You enter a battle. There's a transition, and you're in a scene with the players, the enemy, and a status window, as normal. You can choose attack, spells, items.
But when you choose one, it performs a partially random cutscene within the battle window based on that action.
Using message boxes, skill animatons, and sprite animations the players act out their actions instead of it just being a simple fight, fight, fight, fight.
When you combine actions, or perform the same one several times, further cutscenes are triggered:
Use the fire skill once and Katelyn reads out a spell before casting a bit of a weak fireball at the enemy. Cast it twice and it's powerful, fine tuned, and hits well, to the other players' surprise. Cast it a third time and either it will succeed, or Katelyn will collapse, the power overwhelming, and be out of action; continue to fight and the fire can take over her completely replacing her until the end of the battle with the equivalent of a FFVIII Guardian Force.
Enemies will be mostly special events rather than being stuffed full of random encounters, and will say things while doing their actions too, depending on which player character they are targeting, what action they're performing, their HP, etc.
The result of all this is that essentially the game and story are different every time you play the game. The things read, the events that occur, etc, they could all turn on variables and shape what's said later in the game. Using the lightning based skill early on could affect what happens in the final boss battle of the game (in a good way or bad). Enemies encountered later on could remember what you cast and use it against you. And battle preparations and such could form the basis of conversations in pubs between major game events.
So do we the do away with battle stats and replace them with something more... lorey? Lives instead of HP, or some kind of visual sprite change as the player gets more and more worn down would be cool but might be a little time consuming to animate all the while.
Instead of MP the player characters could just have a general amount of times they can use magic before it consumes them and takes them out of commission.
So that the player is provoked to try things out and experiment without worrying about mistakes, death simply calls up a short cutscene which shows the players down on the ground and death appear to reset time, with some sort of (attempted) witty speech. The battle is then completely reset, players and enemies.
But when you choose one, it performs a partially random cutscene within the battle window based on that action.
Using message boxes, skill animatons, and sprite animations the players act out their actions instead of it just being a simple fight, fight, fight, fight.
When you combine actions, or perform the same one several times, further cutscenes are triggered:
Use the fire skill once and Katelyn reads out a spell before casting a bit of a weak fireball at the enemy. Cast it twice and it's powerful, fine tuned, and hits well, to the other players' surprise. Cast it a third time and either it will succeed, or Katelyn will collapse, the power overwhelming, and be out of action; continue to fight and the fire can take over her completely replacing her until the end of the battle with the equivalent of a FFVIII Guardian Force.
Enemies will be mostly special events rather than being stuffed full of random encounters, and will say things while doing their actions too, depending on which player character they are targeting, what action they're performing, their HP, etc.
The result of all this is that essentially the game and story are different every time you play the game. The things read, the events that occur, etc, they could all turn on variables and shape what's said later in the game. Using the lightning based skill early on could affect what happens in the final boss battle of the game (in a good way or bad). Enemies encountered later on could remember what you cast and use it against you. And battle preparations and such could form the basis of conversations in pubs between major game events.
So do we the do away with battle stats and replace them with something more... lorey? Lives instead of HP, or some kind of visual sprite change as the player gets more and more worn down would be cool but might be a little time consuming to animate all the while.
Instead of MP the player characters could just have a general amount of times they can use magic before it consumes them and takes them out of commission.
So that the player is provoked to try things out and experiment without worrying about mistakes, death simply calls up a short cutscene which shows the players down on the ground and death appear to reset time, with some sort of (attempted) witty speech. The battle is then completely reset, players and enemies.
