Companions for the hero in Coldstone

After doing a tiny bit of thinking and lots of UNTESTED speculation based on other posts on the board I have though up away to have groups of adventurers with in coldstone. The easiest way would be when a member joins the party or leaves the party, change the animation for the hero. So instead of the animation of just the hero walking around, it would be the hero and his companion(s), and if the companion(s) leaves just go back to the original animation for the hero. And have various status windows (One showing just the picture of the hero with his stats, one with the hero and the companion(s) and there stats. This would give the illusion of having a group of adventurers.

Now somepeople will also be wondering about combat. The group combat idea revolves around a modified use of the turn based system described elsewhere on the board, various character animations, and the use of accessable tiles and not accessable tiles.

Here is an example of how a battle MIGHT work under this system. (Note: People have played a game called Chrono Trigger will see simularities in the battle system)

The enemies see the party of adventurers and rush down to attack. Once they reach a certain spot on the screen they are surrounded by very small inaccessable movement tiles. Now the adventurers move through an onscreen animation into combat mode. Then a little menu pops up with attack1 spell1 item1. These menus are linked to the character attack animations. So if you say Attack1, the first person would attack via whatever there attack animation showed. Then if the enemies might attack via a simular method. Then the menu would come up showing attack2, spell2, but this time if you select attack2 a different animation showing one of the other party members attacking or casting a spell etc. This could be repeated until all the party members have attacked, and then would loop until the battle is finished.

Now I'm sure people are saying this is neat or your crazy or hopefully they would be asking how hit points and magic points would work under this system. Hit points and magic points would be a combined total for the party. So if Fred had 50 hp and bob had 35hp and mary had 15hp the party total would be 100 hp. Damamge to the party would be work in the same way. The monster attacks and the party total goes down. Now I'm not sure if this part would be possible but let us say that the monster did 15 points of damage. Well now poor Mary would be unable to continue fighting so once the hp total reached a certain level an animation would show that character passing out, but the battle would continue until the hp reached zero or the remaining adventurers were victorious.

I have yet to test the above to see if it would work, but will be testing it as soon as I have finished the rough draft of the story for my game. If other people want to try it out great ...if people have already tried something simular i woud love to hear from you. MOST IMPORTANTLY if you know that this will not work under any circumstances please let me know so that I will not waste my time and/or post it so other people who have read this post will not waste their time.

Anyways that is the basic idea. I hope at the very least it gets people thinking.

Sincerely,

Pedrith

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Originally posted by Pedrith:
So instead of the animation of just the hero walking around, it would be the hero and his companion(s), and if the companion(s) leaves just go back to the original animation for the hero.

The problem with this meathod is that, when you change directions, the characters behind the hero will jump across to the new position. One workaround is to have NPCs that try to reach the hero. For the initialization event for each map can call an event that checks for globals and creates the needed NPCs (I think that you can put the tags &&playerX; and &&playerY; for the coordinates for the NPC control event, but I'm not sure). Great idea. I'd like to see it work.

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This is pretty much exactly what I suggested before, but alot better in many ways. One way you could do seperate HPs and Mps is using a global, and a random event dictating which character is attacked. If gb_healthCharacter1 is 0 or below minus gb_attackskillCharacter1 +gb_defenseskillCharacter1, etc. Then display a dialog Character 1 (or gb_nameCharacter1) has been killed resume combat.

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Quote

Originally posted by Pedrith:
...And have various status windows (One showing just the picture of the hero with his stats, one with the hero and the companion(s) and there stats.

You'd have to use a Main location (or dialog) for the status windows, as your companions' stats would need to be stored in global variables, and there's no way to include additional globals in the Stats window.

You would also need a way to split the "player is the entire party" animation (during walkabout mode) into a "each character is seperate" set of animations during combat mode. Otherwise, you would need to create a "player as party" animation for every possible combination of characters being alive/dead/spellcasting/attacking, which would be excessively difficult.

An interesting idea - I'd really like to see someone pull together a quick CGE "proof of concept" for one of these turn-based systems.

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AKA Glennfield, Glenndella, Jynnan Tonnyx, Breva, and/or Bölverk.
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The whole problem with coldstone is that its about as flexible as its namesake -
I didn't buy the whole story about it being so versitile when it was in development, and I certainly don't buy it now after I tried it.

Insteed of there being a way to do almost any reasonable thing, there is a work around for doing some reasonible things.

The issue of multiple party members seals this nicely - any RPG engine that is truly flexible would not only support multiple or single party members right off the bat as a standard feture, it would give you explicit control over their behaviors - if they are AIs on the players side, or if the player actualy controls them in addition to the main charicter, et cetera.

Coldstone is basicly set up as a engine for a hack-and-slash like PoG. (Not that that makes PoG bad, its actualy quite fun, but not an RPG.)

Anyway, I just wanted to get that rant of disapointment out of my system - becuase of CS's lacks, I have to write my own engine. Which will be a lot of work - and will probobly take a lot of time, too.

I guess the best game development tool ever written was CodeWarrior... or maybe METAL... or Cocoa? Whatever. You get the point...

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(This message has been edited by Bryce (edited 09-04-2002).)