Hello all, we have a lot to talk about today. Nothing bad, lots of concepts. This has been a very conceptual month if you will. Before that though I’ll start with the concrete stuff. To be honest, a lot of this month was spent pondering and planning rather than coding. The first part of the month did see a few things get done however.
So as far as things added, there was work on the item quality system to work out a few kinks as well as assign quality to fish that you catch. In addition, the cooking UI was finished up. I believe all I really had left to do at the start of the month was finish up fish filleting. Its more precise than what is in the live version. Fish give one of two types of fillet and those fillet’s have quality levels. On top of that different fish give different amounts of fillets. You can also tell what you are filleting, because for some reason I don’t think you can in the live version.
Aside from that there was a fairly large backend change to object hierarchy to accommodate certain placed objects. The reason that came up is because the carpenter mallet got added in so you can actually pick up the things that you place.
The reason the carpenter mallet finally got added in was because I also coded the entirety of the irrigation system at the start of the month. That probably doesn’t sound like much but it’s one of those systems that is a lot more complex than it probably seems. It has to do with placing and picking up pipes, water sources, updating pipe flows, etc. It starts to get into recursive algorithms and things to keep it efficient. In any case, I won’t bore you with the math, it is now done and works.
A few details with the irrigation system though. First, I did some considering and decided that you won’t get irrigation right away in the game. In the live version you just sort of have the option from the start. This was because irrigation wasn’t planned originally so rather than make it a reward I just dropped it in. Problem is if you have it right away it just sort of overshadows the watering can upgrades. So, it will be something you get a bit later in the game this time around.
Aside from that, I’ve changed how irrigation works. Originally, I was intending for it to be the same as before where you connect it to a water source in the world. However, two things happened. One, water changed a bit, and two, I’m not sure if the farm will have a water source on it yet. It probably will but I’m toying with some ideas. I also don’t like the idea of being tied to a static bit of water on the map, it sort of forces all players to build similar layouts if the want irrigation. Instead, you’ll now unlock a small one tile building that acts as a water source so you can effectively irrigate anywhere. This was intended to be a later upgrade in the old system but I decided to just move the whole system back further in progression and give it all at once. However, that said, I’ve also added an upgrade for irrigation pipes that will unlock a bit later than the pipes themselves. I’ll leave that one a mystery but I’m sure if you think on it you can figure out what it might be.
So that was the actual programming work done. I also added in more sprites which is more of an ongoing project to transfer things over, but that’s mostly busy work. As I said at the start, most of my time was spent pondering. Well, pondering and using excel, who doesn’t love a good spreadsheet after all.
So, what did I have the joy of making spreadsheets about? In a word, combat. If you’ve been reading these for a while you probably remember me mentioning combat more than a few times. You might also remember me saying that its gone through like five iterations at this point. I’ll try to put all that into some concise detail and explain where I’m at.
To keep it somewhat simple the older combat systems were much too complicated. I want combat to be a system that feels like more than an afterthought. Because of this the systems I was designing tended to be on the complex side. There were a couple of iterations, a deck builder like Slay the Spire, something that played like a round based card game, a turn based battle system themed around auto battling and using abilities to give yourself stat buffs throughout the battle, etc.
I don’t think these were bad ideas but they all shared the same issues they just manifested at different points in the design. Those issues were, simply put, too complicated, and too long, as in battles would take forever.
Designing combat for Verdant Village has basically been a constant attempt to make something interesting, but also keep it simple and short. As I’m sure most would agree no one wants to be locked into a random battle that takes 10 minutes to finish. Fights should be, get in, get out, excluding boss encounters where I think it’s a bit more reasonable to have a long form fight.
So, with all that said I spent a good chunk of the month trying to think something up and fine tune it. I believe I’ve accomplished that. Keeping the fights short will just be a matter of tuning numbers. Keeping fights simple but interesting is something that’s harder to gauge, but I think this hits a descent balance for this type of game. I’m leaning towards the simple side as I’m guessing no one is coming to this game for dark souls tier combat difficulty.
So, what is the combat? A turn based battle system, okay that’s it next topic.
No, I of course will explain (maybe even overexplain). In terms of appearance, it would be easiest to imagine an old 2d final fantasy game. Your character and familiar on one side, the enemies on the other. The combat is turn based as stated before, turn order will always be you then the enemy. Having different speeds and turn rates was considered, but it ended up being just another complication that got trimmed. Speed is instead bundled into other aspects of each enemy.
Speaking of turns, what you are probably imagining is taking your turn, picking attack, or a spell, or an item, etc. This is where the complexity comes in. Unlike old JRPGs you will only have your character and your familiar (we’ll get to them eventually). Those old RPGs worked because a lot of it was about building a party of compatible classes and using them together to overcome various situations. Since you are just one person I’ve instead decided that you are the party.
To explain, first, in a turn you don’t take just one action. You effectively have a set amount of AP (action points) per turn. Every action you take in a turn uses AP, so in any given turn you can compile several actions together. Once set, all the actions will play out at once and that is your turn.
Now one of the things I wanted to avoid was menus. If you’ve played an old JRPG you might remember that some characters (usually mages with lots of spells) had entire lists of abilities to pick from. I don’t want people to have to dig through menus to find the spell they need. As I said at the start, fast and (relatively) simple is the goal.
As I said before the player is the party. The way this works is that the player has access to six classes. Each class has 5 abilities. At any given time in a turn you can set two classes to active, meaning during any turn you only have access to 10 abilities which will all be displayed on the screen, no menus involved.
Classes have been specifically made to be extremely niche. They basically all serve one particular purpose so keeping them straight should be easy enough. For instance, one class is focused on dealing damage. Another is defensive, another one buffs the player, etc. If you’ve ever played final fantasy 13 (maligned as it is) I looked at the paradigm system of that game when designing this one.
To summarize, the player can take multiple actions per turn. You will have 10 actions available at any time, 5 apiece from 2 active classes. You can swap classes freely and as often as you like and each class has a distinct theme so they are easy to tell apart.
But wait, there’s more! Enemies will be fairly simple in design. They will all have some sort of basic attack and then probably 1 (maybe 2) unique abilities they can use. Enemies are encountered in groups of up to 3 so some mixes of enemies will be harder than others. There is one thing about enemies that is worth mentioning however, it’s just a little added interaction to complicate battles a bit. While buffs and debuffs exist certain enemies will also have what I’m currently calling a status.
A status is a buff inherent to the enemy. These are very strong, but the key is that the player can counter them. Countering a status will negate it for the rest of the fight. The player has specific abilities that counter specific statuses, in fact an entire class is dedicated to it. As I said, the combat isn’t going to be wildly complex. I’m just hoping this will offer up some choice for the player in terms of target prioritization.
Now, finally, the familiar. From a gameplay perspective the familiar exists because going 3 on 1 can get a bit hard to balance in terms of health and damage output. You end up with weird situations where without a lot of on-the-fly adjustments enemies might either just destroy you or be useless. There are other ways around that sort of thing, but I thought this was an interesting solution.
For those unfamiliar with uh…familiars, a familiar in fantasy settings is usually something like a helper spirit for a magic user. In a lot of settings they take on an animal form like a crow or a cat for instance. In this situation your familiar is just that, and it helps you in battle. Familiars cannot be attacked so there’s no managing its hp. They have AP, and can take multiple actions per turn albeit fewer than the player.
The familiar is meant for two purposes really. The first is elemental advantage. Some enemies will have an inherent element. Elements work similar to something like Pokemon. Water beats fire, fire beats nature, etc. There are six in total and they all have an advantage and disadvantage against another element.
While your character has classes that determine your actions your familiar will always be channeling a single element. This element determines the type of damage it deals as well gives it a specific bit of utility. Elements can be swapped at will similar to the player swapping classes. Unlike the player classes the familiar only has 3 actions for each elemental form making it simpler to manage. These abilities also follow a pattern for each element. Each one effectively has a damage, utility, and counter ability.
As mentioned earlier familiars have two main purposes. The other purpose is that each elemental form has one of the three actions dedicated to a specific enemy status counter. So your familiar will be the only thing that can remove some enemy statuses, which means swapping to the appropriate element will be needed for both optimal damage and status control.
And that is the combat system, at least briefly put. There are a few odds and ends that will also exist like the use of items by the player or being able to escape a fight etc. Also, there is a whole external system to grow more powerful. I haven’t finalized the actual progression yet but I may tie it to items and your farm rather than just an xp number.
I’m guessing that all of this probably sounds like a lot. To put some of this in perspective you’ll likely be selecting only a few actions per round, maybe 3 or 4 by the time you have a larger AP pool. And I’m looking to have it so that enemies, if fought with reasonable skill, will die in 3 or 4 turns. So ideally a normal fight shouldn’t really last more than 12 or so turns at most unless you are just in an area where you are out of your league. That said the leveling system is also being tuned so that you will effectively end up stronger than anything you fight. So, bar bosses, which will probably scale differently you will (with enough combat) get to a point where you can quickly mow down enemies.
Hopefully that doesn’t sound like too much. I’d be curious to hear any feedback. I think this is probably hard to visualize from just text, but like I said at the start the goal is quick fights, not too complicated, and not too hard. As a final note I should also mention that animations are planned to be quick so you don’t get bogged down in visuals that you’ve seen 100 times. Basically, the opposite of, oh, I don’t know, Sephiroth in the original FF7 is a good example. Fun fact, Sephiroth, the final boss of FF7 has a move called supernova where you have to watch a literal 2 minute cutscene of him shooting a comet through several planets in the solar system, and then into the sun which then explodes and hits your party (somehow an exploding sun does not simply wipe you out of existence). Anyway, this combat system will be the opposite of that in terms of animation work.
Okay, onto the last topic, this is a long devlog already, but I’ve been talking about dialogue and lore a bit in the past so I wanted to address it just a bit. Perhaps its just because not much coding happened this month, but I partially want to justify the time spent on writing. I guess I’d specifically like to address the standard I’m trying to hold to for each character.
To preface, and I think I’ve talked about this before, I’ve never played a game similar to this where I said ‘these characters are interesting’. In my experience characters always basically come across as cardboard cutouts or walking, talking, shop windows. A certain amount of this is obviously just personal preference. My takeaway has basically always been that there just isn’t enough writing to make them interesting and the writing that is there is very (in my opinion at least) boilerplate. I don’t like to throw shade at other games as making a game is hard work and getting any sort of finished product out is tough and honestly something to be celebrated.
All that said, I think this is a gapping flaw in design. These games have long playtimes and the people you meet in them should be interesting. I guess in terms of importance I put characters at about the same level as I would for a normal RPG like Bauldur’s Gate or Dragon Age. The stories aren’t going to be as epic in scale of course but the people you meet should be interesting at the very least.
I did some research on this as I’ve never really critically analyzed these games I just played them. I looked at Harvest Moon FoMT, My Time at Portia, and Stardew Valley all games I’ve personally played through. I watched videos of effectively the heart event system for characters in each game.
Harvest Moon is very basic but I chalk that up to it being a GBA game, there probably wasn’t much space for huge dialogue threads. Portia certainly seemed to have the lengthiest system and some interesting mechanics like dates. In case you are familiar with the game I watched all of the events with Emily. I’m working under the assumption that the characters of each of these games are probably at parity when it comes to character design and dialogue.
Perhaps Emily was a bad example, but I think the best way I can put it is it felt lacking in personality. It seemed like you go through the entire buildup, but you never really learn much about the character outside of she’s a farmer, she has a grandma with memory problems, and there is a vegetable growing competition that she wants to win.
None of these are bad backdrop ideas for relationship building plotlines. The problem I remember is I came out the other end of the cutscenes feeling like I didn’t know the character, rather just their profession. I couldn’t attribute personality traits to her aside from ‘generically nice’.
Stardew seemed to have the same issue. I watched through the events with Leah as I’d romanced her while playing, but couldn’t remember anything outside of ‘she’s an artist’. After watching all the scenes again I came away with the opinion that there wasn’t really much else there. Spoilers on Stardew I guess? If you romance her most of the scenes involve talking about art, and her not being able to pay the bills with said art. There was a cute scene with getting fruit from a tree as I recall and another where you can punch her ex in the face because he’s a stalker.
All in all, as with Portia, by the time it got all the way to marrying her I was left with the same conclusion that the character seems to be generically nice and is an artist. Again, perhaps I picked the wrong person and the others are more interesting. The general issue I found is that the focus is too much on what the character does for a living rather than them as a person.
Ironically, the game with the least going on (Harvest Moon) had the character with the most personality. I watched the cutscenes for romancing Ann because she was the first on the alphabetical list (as you can tell this was very scientific). In any case, over the like 4 minimal cutscenes you actually get insight into her personality. She’s a barmaid and seems happy in that job. She gets embarrassed when romantic topics come up, she thinks her dad is overbearing when it comes to her getting married, she likes to eat, she sings to herself, she’s tidy, and she can have a temper if she gets flustered.
She seems to follow tropes you would see in anime and I’m not saying she’s the best written character ever, but there is at least something there. If you ask me to describe her personality I can list what I just did whereas with the others I wouldn’t have anything to say other than their profession and that they are nice.
So, at this point I’m probably running the risk of making people who like these games angry, for the record I like these games too. As I said before I don’t like to criticize. Its easy to sit on the side and point at something you don’t like when you aren’t the one doing the work to make it.
I bring all this up just to preface, yes, the last like 5 paragraphs were preface. I really go on forever don’t I? I should take up youtube video essays or something. In any case, all this is to say this is what I want to avoid. I want people to come away from this game remembering characters or thinking they are interesting, maybe have that story stick with you for a time.
The thing I wanted to bring up originally was a comparison I did. When I watched the Stardew cutscenes with Leah I copied down all the dialogue lines including player responses. The word count for everything together was around 600 words. To be clear, more words does not mean better writing. That said, 600 words to go from acquaintances to marriage is a lot of ground to cover in very few words. There is an argument to be made that a game has more ways to convey narrative than words as it is a visual and audial medium. In this case I’d say neither of those elements did a significant amount of heavy lifting to compensate.
The first character I’m writing is planned out at this point. I wrote the first event this month between other things and the word count for the first conversation is around 800 words. I say this not to brag or anything, like I said, word count doesn’t equal better. I bring this up because if you remember prior to me babbling for a full page I said I wanted to justify the time I’m spending on writing.
I hope these counts and some of my long winded explanation put into perspective the detail that I’ll be attempting to add to characters. I believe the first character has 7 ‘events’ if you will. They will likely vary in length, but if you generally extrapolate, 800 words multiplied by 7, is 5,600 words.
That said, each character tale is probably going to be about this length. However, the thing is, that’s just the tale. Every character will have one, and this could be considered just getting to be good friends with a character, these stories aren’t romantically inclined. For characters you can romance they’ll have an additional set of events focusing on an actual relationship that builds to marriage. So there is even more dialogue.
Since this devlog is already just going forever I’ll also briefly mention topics. In addition to tales there was planned to be a topic system where you can bring up various things with NPCs and have a short but unique conversation. This has been altered slightly because the original plan would have resulted in an insane amount of writing and a mess of programming. At this point the plan is that during the main tale or romance plots various things might get mentioned by the character. If you want you can go back afterwards and ask them about whatever relevant topic came up and have a short conversation to go a bit more in depth on that specific topic.
All this is to say there is a lot of writing that will need to happen and characters aren’t as simple as just dropping in an NPC and slapping on a few lines of dialogue. Now, if you are thinking to yourself ‘he’s never going to write that much’ I should also mention that I’ve written a few books in my life all sitting at about 160k words so I promise I am more than capable of writing a lot.
As a final disclaimer, I don’t want to come across like I’m some great novelist. It’s a hobby of mine, I enjoy it, but I didn’t go to college for it, or train in any real way. While I think I can do an alright job I just wanted to clarify that I’m not some amazing author or something. I can’t promise some fantastically written story but I want to try and make characters feel like real people that players want to actually talk to and see the story of. The unfortunate downside of that is that it will take time to write all this. I want to put forth the best game I can. I unfortunately picked the type of game that has 18 bazillion aspects to it so there’s a lot to do. In any case I hope this sounds like something you would find interesting to have in a game like this. I personally think of it as less of a ‘nice to have’ and more of a requirement.
I think that’s it for this month. This devlog is like the length of a chapter in a book for whatever that’s worth. I talked about a lot here, but a lot of this month was getting things in order rather than coding. Usually ruminating leads me to talking a lot. I think December will shift back towards programming though. Dialogue writing will continue to grind slowly. Combat needs to be sorted and planned some more, but I would think the systems will start to be setup next month.
Thank you all for bearing with me during this long process. I hope that at the end of this long tunnel there is a game you all find worth the wait. If you have read this far you are a true champion. If you live in the states happy belated Thanksgiving, I hope you found something on the Steam sale to play. And, since I won’t be writing another of these until the end of the year, Merry Christmas if you celebrate, or happy Hannukah, Quanza, Festivus or whatever you might choose to celebrate in December.
