Eternal Knight Follow-Up Announcement!

First of all, we want to announce to our followers that we are indeed working on another game, a follow-up to this sample project - Tower Song: Echo!

Echo is another RPG Maker game, set in the same world of Eternal Knight. This game will be a more premium product with original assets, music and a more complete, lengthy campaign.

Starting this week, we will be sharing development updates as originally seen in our newsletter. You can subscribe for free to get the latest updates: https://oigames.substack.com/

Now, on to the show!

Episode Start

We chose to use RPG Maker for our next game for the simple reason that we like these style of games: the art, the stories, and the character progression. But by choosing this engine, we also granted ourselves a Day 1 design problem: boring combat.

Out of the box, RPG Maker combat is not much more interesting than the most basic combat system in a mid 1990’s Japanese RPG. You get into random battles, spam your most powerful attacks until you run out of mana, and then just use your ‘Attack’ move until the battle is over. Maybe you mix things up when an enemy shows up immune to your Fire spell, so you have to cast a Water spell instead. But you almost certainly never use the ‘Guard’ ability, only use items or healing spells when fighting a boss, and definitely never get your pulse up.

To solve this design problem, we leaned on influences from some of our favorite game genres: tabletop RPGs and strategy card games. We did not want to rely on a single battle system mechanic like elemental weakness (from Octopath Traveler) or Brave Points (from Bravely Default) that every character was built around. So we looked at how tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons give each character unique battle systems to work with, even with similar archetypes. Playing a D&D wizard is a very different prospect from playing a sorceror. As a wizard, you pre-plan spells and effectively manage an inventory of consumables in combat - once a spell is cast, it’s gone for the day. But with a sorceror, you can always cast any spell - you just have a hard limit on the number (think of a mana bar).

And then we looked to card games for their ability to give players a puzzle box on every turn, where the puzzle is the enemy’s position, and the player’s answer lies somewhere in their hand of cards full of varied effects.

With these as our influences, we crafted four tenants for our combat system’s design:

1. Playing a character should feel different from playing another character and demand a different mode of strategic thinking.
2. On any given turn, the player should have access to a toolbox of spells and abilities that are innately interesting to use.
3. The most powerful abilities should not be available in the toolbox by default but should be created through chaining abilities.
4. At any given time, the player is only 1-2 turns away from a Game Over screen.

Tenant #4 sounds intimidating on paper and is actually the easiest design solution to reach for: make combat harder. On its own, though, it does not mean much except that players have to use more healing spells in their damage rotations. It’s when we look at the first three tenants that things get more interested. To illustrate this, let’s talk about one of our favorite player characters: the berserker, Porphry.

Porphry comes from a long (and proud) line of video game warriors who get angry and hurt things, including the D&D barbarian. With her design, we wanted to recreate that feel of raw power and risky gameplay - of taking things to their limit and punishing foes. So in our game, Porphry has no innate resources to spend - no mana, no stamina - she can just go ham. What Porphry does have, however, is Rage.

Rage is a passive resource that adds a damage bonus on all of Porphry’s weapon-based attacks. The more Rage she has, the more damage she does. But here is the trick: Porphry loses rage when she is healed (“I feel much better now, thank you.”) and when she deals damage (“Violence is so satisfying!”)

To manage this, Porphry has two basic abilities: her generic Attack (called ‘Slash’) that benefits from this Rage, and a taunt move called ‘Provoke’ that forces an enemy to attack her.

The Rage mechanic and these two skills, on their own, create a unique gameplay experience for the Porphry player. How long can she draw attention to herself without a heal? The longer she goes, the bigger that Slash attack will be. Nothing is tastier than a ripping a big crit, right? But if she pushes too hard, she’s liable to end up on the ground - and you don’t deal any damage when you’re dead.

Of course, that is just her starting kit. As Porphry gains experience, she can unlock many more tools for her toolbox. She can Cleave, spreading that juicy, Rage-filled damage across the battlefield. Or she can give in to her ‘Wrath’ and generate bonus Rage while her allies are down. Or, she can dive use her ‘Unbreakable Will’ and remain standing, even if a blow would otherwise kill her. And we haven’t even mentioned how she can exacerbate Bleeding wounds, until the enemy is finally ready to be ‘Ravaged’ for an obscenely hard hit.

All of this contributes to giving Porphry a basic, straight-forward feel suitable to the warrior playstyle, while also giving her a range of answers on the battlefield - all of it leading toward that final, enraged basic Attack that puts the enemy down for good.

Development Update!

As this post has shown, our focus right now is on combat and classes. To that end, we actually have a playable, run-based combat arena prototype live today on our beta branch. In the arena, you can dive into any stage of the game to playtest high level characters, or start at level 1 and work your way up, unlocking skills and leveling your party as you otherwise would in the story mode.

This will allow us to design the full arc of our characters’ ability progression without having to playtest (or even build) a full-length campaign. The goal being when the campaign is finally in full place, the combat will be battle-tested and ready to go!

See you next week!

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