Combat was where a lot of the team’s resources went, including me. Firstly, I championed and designed the details for the iATB system. The game was pitched originally with this stat driven timer that controls when a character can take a turn and to me it was integral to the game’s identity. My initial prototype for the ATB system only took a couple of hours to create and it was iterated on throughout the project’s life cycle. I worked closely with Lead Programmer Coleman Levy and Programmer Austin Relis on the rest of the combat systems and architecture and it became difficult to separate our work from each other. We worked closely together, communicating often, both verbally and through text, to ensure the design was clear and to resolve bugs. That being said, one area that was primarily my responsibility was our Status Effects, which I designed as a stack based system. I felt this would make them more meaningful, creating dynamic interactions with the variability of turns with the ATB system. For example, the player could avoid taking a turn with one character to avoid triggering the Burn Status Effect (a damage over time condition) on them until they can use their other character to reduce or clear the stacks. Getting to implement these systems alongside the programmers and communicate other aspects of our combat systems with them taught me a lot about the value of iteration and how to design complex systems to not bloat the game’s scope.

Combat Content

In addition to the above systems, I also worked with Design Lead Dillon Lynch and fellow Technical Designer Pedro Bautista, to build out the status effects, combat actions, enemies, and encounters. We spent some time doing some independent brainstorming and ideation before coming back to share our ideas. It quickly became obvious that our concepts of the game’s balance were wildly different. Myself having attacks that generally dealt damage in a range of 1-10 while Pedro had some of his lower attacks dealing 100 damage. To resolve this issue, improve our communication, and facilitate balancing, I created a spreadsheet that would allow us to create different attacks and items that would then rate the strength of it based on the values of its effects (damage, healing, status effects). Then my sheet allowed us to build enemies using the attacks and items as well as giving them different stats such as health and speed (determines the time between their turns). Finally using these enemies, the sheet would allow us to build encounters, by adding different enemies to it. This would also calculate an approximate difficulty value for the encounter based on the number of enemies, the moves they have, and their stats. Getting to make this spreadsheet and iterate quickly on our attacks and enemies was an enlightening exploration into the raw importance of balancing and communication between designers.