Devlog #19- Run and Lucky Time

I’ve made a decent amount of progress this week. My brother has been playtesting my demo and giving me feedback, and he’s not a fan of JRPGs or even played any games in the genre but he’s been liking it so far (and only found 1 game-breaking bug so far). Getting feedback has been really helpful so far, and everything I’ve worked on in the past week has been in response to things he’s pointed out. So this week will be a breakdown of a bunch of random, but important, systems I have added or adapted.

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Running from battle

I had a very crude run system in the game but removed it for the demo because it was buggy and I didn't think it was important. Little did I know it's incredibly important. Even if it's never used, it just makes battles more fun knowing that you can run if you wanted to and aren't trapped in battle with every ambush. So this week I went all in, fixed the bugs and added the minigame element I had planned.

The RUN minigame is a very simplified version of pacman. Simply get from the bottom to the exit at the top of the screen within the time limit, while avoiding ghosts. (I'll do up the visuals in the future)



The maze itself will be randomly selected from a bunch of pre-handmade mazes. They won't all be great, but the fun will come from the variety. They’re intended to be simple, but also easy to lose if you misjudge a ghost or run out of time. Losing will boot you back to the battle and go to the next turn.

The ghosts have similar AI to the original pacman game, and I plan to add faster unique ghosts for boss battles or battles where the player is likely to run. The minigame has 4 ghosts at all times, but I plan to change this so if there’s 3 enemy ghosts then only 3 will chase you, etc.

For now, a successful RUN drops you back at the temple in the basecamp. I’m still undecided on checkpoints, but I might have to add them anyway for mid-run save points.

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Lucky Time

In a previous devlog I introduced a feature that aimed to make levelling party members feel more rewarding- a wheel of rewards. This week I spent some time repurposing it to fit my game loop better.

Lucky time (the weird gameshow-style name I went with) now requires 5 chips, and you can get these chips through either levelling up a party member or by beating a ghost battle for the first time. It's indicated by Mac's arm rising and flinging a chip up as seen below. Also, quick side-note: as per my brother's request I made it so a characters fully heal when they level up, because it's fun and why not! (...ignore the visual overlap, I'll fix it)

In the first iteration of the demo I had some enemies with repeated battle layouts, but my brother pointed out it felt tedious doing the same battle again (an obvious reaction in retrospect), so I’ve now made sure that every enemy triggers a unique battle. Additionally, I’ve adapted the Lucky Time system to also reward seeing more of these unique battles instead of grinding the same ones or constantly avoiding battles.

The wheel holds 20 rewards and when you win one it is then replaced with another from a list of rewards that escalate as you get further down the list. The chips are a limited resource and the rewards consistent, so I think it’ll be fun to slowly see the wheel rewards ramp up as you play, even getting a weak prize removes it for better ones.

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Now Entering

The last major thing I added this week was something I’ve been meaning to add but it slipped my mind somewhere along the way-
Dream location names when transitioning into new areas.

I refer to locations in quests like “Momo’s Dream” to inform the player where they need to go but never actually tell them the specific boundaries of areas. Visually, I want the dreams to blend together somewhat, but if so then I need some proper signposting for whenever the player enters a new person’s dream.

I’ve now added this ‘now entering X’s dream’ overlay in the bottom left. It only shows when swapping to new dreams, so changing areas within the same dream won’t trigger it. And if the player hasn’t met said character yet then it will show as ????’s Dream instead. I also plan to change the text colour, and maybe the background image depending on the character.

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Final Thoughts

I feel like I got a lot done this week overall (lots of stuff I didn't show here too), and I think it’s in big part to do with finally getting some player feedback. I design the game with the most important parts first and then build outwards, which works well enough but having direct feedback really helps push forward instead of just always just pushing outward and helps me feel like I'm getting somewhere much faster. If any game designers are reading this, it's just another reminder to get people playtesting as soon as possible.

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I’ve made a mini list of new things I want to add before releasing the demo publicly (mostly things talked about above which are now crossed off), but if all goes well then I’ll try and have the a public demo by next devlog! Thanks for reading :)