(credit for the feature pic)

I really like battlers that do more than make white numbers fly out of bad guy heads. If its a competition to make bad guys fall down, then the heavier hitters do that better than the.. not as heavy hitters. Since this is a game focused on the not as heavy hitters, there has to be something that they can offer in battle that isn’t just pathetic by nature.

I don’t play many cell phone games, but I do still play one: Summoner’s War. It is absolutely a gatcha game, down to the best monsters being heavily paywalled, but its fun enough for the whale food (krill?) to play even knowing that they’re krill. Almost all of the monsters in that game add buffs to their friends, debuffs to their enemies with all of their moves. The availability and diversity of these means that when you’re cobbling together a team, you will want to bring enough of them that you have some synergy to play off of. Got a heavy hitter? Bring somebody who weakens defense before they take a swing. Is somebody weak on your team? Bring somebody who can guard them, or revive them, or do something beneficial. (And if you don’t actually have that unit, then pay to win, baby!)

These are easy enough to staple to attacks and give some diversity. For Alastrina, all of her attack moves are staff swings. Being hit with a stick hurts, sure, but where you are hit may daze you, stun you, blind you, or give you a nasty splinter, I suppose. So all of her staff swings should have enough interest value attached to them that she helps in combat even if her damage numbers are weak. Meaningfully, since the player can choose which of the options are provided, one of her attacks might synergize with her friends. If Pox is tanking, maybe it would help if Alastrina dazed a foe so they had an increased chance of a whiff. If Flonk is in danger, a risky move to stun a foe with a crack on the head might be the move to save his life.

There’s one more aspect of both Summoner’s War and Griftlands I really like: Passives. These aren’t skills that can be used, but they kick in, well, passively. Some of these can be pretty broken (and the units who have these are what the whales drop the big dollars for, coincidentally enough, cough cough) but I’d rather like to avoid that. I’m thinking more like racial abilities for monsters that are their passive trait, like how trolls have regeneration or drow are all inherently evil oh god don’t cancel me.

Griftlands has humans, whose racial ability is nothing because why would space humans have anything? The other races do have abilities, like simple regeneration each round, or after they take damage, they automatically gain some defense once a turn. One of the aspects of this I like is that nobody says how much health they regenerate or armor they get; this is a sliding scale based on the difficulty of the playthrough (“prestige” level). So you can have a version of a passive for “Regeneration: 1” for difficulty 1, and so on.

I bring this up because one of the characters is a monster who is genre savvy about other monsters. And, as you do, your goomba partner’s basic ability that isn’t bonk with your head, is to tattle on the monsters you encounter. The benefit of doing this, in games where you have a goomba partner, is that unless you tattle out each enemy, you won’t see their HP bar. Cool, I guess. What if, by the experience of learning how to combat trolls, you find ways to at least somewhat counteract their racial. Maybe instead of Regeneration: 2 beforehand, after sharing knowledge about them, they and all their troll buddies only get Regeneration: 1 buffs.

I wanted to bluesky about this because the more I am learning about programming, the more it hurts me to realize how monumental a task this is going to be I realize that defining what I want to do early will make my life a lot easier later. I also want the characters to have a lot of ability to make a difference, either by throwing appropriate buffs on friends, significant debuffs on foes that help their friends do more, or neutralizing the abilities the enemies may throw at you.

Suggestions? What sorts of buffs/debuffs/passives do you find fun?