Castle Paradox

[Newbie_Power]

DQ games were good at telling you what happened to an enemy and which group/enemy it is, and most importantly told you when an enemy is affected by its status or when it recovered from it, so it was easy to commit to memory.

FF1 told you when an enemy was afflicted by status and when they recover, but not which enemy if there's more than one of the same kind. Any buff or debuff was permanent for the rest of the battle if it hits. Player characters would have the word "HP" changed to "DARK", "STUN", "POIS" when afflicted with a named status effect.

OHR games are much more frantic and it's difficult to convey information to the player, so status indicators are more of a necessity for them, IMO.

For the actual presentation of status indicators, I think it should be a user defined thing where they can choose to display any sort of custom icon over an enemy when they need to, and not just for built in statuses because of the heavy emphasis on buffs and de-buffs, and the icons would ideally be for both players and enemies, because like I said OHR games are frantic so you want to make sure the player notices one of their characters got de-buffed.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[msw188]

That's all true, and I hadn't thought about it this way, but yes the DW games were very good at telling what was going on, because they used text to explain every action in battle (there was almost no graphical aspect at all, just the screen flashing or shaking).

The OHR is definitely more frantic at the moment, but it has certainly come a long way, especially with the recent additions to have captions pause battles. All OHR authors take note - captions remain the best way to impart information in battle to the player!
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My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

[Newbie_Power]

[Bob the Hamster]

ooh, yeah, some codes like ${ATTACKER} and ${TARGET} would be awesome for captions.

We could also use support for multi-line captions.

Support for full text boxes in battle would be desirable too, eventually, although there are some very tricky things about implementing that.

[Ronin Catholic]

[TMC]

[msw188]

Perhaps ${Element}, ${Enemy Type}, and ${Stat} would be helpful, if only because people can change those in the Global Text Editor and not have to change it for lots and lots of attack captions. Also, can we alter Global Text Strings with plotscripting? That might make this worthwhile, although I'll admit it seems rather low priority if these things are harder to implement than the others you are planning.

There's also the question of what to do with ${Target} when the attack is a spread attack. This will be needed for Optional Spread attacks used by enemies, I feel.
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My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

[ShakeyAir]

[msw188]

Oh yeah, that's how Dragon Warrior did it as well. This is actually a worse situation than I thought. It might be worthwhile to have some Global Text options for spread heroes, spread enemies, and spread 'all'. Or maybe just a careful note explaining the issue to users.

I still wish there was a way to convert spread attacks to simultaneous single ones in the attack queue, like Dragon Warrior essentially treats them. Thus allowing easily understandable and readable spread counter attacks, reflections, status effects, etc. But that sounds like a much larger job, with rather limited utility.
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My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

[TMC]

[msw188]

I just meant that if an author had made a few hundred attacks with captions describing their damage, and then decided he wanted to change "HP" to "Life" or something, it would be easy to change the global text string for the stat and not have to worry about going back and changing all his captions. Not a huge deal though.

If there were ways to alter these things midgame via plotscripting, it might be worthwhile to have the textual tags (imagine if in FF3/6, while riding Magitek Armor, your HP was called something else for some reason; or imagine a game where one of the elements was a huge deal, always dealing tons of damage, and then midway through the game the heroes discover that this element is actually some kind of dark doom element, and its name is changed moving forward). These are all rediculously hypothetical, I know.
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My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

[Newbie_Power]

The game already tells you the HP values of something on-screen, so I can live with the compromise of "$(ATTACKER) casts a giant inferno!" and knowing the damage it does to each enemy/hero anyway.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[Bob the Hamster]

Yeah, we should keep this feature simple. Fancy stuff like the Dragon Quest series does will have to wait for battlescripting and textboxes on battle.

[Ronin Catholic]

I would also like to see multi-hit attacks add the damage done on each hit to the damage display above the enemy, so that if (f'rinstance) an attack did 20 damage and hit 5 times, it would count up "20 > 40 > 60 > 80 > 100"; not remotely important, but it could look pretty cool.
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"I didn't start the flame war;
I don't know what you thought here
'Twas that way when I got here"

"I didn't start the flame war;
I can't understand a word you're saying
nor the game you're playing~"

[Chronoas]