Behind the Curtain: The Mechanical Mind

I figure that, in addition to weekly (or so) patches, I can look to do these more "explanatory" posts every week or fortnight or so. Give insight (and context), demystify a lot of things, and just help settle some of my thoughts on this thing I put together.

As an update, I have started working on a proper follow-up to Chronicles of Dramarith I; it is in its very early stages, but Iprogress proceeds on it, and I'll see where it goes. For now, though, let's talk about the game I put together and put out in the world.

Similar, yet different

Let's start with the obvious and most consistent throughline: my Fire Emblem inspiration. It's definitely something I wanted to lean into a bit instead of just running away from it, but I didn't just want to copy every little thing Fire Emblem did and does and call it a day...if people want to play a remixed Fire Emblem, there are plenty of ROM hacks out there what people can go with, along with games that more closely copy the trappings and style of the series.

Part of this is tied to what SRPG Studio had baked into it in terms of mechanics. It's very much an engine that takes inspiration from the entire Super Famicom era of the franchise (Mystery of the Emblem, Genealogy of the Holy War, and Thracia 776) as its building blocks, with many of the default systems being based off of those games.

Instead of trying to import plug-in scripts to copy all of the "modern" Fire Emblem mechanical tropes (weapon ranks, tiered support systems, and the like), I felt I could make things work with the tools I had and still make things fun. The caveat there is that you can't sometimes get everything perfect, but this was my first project, and I figured "good and done" is better than "never completed and never going to be completed".

A Horse-Shaped Specter

Speaking of that, a common theme in Fire Emblem is that, unsurprisingly, mobility is king. In the vast majority of games, its best units will tend to be mounted units (flying or grounded), and this is by design. Mobility is often the one stat that you can't reliably improve or upgrade. and being able to fly to parts others can't or just get places faster is always going to be more valuable than a lot of other attributes.

Obviously, that's going to be a hard thing to design around to try and mitigate, and the solution of just making them bad is both inelegant and unsatisfying to me. But I can still try to design in a way where they have strengths, but those strengths aren't as pronounced.

My thoughts were:

• Give every playable character a small growth rate for their Move stat. This was originally more for flavor, but I really liked how it played and made t so that, by and large, the variance between playthroughs was a bit higher. 
• Keep the gap between mounted and unmounted units smaller. Unmounted units generally have a base movement of 5 (with some exceptions), while mounted units start at 6 move (and gain 1 on promotion).
• Unmounted units will have slightly better stats, both in terms of their growth rates and their stat caps.
• No mounted healers.

The last point was one I was pretty adamant about, since mounted healers tend to break the game pretty spectacularly once you get them. It's not so much that I couldn't build the game with them in mind...but I think that there's definitely a bit more interesting tension to be had in locking staves to unmounted classes.

Lord of the Dark

The other thing I was interested in playing with was with making dark magic more present. I've always loved the shaman classes in Fire Emblem; dark magic is fun, but it's always been so limited in how much you see it. It also feels like, generally, a stronger elemental magic type with some occasional upside.

I wanted to sharpen that a bit more. While I could probably have done more with light magic as well, to play in a bit more into some unique mechanical space, I wanted dark magic to feel a bit more powerful and threatening, both in terms of power and what it did. I also didn't want it to just be an enemy thing, because it's sometimes fun to get those tools to play with for yourself.

Still, dark magic is, and should feel, a bit special and more distinct than elemental magic, and that was why I only provided a single dark magic user available for the player. I'm definitely not going to repeat that limitation for this follow-up project, but here we are.

Those are some thoughts. As a forecast, v1.04 should feature a first pass at a harder difficulty setting, as well as some more tweaks to dialogue (to fix typos and add in more color), as well as a couple gameplay tweaks.

Thanks for playing, as always! I appreciate it.