Character
The player takes control of a powerful Mesartian Hero. The player can choose between three different genres which lead to different availability of weapons and combat techniques. Essentially it’s the classic Warrior (short-ranged powerful attacks), Rogue (long-ranged less powerful attacks) or Mage (long and short range less powerful attacks) selection. There will be no class selection or character customization as this needlessly raises the complexity of the mechanics. The character will be a combination of all the above classes able to fight short and long-range combats.
Controls
The controls are created with fast paced gameplay in mind meaning that the player needs to move around quickly to gain dodge the enemy attacks or gain strategic advantage (similar to YS Origin). Therefore the move-per-key moving controls are adapted, where each moving key corresponds to an immediate move action. Allowing jumping in the games gives the player a feeling of control over his character and can also help enriching the gameplay. Below it’s a summary of the controls:
- 8 directional keys for moving around
- 1 jump button
- 3 fire buttons
- Camera rotate Left/Right buttons
These buttons can easily be mapped to an Xbox controller, with the directional keys being the stick/pad, the jump and the three fire buttons the A,B,X,Y buttons and the LB and RB buttons for camera rotation.
Levels
Each level consists of a number of smaller levels/rooms (like YS Origin, Phantasy Star). These rooms are usually floating platforms and access to the next room is restricted unless the room’s objective is complete. The room objectives can range from killing everything in the room, to pretty much everything else, including puzzles that the player has to solve.
The rooms are randomly generated and the enemies found in every room depend on the level of the player(s). The rooms are connected to eachother but the player can’t see the next room or return to the previous one after leaving.
Combat
Attacking can be performed by simply pressing the fire buttons. There will not be automatic opponent targeting; the player is responsible for correctly aligning and orientating his character against the enemies.
By pressing the fire buttons in a specific order (combo) the player can actually perform special moves and perform more damage. In addition when attacking the player might be presented with an indication of a random button to press. Pressing that button at that moment will cause an improved attack. This promotes skill-based gameplay.
User Interface
The interface will be fixed (no moving windows) and will be minimal, just enough to display the current player’s status and available options.
Single Player and Multiplayer
A server allows for the creation of a number of different games each allowing for a maximum number of simultaneous players (probably 4, 6 or 8). The players can play alone by creating a game. Because of the nature of this game (demonstration purposes) the game can also be played single player locally. This is achieved by the game silently running a server in the background and creating a game for the player.
Apart from some basic chat there won’t be any specific multiplayer mechanics added to the game for the time being as this can create a lot of bugs and inconsistencies that need a significant amount of time to be fixed.
Each of these sections will be further analysed gameplay-wise and technically-wise in the future.
