MOBA-style combat. Whereas our design work on check-ins were strenuous, yet smooth–we hit a wall with our battle system. We were drawn to the simplicity of past systems, notably Pokemon’s, but understood its inherent flaws: Incredibly difficult to balance, numerous tiers of ‘viability’, and excessively cloned.
After our initial meetings, we started to narrow our focus to a turn-based battling system for ease of programming and balancing. We also decided that we would deliberately avoid a Pokemon style of elemental-advantage combat to help differentiate our game from Pokemon and its numerous clones.
Instead, we chose to pursue a battle design more akin to Magic: The Gathering, where battles are designed around strategies that balance and challenge each other (as oppose to set advantages and hard counters). With this base, we are now moving forward into designing Locanimals’ stats and movesets with a paper prototype.
Our disciplines also made great progress. Programming now has a solid foundation for our server and tables. Art made excellent progress on branding, a test of our Locanimal pipeline (which was somewhat hampered by no access to ZBrush), and with more Locanimal concepts. Futhermore, Sound finished a rough draft of Locanimal’s main theme song. In the next week, we hope to shift more fully into production: a rough battle system, UI concepts, and even more Locanimals!
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.