Still Alive + Features Overload!

For those who are still following (and wondering why on earth I haven't updated!) it looks like I decided to go further with the project than originally planned. And thus, more cool features (and lots of testing required to keep them balanced) have been made. Also, time restraints have meant I haven't been able to finish earlier as well (this was also unexpected, but I'm not going to dwell on it). However, progression is looking good, and I'll release an early patch for testing soon!

I might as well mention some of the on-the-go additonal features:

Difficulty modes. I've been working on multiple iterations and by release there will be three modes (each a separate patch). Casual, normal and veteran modes. Save files at any time will work on them and you can switch freely. The reason why it is important for me to work on them before release is because of item/spell balance. Perhaps individual tweaks aside, I need to accommodate for all three on the standard mode.

Rare loot for almost every enemy in the game. This also ties into the difficulty modes (more on that later) but the amount of sheer items I've added into the game because of this is well... quite substantial. More item types as well (see my equipment post from earlier) were also added too.

Changes to mechanics. For example, there's now a physical element type where some enemies are resistant against weapons. This took a lot of testing, as it needed to be balanced against physical defense. There are tons of benefits to this addition, especially late-game (where defenses needed to be over-tuned, making combo attacks very weak).

And more (my hopeless decision making -- or testing feedback on moves/spells etc...). I apologize for the silence, as I know some people have been waiting for a while.

So don't worry, I haven't stopped the project or anything! I've only remained quiet because the extent I wanted to take the project was still in flux. However I've now locked down pretty much everything so it shouldn't be too long.

Update + Videos

Haven't posted in a while so I'd thought I'd give a brief update.

It seems like Complete will take a bit longer than I'd like. But I should have a release due early next month.

So here's a video showing the Rock Bird!

Boss fights should be fairly different in Complete. In the original ReDux, boss fights are/were generally very bursty and could take you down fast unless you made use of stunlock or enough outright damage to take them down quickly.

In Complete, bosses are much more of an endurance test. They may not be able to burst you down as fast, but neither can you to them. This means that longevity of your resources matters a great deal more. Moves have more strategic use due to the new SP system, rather than being fire and forget. Hopefully this improves the flow of boss battles overall -- making them a longer-term struggle rather than shorter make-or-break situations.

Video #2: Rangle Mountains

Abilities page is now complete!

A list of statistics for all the moves/spells in the game is now shown on the 'abilities' page.

More to come, notably items and a similar re-structuring of the enemy page. 

Grandia ReDux Complete #3: Magic

Magic is a rather big topic so I'll likely post some further details elsewhere. In any case, here's the rundown.

Different Types of Mana

Magic from the original Grandia to ReDux currently functions very similarly: In regards to MP you'll have three different pools -- each containing spells that are catagorised into being weaker or stronger than others. Weaker spells would be LV1, and stronger spells would be LV3. It was a simple enough process, and mana management simply came down to balancing weaker spells with stronger spells. The problem with this is that often times, the way you could use your mana was often confused and you could say -- a bit overbearing. There wasn't really any focus into balancing spell usage with similar types, since they were split into different pools. And using weaker and stronger spells was never really a choice for the same reason. Ultimately, you had 297 mana to use healing spells if you wanted to, or 297 mana for damage spells. This just made it easy for someone to essentially not care about which spell they were using. Take Alhealer and Alhealer+ for instance. One is clearly stronger than the other. However, both are seperated into different pools of mana, so you therefore have 198 mana to use both, while having little compromise on which spell you wanted to use at any given time, other than balancing mana in each specific pool.

A better way to balance this however is to scrap the idea of splitting spells based on power, but instead seperate them into defined types. If Alhealer and Alhealer+ shared the same pool of mana, then there is suddenly a need to think about what spell is appropiate to use. If you overheal with Alhealer+, your entire mana pool for healing spells takes a noticeable hit. Again, this works for say, Burn, Burnflame and Burnflare. All of these spells now share the same MP pool. What this means is that these spells can be balanced closer to eachother while offering a choice on whether extra power is essential. Previously, if you ran out of mana to use Burn, you would still be able to use Burnflame and vice-versa. Thematically that didn't make much sense and had to balanced oddly. Therefore, instead of three pools of mana separating power, they are now separating types of spells:

LV1 = Support Spells.

LV2 = Basic offensive spells.

LV3 = Advanced offensive spells.

'Basic' and 'Advanced' simply refer to the elements of the spells. Fire, Water, Wind and Earth are catagorised as 'Basic' while Explosion, Lightning, Blizzard and Forest spells are catagorised as 'Advanced'. This does not occur for support spells however.

Mana Restoration

This is fairly similar to the SP system changes mentioned in the previous post. What was also mentioned is 'Invoke' a new SP costing ability that all magic users have. To put it simply, 'Invoke' is a spell that restores a flat amount of mana to the user. This costs SP as well as having a fixed cast time. Again, this means that spells generally cost a lot more than they used to, which means that you'll need to invoke fairly often in order to restore your mana. However, because of the SP cost and long cast time, you'll need balance normal attacks with other skill usage in order to do so.

In boss fights, you'll require careful management of both resources inbetween areas of downtime. MP and SP items are no longer avaliable in combat, individual management is even more essential. Most of the reasonings behind this change was echoed within the previous post. 

New Spells!

In ReDux Complete there are also many new spells to learn! As well as tweaks and overhauls of the currently existing spells too.

Shield - A single target buff that increases defense. Earth element.

Star - A single target buff that increases Max HP. Explosion element.

Restore - Restores all health to a single ally. Forest element. Was previously Boost.

Bubble - A single target damage spell. Water element.

Bubbling - A damage spell that targets all enemies. Water element.

Wrath - A single target damage spell. Forest element. Was previously Craze.

Howlspin - A single target damage spell. Wind element. Was previously SHHH!

Confuse - Inflicts confusion on a single enemy. Water element.

Meltdown - Inflicts heavy damage on multiple enemies. Fire element. Was previously Fireburner.

Haste - Increases the IP of one ally. Wind element.

Runner - Has now returned!

Curse - Inflicts plague on a single enemy. Blizzard element.

Torment - Inflicts plague on multiple enemies. Blizzard element.

Shock - Inflicts paralysis on multiple enemies. Lightning element.

Spell Progression

Spells are now also recieved at a much more gradual pace than they used to. Higher level spells are especially recieved much later than they did before. This is so progression remains consistant across all areas in the game. You'll still be learning new abilities even near the end of the game, so progression does not come to a halt much earlier! In addition, higher level spells have room to be even more powerful or useful as a result. You should feel satisfied when learning them!

Grandia ReDux Complete #2: SP System

In ReDux complete, the SP system is going to be completely revamped in order to become much more short-term oriented in general. This is inspired by Grandia 3, which had a system where your SP would rapidly rise when using normal attacks or taking hits, in return for skills generally costing more. It was a great system in that it would not only reward players for managing their SP more carefully, but not discourage them to use abilities in longer fights or areas. Let’s go through why a longer-term, more resource heavy system was not ideal.

Weapon skills are the bread and butter of any character – the idea behind them is that they are more powerful than normal attacks while defining the characters overall. This is all fine and good, and that’s what they represent in the original game. The balance between using them however, never really made much sense. JRPGs in general are notorious for long-term resource systems and Grandia’s SP system was no exception. The problem is that the game, especially early on, forces the player to save your SP and hinder the use of your skills, only because the system was designed to make it difficult to recover SP aside from item usage. And in-turn, late game scenarios often allowed you to spam them because of SP pools in boss fights, in addition to items needing to be constantly force fed to the player in order to use them to a good degree. There were a lot of flaws in this, of course.

Firstly, for the most part, SP was tight enough that in most fights you avoided using them unless you really needed to.  They were powerful, yet had no tactful use other than to blow what you have left to get through an area. And in boss fights, once you blew all your SP, the fight had to be balanced to be almost over since SP couldn’t realistically be renewed. End stages of the game would cause you to use skills haphazardly since SP couldn’t really be balanced. And of course, this ended up making normal attacks lacklustre and pointless to use, since spells and skills alike had a flawed resource system which didn’t really have the concept of downtime.

And that’s really the whole point of the new SP system; Downtime. Weapon skills now cost an extreme amount of SP – often depleting your entire pool with only a couple skill usages. However, using normal attacks will refill your SP very rapidly, and when you take damage also. This results in the concept of downtime where you can balance your skill usage, knowing that you have the means of restoring SP fairly quickly. Therefore, all skills cost a lot more now, with character base SP amounts being a lot higher (Justin has 100, for instance).

For example, here's a list of Feena's weapon skills with their associated SP costs:

Knifehurl: 30 SP [CRITICAL]

Randomhurl: 50 SP

Power Lash: 40 SP [CRITICAL] [DELAY]

Flame Lasso: 60 SP

Shock Whip: 80 SP [PARALYZE]

End of the World: 120 SP [FIXED]

Tree of Life: 160 SP [FULL RESTORE]

Time Gate: 140 SP [STOP TIME]

Invoke: 80 SP [RESTORE MP]

Name changes aside, Feena mostly has her old abilities intact with her Icarian abilities now becoming weapon skills themselves. Invoke can be learned by any character able to use magic and has a fixed cast time. This a part of the tweaked MP system which will be detailed another time.

Functionality of some skills has been changed though. Knifehurl and Power Lash are both low damage, but high interrupt skills. Like the other Grandia games, each character has their own skill (always initial) that has a guaranteed chance to cancel. However, Feena is the exception with two of them, and Rapp's cancel ability is AoE rather than single target (Discutter).

Non-Ranged cancel skills (Such as V-Slash, Power Lash and Flying Dragon Slash) also have 'Delay'. You may be able to work out what that means.

So what should this new system result with? Generally speaking, this approach to the SP system should enable you to use abilities a lot more, have more tactful usage of normal attacks, as well as better management in boss fights. Dungeons runs should feel less restrained on resources, with a better emphasis on balancing actions as opposed to saving them, which should result in a more enjoyable experience. Boss fights will become less bursty and more consistent, forcing use of combos in particular. This adds to balance as well. As a result, this should keep skills fun to both manage and use!

Grandia ReDux Complete #1: Equipment

As it currently stands, equipment are decently varied and have a straight-forward rate of progression. Correct? The problem however is that many equipment categories are fairly homogenised and don’t realistically offer options to the player other than what is obviously the best things to equip. Character customisation was a bit lacking too, you see Justin itemize into a physical attacker along with Rapp, with Feena and Liete shoehorned into Magic (although Feena did have Whips that increased skill power and attack – they were just inferior to magic options).

So what’s the solution? Simply put, equipment follows a more choice-related pattern especially concerning the secondary slots. Weapons and body armor still follow general progression with different types but still offer more options. Secondary equipment slots will now have more than one defined type that offers entirely different niches. 

To begin with, the shield slot has now has been changed to ‘Offhand’ and shields are actually a sub-type of the offhand slot. Here is a list of different types of equipment now belonging to the offhand slot:

• Shield - Negates damage below a certain value [BLOCK] (Justin/Gadwin/Rapp/Milda/Liete)
• Buckler - Chance to reflect damage taken [COUNTER] (Justin/Sue/Feena/Rapp/Guido/Milda)
• Orb - Increased spell potency [MAGIC+] (Justin/Sue/Feena/Gadwin/Rapp/Liete)
• Focus - Increased spell haste [SPELL HASTE] (Justin/Sue/Feena/Gadwin/Rapp/Liete)
• Gloves - Lower SP costs [PSYCHE] (Sue/Feena/Gadwin/Milda/Guido/Liete)  
• Spear -  Increased skill power [SKILL+] (Sue/Feena/Gadwin/Rapp/Milda/Guido)

Essentially, there are five catagories that can be equipped by certain characters. All in all, this adds varying factors of customizability. It's worth mentioning that each type has their own parameters that they focus on. For example, gloves increase attack and movement, meaning that Feena can specialize in physcial attacks if you choose so.

Then we have the weapons which are also further broken up into catagories:

• Standard Sword - Increased SP gain on attacks [FURY] (Justin/Rapp/Guido)
• Greatsword - IP knockback when attacking [MIGHT] (Justin/Gadwin/Milda)
• Axe - Chance to reduce defense on attacks [BREAK] (Justin/Milda)
• Mace - Increased skill power [SKILL+] (Justin/Liete)
• Staff - Increased spell potency [MAGIC+] (Justin/Sue/Liete)
• Hammer - Chance to stun on attacks [HEAVY BLOW] (Sue/Milda)
• Whip - Chance to bind on attacks [BINDING] (Feena)
• Dagger -  Extra combo hit [COMBO+] (Feena/Rapp/Guido)
• Runikard - Increased Spell Haste [SPELL HASTE] (Feena/Rapp)
• Bow - Increased Range [RANGE+] (Sue/Guido)
• Darts/Shuriken - Extra critical hit [CRITICAL+] (Sue/Rapp)
• Boomerang - Three extra combo hits for reduced attack [VOLLEY] (Sue/Rapp/Guido)

Of course, there are still only six global weapon types; Sword,  Axe, Blunt, Ranged, Whip and Knife -- and as you can see, character weapon types are very similar. However, the subtypes for each weapon type all contain a niche. Normal attacks and criticals will serve a much bigger purpose in ReDux Complete (you'll find out why in another post) so effects that enhance them are that much more important. Stats are also widely varied. Most of them will increase your attack (which are decently varied) but other stats are increased or decreased based on type. Bows, Greatswords and Hammers for example are all powerful, but decrease your movement (which is a much more scarse stat in Complete) in return.

Another catagory to look at is head specific equipment. These are also broken up into varying catagories:

• Helmet - Reduces IP knockback [STURDY] (Justin/Gadwin/Rapp/Milda)
• Hair/Ribbon - Increased SP gain upon being attacked [TEMPER] (Sue/Feena/Liete/Milda/Guido)
• Hat - Chance to warp from attacks [LUCKY] (Justin/Sue/Rapp/Guido/Liete)
• Crown - Restores health over time [REGEN] (Justin/Feena/Gadwin/Rapp/Guido)

Again, this follows the same ideology that the offhand slot has. Each type has its own effect and a different set of stats. That said, the other two slots are entirely stat based and have their own effects individually, either rarer or common. Here are both the body and feet equipment slots:

• Armor - Provides high defense but lowers movement (Justin/Gadwin/Rapp/Milda)
• Clothes - Average defense (Justin/Sue/Feena/Rapp/Milda/Guido)
• Robe/Veil - Low defense but increases resistances (Sue/Feena/Guido/Liete)

• Shoes - High movement (Justin/Sue/Gadwin/Rapp/Guido)
• Boots - Average movement and provides defense (Feena/Gadwin/Milda/Guido)
• Hi-Heels - Low movement but provides other properties (Sue/Feena/Milda/Liete)

These equipment slots are more simplistic but are still defined. Options are avaliable for most characters overall. What's important to note is that choices are dependant on what statistics they can natually increase. For example, Feena naturally has low defense growth, but being able to equip boots can offset that.

That about sums it all up. Equipment overall should provide more impactful choices overall and help customize characters a bit more!

Movement?

Ah yes, since we're on the topic of equipment, I should mention that movement is far more scarce than it is before. In the original game or ReDux, movement wasn't really a stat thought about much. For non-dagger users it never grew much but boots often did offset any care for it, even early game. You'll be thinking about managing it a lot more now though.

Many types of equipment (some weapons, shields, helmets, armor etc..) reduce movement as a payoff for increasing defensive stats. Remember that normal attacks are far more crucial in Complete and you'll need to make sure that the movement stat does not drop dangerously low due to equipment! Balancing your defense and movement is another challenge to uphold.   

ReDux Complete Progress Update

Yes, I’m alive! And Grandia ReDux is alive too! It’s been a long time since I announced ReDux Complete and a lot has happened since then.

Things have been progressing however and I think it’s important to give an update. So what’s the best way to go about this? Discussing the changes of course!

ReDux Complete will hopefully make the game feel ‘complete’ all right. More and more fun changes have been added and thought about recently and things are shaping up to be interesting. Since I have the opportunity to test so many things I have been trying out many new ideas and have finally thought about what’s best for the game. Grandia ReDux up until now has been a good semi-modifier of the game (mostly the same items, same classifications, same rules etc…) but why stop there? It might as well have been a teaser for the massive update that is to come!

Therefore, I’ll make a rundown of some of the most interesting changes. Things are still very much subject to change but I’ve come this far enough to get a gist of the direction I’m heading in. In this case, in the coming weeks; every Sunday I shall post an update relating to an area of the game that has changed. It keeps interest and helps me be productive! 

They’ll be another post later today.