Hi and welcome to yet another weekly update!
This week we continued working on our menu system. We polished several graphics, created new mock-ups, and further implemented the start menu screen.
Incoming screenshots!
Let’s start off with the implementation of the start menu:
This is an actual screenshot from the game. On the upper left you see a more detailed status display, which actually expands dynamically from the smaller status HUD during gameplay. In addition to HP, we have experience, level, and base stats displayed as well.
The small entries with the yellow lines show the currently active buffs of the player, which can influence base stats, element resistance, or other parameters (such as aiming precision). With the yellow line you can see how long each buff is still active. And yes: you’ll see those buffs outside of the menu as well.
On the right side you get an impression on what kind of content you’ll find in the menu.
So much on what’s already implemented. The following screens are mock-ups from future menu content:
This is the equipment menu. We have shown an earlier version in a previous weekly update. We just polished some of the graphics here and added a few more buttons in the upper right corner. The status button allows you to quickly switch to the status menu for convenience (you often want to see the status in full detail when changing equipment).
Here you can select a new piece of equipment. On the left side you can see what effects the selected item will have on your stats.
Finally, the status screen. That is: the parameters page of the status screen. Yeah, that’s a lot of numbers since it shows each and every parameter for all 4 element modes + neutral. However, since you won’t start with all elements right away you can expect this screen to start simple and grow more complex over time.
Oh yes, those small circles? Those are some miniature pie charts visualizing the stats: either they simply map to the percentage value (e.g. for modifiers) or they show the difference to the base value (e.g. for the 4 base stats MAX HP, ATK, DEF and FOC).
…You might notice that the numbers don’t really match the circles. Well, it’s a lazy mock-up. You will find more consistency in the game, promised!
And that’s the stuff we’re doing these days. Any opinions about the menu? Just leave a comment!
Otherwise, until next week!
8 Comments
Thunfischbrötchen? xD
Best item already confirmed!
*insert throwing money at the screen joke*
nah, really. if this game were on kickstarter, I’d already bought it. thanks for keeping us updated.
Although it looks nice, it is far too overloaded with numbers. I doubt that the player will be able to fully make use of these stats. Why include so many different types of numbers? ;)
From what we show in the screens it certainly looks overloaded. That is because we tested how the layout scales for an increasing number of stats. At one point in the game you will have these number of stats, but it will certainly be toward the end of the game.
CrossCode only has 4 base stats (HP, ATK, DEF, FOC). That’s less than what you usually have in RPGs. The following 4 stats are resistance values per element and after that you have optional gray “modifiers” that might or might not be there depending on your equipment and skills. And that is stuff you have in most RPGs as well. The only difference is, that many RPGs choose not to display a summary with all stats accumulated as you can see it in the parameters screen. Instead you need to check each piece of equipment and/or skill to sum up the final values yourself. We just thought having this kind of overview might be very useful for players who pay attention to these kind of details (yes, those players do exist :) ).
Well, the parameters view is definitely one extreme. What you see here is all possible stats for all element modes at once. That’s comparable to having an overview over all stats for a whole party of 6 characters.
We just thought this is nicer than having to swap through all elements separately.
But again: The parameters view won’t be this complex from the very beginning. In fact, it will start with 8 rows and 2 columns of numbers. Over the course of the game you will obtain more modifiers (per skills / equipment) increasing the number of rows, and unlock new element modes, increasing the number of columns. So we hope players will be able to adapt to the increasing complexity. :D
OK, I got the point of starting off with less degrees of freedom.
Even if there are RPGs out there that have a comparable number of attributes, then this is because those games have a much different style of gameplay, gameplay that is centered around tons of items, upgrades, and the said attributes. The whole game-strategy develops around those things.
But in your game, the situation seems to appear quite different. In scientific terms, I would say the number of degrees of freedom you have in your stats (if at the beginning of the game or not) is overfitting the model (i.e. gameplay) by far! Remember Occam’s razors? “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.”. ;-)
Hi again!
Occam’s razor makes sense when talking about hypotheses. I don’t know how exactly it should apply to game design, really.
In the end, this amount of stats are perfectly normal for Action RPGs. It’s pretty straight forward to extend the gameplay to match the ‘degrees of freedom’ the stats provide. HP = Energy. One down. Damage = ATK – DEF. Three Down. Use FOC for critical hits. Four down. Attacks have elemental properties and enemies strength and weeknesses toward 4 elements. Eight down. And so on.
Well… reading your previous comment, I realize you’re quite skeptical about the whole RPG direction that CrossCode is taking. I can’t blame you for that. The TechDemo didn’t really feel like an RPG at all, more like an Action-Adventure like Zelda or a puzzle game like Portal. And yeah, in the end, RPGs aren’t for everyone.
Still, an Action-RPG is what we’re going for. That has been decided pretty early on already. We also do think that it works perfectly fine. For the combination of Action and RPG you have many critically acclaimed games such as Kingdom Hearts and Terranigma. Even the combination of RPG and Puzzles has been done before (Lufia 2 for SNES) and worked great as well. Just the combination of the three, Action, RPG AND Puzzles hasn’t really been done before, at least to our knowledge. But we don’t see why a Zelda-like game is immediately broken by combining it with RPG concepts. And that’s exactly what we want to try.
Anyway… We’re always happy about feedback. And especially comments like yours help us to think out of the box. Still, you should know we’re mostly a bunch to people crazy about RPGs (and Action RPGs) so trying to get us away from that path will be pretty difficult. :D
You are right, Occam’s Razor is a bit misplaced here, but it still works if you just use the word “model” to substitute “theory/hypothesis”. So, even if every degree of freedom in the stats has a unique effect not explainable by other stats, the real questions to ask here (and what I really meant in the first place) are:
– Is the player fully aware of the configuration of the stats while playing?
– Does he feel to be in control of what’s going on?
– Does he praise/blame his own skills/decisions if some action/event turns out well/bad?
The player should be the master of his game character and its attributes. And in my opinion, this works best if the number of degrees of freedom before any player action is below 5.
A game I often refer to when it comes to this problem is “Golden Sun” (any installment). The Djinns are a really nice idea, but the sheer number of different classes and the associated parameter configurations are far (faaar) too complex for a normal player to feel in control of. Even worse: During battle, if you summon your Djinns, the player’s current class changes dynamically, making the mess complete. During gameplay, I remember that the only information (and therefore “degree of freedom”) I really kept in mind was: “Oh, and now my stats are lower than before, so I have to be more careful…”.
I hope you see my point! ;-)
Other than that you are right that I am skeptical when it comes to RPGs. But I still love them!
I don’t want to change your mind on the general direction of the game (how can I?!), but I just wanted to make this point clear. Maybe your game will teach me better. ;-)
Keep going!
Hi NicM!
Man, you really make a good point here. I agree that Golden Sun was problematic with the whole Djinns system. I think this is especially true, because you had such a huge degree of freedom, as you say: You had up to 4-5 Djinns per Character (if I remember correctly) and each Djinn modified the stats in a kind of individual (non transparent) way… And the worst thing is, that you can connect / disconnect Djinns during battle… for each Party member. There are just so many different states you can have here. With 5 Djinns you have already 32 states if you consider all possible sets of connected djinns. And that is again multiplied for each party member. That’s up to 160 different states. Yes, I agree that this is hard to follow and really too complex, even for a turn based system.
Yeah and seeing all the stats in our menu, I see how you might think we might have the same problem in CrossCode. But there are a couple of differences compares to Golden Sun.
First off, you will only have up to 5 different sets of stats per battle: one for each element and neutral. I personally think this complexity is comparable to having a party of 5 characters with different stats. It’s nothing near the 160 possible states in Golden Sun.
Second, each set of stat will have certain intuitive characteristics. Especially elemental resistance will be pretty straightforward. E.g. in heat mode, you’ll be resistant to heat, but vulnerable to cold etc. In addition, each element will have certain preferences for stats: e.g. heat is strong in ATK, cold is strong in DEF, wave is strong in HP etc. While you will be able to influence the stats by skills and equipment to make the differences larger / smaller, it will not be possible to turn the general preferences of each element around entirely. So it’s not like you have 5 sets of random stats. It’s rather you have 5 classes with known preferences that are easy to remember after some getting used to – we hope.
As for the modifiers: At this point it’s not entirely clear how many of these modifiers we will have and how strongly those will vary among the different element modes. Things we wanted to have are weapons that are faster or slower to aim with (which is expressed by the AIM speed modifier) and equipment with rather passive abilities (Exp+ will simply give you slightly more Exp per enemy). I don’t really think that will blow up the complexity too much, especially as these things will be added gradually.
As for the player feeling in control: I think the key here is to avoid strong variations of the stats DURING battle, like Golden Sun does. I think players can handle a good amount of complexity as long as it is managed outside of battle as some kind of preparation. After all, some fun with RPG comes from experimenting with equipment and skills to find the best configuration for the situation.
So… In the end I hope the situation won’t be quite as bad as with Golden Sun (actually, I like that game… but you still have a valid point here).