bass cadet

Compared to the entire universe, we are even smaller than a single atom from our own perspective.



"The most astouding fact about the universe is the knowlege that the atoms that comprise life on earth, that make up the human body, are tracable to the crucibles that cooked light elements to heavy elements in their core under extreme pressures and temperatures. These stars went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts accross the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.
So when I look up at the night sky, and I know that 'yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe,' but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up; many people feel small because they're small and the universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars."

-Niel deGrasse Tyson

hey guys!
I'm working on a flash game that is still in it's very early stages. basically its going to be an rpg with turn based combat, with a world to walk around in that more resembles a platformer. The theme of the game is comical and light - the story involves monsters spawning as the result of typos in the human world, and I'm trying very hard to incorporate humor into the game.

Ive done all the basic things in the game design and coding so far - the hero can walk around, change maps by going through portals, npcs say things, and the code is setup in a way that adding more content and maps will not be a difficult task. I also already have the graphics exactly how I want them and intend to keep adding graphical content at the same time as I add coded content (I hate using programmer graphics).

but now comes the part of what this thread is really supposed to be about. I'm trying to come up with a definite skill and stat system to use that stands out from all the cliche things that other games always use (strength, stamina, etc), and who better to ask for feedback than my fellow self-proclaimed nerds?

i've come up with a super rough draft of what I want this all to be like and I welcome suggestions to improvements, or even ideas for totally new features. After all, this is essentially going to be the most important aspect of my game as all of the combat will be centered around it, so I want to get it right before I start to code a system that I decide isn't good enough and change later down the road.

Here's what I have so far:
-there will be a basic attack button as well as skills. Only the hero can act (none of that companion BS lol...or maybe i will add some but i'm heavily leaning on not) but multiple enemies may appear. ie. 1vsX
-skills cost mana
-mana is set to full at the start of every battle
-mana is going to be balanced much more closely to action points than traditional mana (meaning the cost for skills will be quite high and so will the regen).
-some skills will have cooldown.

-stats will have a primary attribute that gets raised significantly as well as a secondary that gets raised slightly.

-Courage, Sympathy, Cruelty, Artistry. these are what the player actually chooses to raise.

-Courage- P:Melee dmg, S:Physical defense, physical accuracy
-Sympathy- P:Max health/physical defense, S:dodge rate
-Cruelty- P:Magic dmg, S:Magic defense
-Artistry- P:Max Mana/mag defense, S:Mana regen

-skill trees will exist that have prerequisites of stats.
-Courage based skills will be mostly melee attacks
-sympathy based skills will include status inflicting skills, heals, self buffs, debuffs
-cruelty based skills are the mage bread and butter. fireballs, etc.
-Artistry based skills are mix bag and will have animations of the hero drawing things quickly and then using those objects to cause mayhem. some of these are magic based and some are physical based.

-skills will also have prerequisites of level, as well as knowing the previous skill in the tree.
-physical attacks/skills have a chance of missing based on hero accuracy and enemy dodge rate
-magic based skills can't miss on weak/common enemies but have a chance to be resisted by harder enemies.

here's my very rough draft of what the skill tree might look like. I kept in mind the physical and magical properties of the stats and how i might be able to mix those traits to give the player interesting build options. The boxes that are the result of two stat trees coming together means that the prerequisites for that skill includes both of its parent skills as well as the stats associated with both of them (possibly to a smaller degree than the "pure" skills?)

http://tinypic.com/r/23ueqkk/5

Again, I'm looking for feedback/comments! Do you think the game balance could be off? are there too many arrows and connections? not enough? etc. thanks!

edit: some typos... I hope this post all makes sense, I'm rather tired and copy/pasted most of it from my personal idea .txt file in which I'm not very concerned about proper grammer or overall coherence.

hi guys,
some of you may have known me in the past as imscotthi. I guess my roots in how I found this website was that I used to be a signature maker in the [adult swim] forums, but that seems like forever ago. It's been at least a couple years. And then an email from spleen from out of nowhere just gave me a lot of memories of what my life used to be like back then and started missing that group of people a lot.

what ive been up to with my life is that I'm going to college now for music. I'm planning on possibly going to graduate school for performance when I graduate and maybe someday joining an orchestra.
But hey! i'm still a nerd. I started picking up flash game development as a hobby and hopefully a way to make a bit of cash one day. I probably couldnt code HTML anymore to save my life though, haha.

So, any of my fellow long time adult swimmers around still? Alie? baal? i'd love to catch up.
and for people i don't know, well you all seem pretty alright too. let's talk about nerd stuff!