To hold everyone over for now, I thought I'd throw out some random screens, sketches, and ideas I've had over the last month or so. Onward !
This was a test of opening treasure boxes. Some time was spent a few weeks ago deciding how this dialog box would appear, what sounds would be made opening the treasure box, and hooking the discovery process to your inventory. I wanted to add a particle effect coming out of the treasure chest, to sorta give the players a feeling of reward upon opening a chest, but unsure as of yet. I was also unsure of whether or not to incorporate both small and large chests, but that will depend on how frequently small items would appear in-game. The "Mystery Box" placeholder graphic comes from a well-known icon set and has already been replaced. In reality, if a treasure box's contents read an invalid number, it shows up as one of these.
These enemies will likely not appear until mid-game so as to give the player a false sense of comfort opening smaller chests. If bigger chests are implemented, there could even be a mimic boss. Mimics will impart a nasty status ailment on players, most likely a form of paralysis, bind (think of that tongue), or confusion (think of that eye). I am as of yet undecided of the permanence of the various paralysis/bind/curse effects, or how to name them.
Status Effects
A quick segue into those types of status effects The effects would include anything from simply slowing the player way down to being unable to draw your weapon. I originally wanted paralysis to describe the slow effect which occurs from binding or electric shock, but paralysis could also do a good job explaining a status ailment where you're unable to draw your weapon. 'Tangled' might be more appropriate for the the inability to draw your weapon (or having a 0.5x or infinitely worse attack rate) effect, whereas 'Paralyzed' could explain the slowbound effect -- Or, 'Slowbound' could be good enough, and replace 'Tangled' with 'Paralysis'. I just don't know.
'Curse' is also a good generic name that could be used to apply a variety of ailments that you want to be permanent, such as a halving of intrinsic str/def values. It could also be used to explain the inability to draw your weapon, but perhaps only for more permanent situations. Since it would probably be very dangerous to implement that way, a stat debuff seems like the more likely scenario for this effect.
'Confuse' is a relatively simple status effect which inverts both directional axes of the controller for a short time.
'Poison' slowly drains your HP over time. The permanence and amount can be different for different enemies.
'Petrify' / 'Stone' makes the player immobile for a period of time. It's possible that jamming keys might reduce the effect period... The purpose of this effect is to penalize the player with further damage if effected by it. Trap gazers (firing beam projectiles) and enemies which can gaze would be the most likely inflicters of this ailment, and most likely would appear in enemy patterns with mobs of minor annoyance enemies "birds, bees, etc." to pick at you for that damage.
Keys & Gems
Gems are basically little pebbles or larger stones which will come out of enemies in a burst when they are defeated. Depending on the type of enemy (and possibly augmented with a luck value), their payout will be different. Collecting the gembursts will become a farming mechanic with the intent to be a positive reinforcement for some minimum level of grinding in-game. Different colored gems were devised to fill the gap for larger payout values.
I also considered mana gems to refresh some MP while on the field without necessarily needing to resort to items to constantly fill the meter. This mechanic might be useful should we come up with any enemies which have an unusually high attack defense but are weak against a certain spell or MP-draining weapon such as elemental staves.
Prize gems would be located in dungeons and in far-off corners where a full treasure chest would be inappropriate but where we'd like to reward the player for exploring. The purpose here is to have a nice big gem graphic to get the player excited over, and have a modest payout for the area upon collecting it.
More Monsters
The mummy simply wanders around aimlessly until you get close to it, whereby it will turn in your direction. From far away, it will only turn in your direction if you are facing perpendicular to it -- a 180 spin shouldn't occur on the base mummy, but might occur in a more difficult variant. A chaser variant may also be implemented, which would appear angry if you are within line-of-sight, and increase speed while chasing you for a short period.
The golem is based on the mummy, but has no recoil, is very slow, and has an extreme haymaker attack which it uses if the player is within range. This attack should only fool the player if he's not paying close attention, or if it's the first time he's encountered a particular golem. Different golems will have different attributes, such as sliding while attacking, or being able to attack on the diagonal (or only on the diagonal).
More Inventory Stuff
Where to start on this..... since my inventory currently has 125 slots, I needed placeholder graphics for all of them. Unfortunately, I don't have placeholder graphics for all of them, so I had to make something. Luckily, believe it or not the Shift-JIS character set have placeholders for the numbers 1-20 and roman numerals up to 12, I think it was, so I just used those and aligned them to a grid for easy inventory/treasure placeholders.
That's all I have for now.... Comments welcome; sound off below.
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The Gembursting thing sounds interesting. Do the bits of gem disappear if the player doesn't collect them in time? Curious!
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