1
General Chat / Re: FFT Arena Season One AI Tournament
« on: March 24, 2012, 04:40:21 PM »
The Way of the Samurai: being beaten with the nerf hammer until you beg for mercy.
Show Posts
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
-Fill some plotholes (such as how Gogo came to be)
After leaving a United Nations meeting, Adlai Stevenson was returning to his home country when his plane took a detour over the Bermuda Triangle. During a terrifying storm, a portal opened up that the plane foolishly flew into. In the world of FF6 thus did they come out, and crashed on what would come to be known as Triangle Island. For a while, the people of the plane worked together, but days turned into years, and the group split into two warring factions. Eventually, Adlai was the only one alive, having lost all those close to him, and his new love in the ensuing battle. He sequestered himself in a solitary area of the island, until finally coming to the conclusion that death would be a welcome release. He walked towards the centre of the desert, where the group had seen giant sandworms before, and cried out to the gods to devour him and release him from the world, from the torturous existence he had come to know. As if his prayers had been answered, a sandworm came and devoured him. But fate would not let Adlai go so easily, for he found himself in a mad world inside the creature. Here he met an odd man...or woman...wearing full multi-coloured coverings over its body. The creature called itself "Gogo", and the story it told, while fantastical, was something Adlai found himself believing. Gogo spoke of many dimensions, many worlds beyond this one. It had traveled to this world from one where, difficult as it is to believe, giant trees took the form of humans and magic was commonplace. Gogo, unfortunately, had aged significantly during the transdimensional travel, and thus was dying. However, before it died, Gogo taught Adlai everything it knew. Adlai had at last found the will to live once more, and took this as an act of providence. He trained and mastered the art of mimicry. As Gogo took its last breath, Adlai swore he would carry on the teachings of Gogo, and donned the creature's regalia...as well as its name.
Casters really have the better skillset and class unless you want to bring in Orlandu or something.
Even with Orlandu, almost every magic skillset has more versatility than All-Swordskill. Granted, no: Black Magic doesn't, but even Summon has stuff like Golem, and the number of versatility moves in Yin-Yang, Time, and White is...actually pretty ridiculous; like more than half of the powerful effects in the game are largely restricted to those three skillsets (and Mathskill).
Most of the rest of the game is just...damage, or unique but very weak effects (like Battle Skill). Orlandu's got power, and some versatility, but even if Holy Swordsman was a generic class replacing Knight, sure, it might replace your damage dealers (although mages probably outclass until chapter 3) but I'd still expect quite a bit of mage use for Haste/Protect/Shell/Raise/Faith/Quick, and maybe still Demi/Life Drain on bosses.
I tried the FF6 hack!
- Terra can't equip the Dagger she has on at the beginning of the game, which seems to be a bug. This means I might never have Scan!
- I like how only the random-ass moogle team has a chance of beating the marshall. This took a lot more tries than it should have since the boss liked to target the only healer in the team with Stop, and unfortunately restarting this battle is a pain.
- Magitek armors. They are too overpowered. Mtek laser is a OHKO to both Terra and Locke and you have no options at this point. Restarting this battle takes ages if you don't savestate (I guess I should) This fight was just pure luck, I won by spamming Noiseblaster and... That's it. I got extremely lucky (For those who don't know, Noiseblaster targets your team too here)
Overall it's definitely fun, but so far there are a few issues. Most enemies have regular scrubby attacks + one giant pain in the ass attack (Blizzard, Marshall's charge, stop, sleep, Mtek laser for example so far) which makes randomness a big factor during battles.
Edit: And it makes some battles take longer than they should. Leafers have 100% sleep and like to use it -> Extremely long but not difficult regular battles.
Not sure how much you've read my spreadsheets yet, but every item is equally balanced to be used all throughout the game, and only a few items are steal/Move-Find only. So it's more-or-less something I'm thinking of to help so stats don't get ridiculously high.
I hadn't glanced at the items yet.
Looking at them, I don't think there's any particular concern in the long game--the equipment is stuff that would fit in fine with endgame FFT. Well, other than the usual "FFT's quadratic formula encourages people to attack with fists not weapons at high levels." (And you're already doing plenty to discourage that--like no Bracer equivalent and no Power Sleeve equivalent; actually, for all I know you've changed the damage formula on fists).
My concern would be more in the earlygame, when HP from class is going to be much smaller than HP from equipment. I'm guessing you were planning to deal with this by setting the level 1 HP much higher and then taking away the ability to level? That'd work. Another option would be to raise the starting HP and also significantly lower the HP growth.
Basically, you can balance reasonably effectively either way; FFT's system is fairly flexible like that.
What you should be doing is asking yourself what kind of game would you rather make? If you remove levelling, then you can be more precise in your designs; you can set things up so that the player can only survive by 1 HP and only with the right class/equipment; this is not something you could design normally. On the other hand, RPGs generally have a bit of an auto-correct difficulty, where if you're having trouble you will gain more levels, and thus the game gets easier...and you lose that when you don't have leveling. (And JP gain systems don't always have the same dynamic--in FFT an experienced player can make a much more powerful character with 1600 JP than a new player generally will with five times the JP).
But...yeah, roughly how I think about the design process is:
Step 1: Decide who your audience is.
Step 2: Figure out what large-scale systems are good or bad for that audience. Cull the bad. Keep or extend the good.
Step 3: Now that you've done that, go mess with some numbers for balancing (bearing in mind that, depending on the audience, the definition of "balancing" may change).
The decision to include or exclude levelling is such a large scale change that I feel like balance shouldn't be coming into the question yet; you can make a fairly balanced game with levelling, or without levelling regardless of when equipment shows up. It's a question of: does no-levelling match the kind of game you want to make?
(If the Aesthetic you're shooting for is "you get everything from the start", then it might be the right decision. Then again, increased choice is a different variable from the relaxation/trance of the grind. The reason most games don't do increased choice from the start is choice paralysis, but you really shouldn't let that stop you--LFT definitely leaned on the side of "more options earlier!" because it worked under the assumption that LFT players already know FFT and therefore won't find the flood of options overwhelming).
Elfboy's right: I used to do SCCs while gamesharking myself to level 1 (around the same time the rest of the SCC community was moving to Solo SCCs--mostly I just find FFT a poor engine for solo games; hard solo fights often boil down to "turnintoacrystalturnintoacrystalturnintoaYESSSS"). I can get you the gameshark codes if you want them."Fenrir: For FFT at least, there's a GameShark code that does pretty much exactly what you say (not sure what it is... ask mc) which I'd imagine is probably easy enough to pull off on emulators (though... not certain)."
Everybody is at level 1? Sounds... Actually great yeah, but it would still be a lot better with some balance work (I don't know much about FFT, but everybody would have almost the same attack power late in the game but a lot less HPs, right?) Either that or everybody is at level 50 and battles take way too long at the beginning.
Damage is not the same at all. HP does become the same (except Mime and Monk which suck at HP due to lack of equipment). The money you gain from a fight is fixed to enemy level, which means the level 1 randoms are worthless. Enemy loot from randoms is also worthless.
--------------
Now, on designing a patch to be played at level 1: yes, you could do this, and avoid most of the ways FFT isn't designed to work with this setup (like...have chapter 4 equipment not give +200 HP). Fixing level to 1 is actually something I probably would do if I ever get around to that hypothetical future FFT patch that I may or may not ever make. (It's definitely not something for LFT).
You'll want to ask what your audience is for this patch, though. Mindlessly grinding in FFT is...fun; it's theraputic. It's well...see Nicole Lazzaro's work--specifically relating to what she categorizes as "serious fun" -- relaxation/trance.
The place I would use a fixed level 1 design decision is if I was thinking something like "Screw that entire playstyle; this patch is all about brutally hard almost puzzle-like fights, and everything else takes a backseat." (Or whatever--the point is, there's nothing wrong with specializing your patch to a specific audience archetype, but you should very clearly define your intended audience before you start making these design decisions. It's also equally valid to appeal to multiple audience archetypes--that was the goal of LFT; you end up giving a diluted but almost-as-fun experience to a variety of people, as opposed to giving a "flawless" experience to one audience).
