First of all, a happy new year to all our fellow readers!
This blog post will explain one of the most important features in Chaos Chronicles: a game engine that includes both systems, turn-based as well as real-time.
There used to be a time when pretty much every role-playing and strategy game out there was turn-based. That was partially due to technological restrictions but also due to the fact that these games were derived from pen & paper rpgs and board games which are both usually ‘turn-based’.
In the early nineties, Dune 2 (by Westwood) created the RTS genre (at least on the PC, because Herzog Zwei was Sega exklusive) or, as some would say, changed strategy games to be real-time instead of turn-based. At the same time games like Ultima Underworld did the same for the RPG genre. In both genres the change usually implied the change from boards to analogous movement. And interestingly, in the RPG genre, it also implied a change from character parties towards single character games.
Yes, Dungeon Master and its imitators, i.e. ‘the subgenre of dungeon crawlers’ (revived by the great Grimrock) had a little headstart compared to the rest of the RPG genre and, yes, real-time-with-pause-RPGs revived character parties, but that didn’t change what happened next: With real time combat being new and exciting and turn-based being (or being said to be) old and boring developers ceased to make turn-based games. Not because all devs were morons but rather simply because no one – including gamers – was interested in turn-based games any more at that time. But even if we (and hopefully you RPG vets out there) are eager to see turn-based combat revived, we have also gotten used to the amenities of real-time, regarding, e.g., the exploration of the game world. For us that meant that we would have to feature both real-time and grid movement.
Marketing experts probably couldn’t resist using pretentious terms like ‘hybrid’ at this point, but we’ll restrain ourselves to saying that our levels have to feature *both*.
As already implied in this blog post’s introduction, (real-time) analogous movement is much harder to achieve than (turn-based) field movement.
Luckily, our editor already featured automatic navmesh generation from our last projects. And it was obvious that we could make use of that navigation mesh to automatically compute a game board for combats. To do this we basically just have to lay a 2d grid of potential board fields on the navmesh polygons, and use navmesh raycasts to test in which directions they should be connected to their neighbours.
We had a prototype up and running rather quickly and from there it was a long way of improving data structures and implementing algorithms to make use of the board data, i.e. path search, flooding with weighing of fields, etc. and to get the board (including combat animations and stuff) neatly visualized (neither being overly prominent, nor to technical, nor too hard to see and so on). Also there’s always a list of problems that you don’t expect in the first place and it took time to handle those. Especially party movement in real-time mode and immeersive examination of objects in the game world were tasks on their own which we will probably cover in blog posts to come.
By now, the logical stuff is mostly solved and we (even our level-designers) are pretty content with our auto-generated combat boards. Hexagons were definitely the right choice for this, as you can just build levels looking as naturally as you expect them to, and the hexes will mostly fit themselves into it like a charm.
As far as gameplay is concerned, there are still some open questions. E.g. a player moving his party around in exploration mode has little control over the dynamic movement of the party following him. However when a combat starts the characters’ positions suddenly become relevant as characters are simply placed on the closest board field. The resulting lack of influence you have in your party’s initial positioning is cool for surprise combats but might be annoying for a combat you already expect. We considered manual placing of the chars but found it too immersion-breaking. Depending on our polishing prioritization we might leave this as it is, but as always we appreciate your opinion or suggestions.
Just my opinion, but I think you shouldn’t have manual placing of characters, it kinda reminds me of JRPG’s when your party basically “runs into” an enemy and your “teleported” to a battle scene. Although that’s an extreme example, I prefer TB combat that feels more organic and real.
Create a formation option. Make it a mini screen. Have it be the default position at the start of the fight.
So, lets say I have a tank type, a rogue type and a wizard type. I set up my formation to be one in front of the other in a line. Now, in exploration mode, due to the way the characters are moving the wizard ends up in front an triggers a non surprise encounter. The game automatically resorts the characters into the formation and the combat starts.
If you have time, you can also create a surprise system where during surprise attacks your characters are where they are.
I’m in favour of the old school GM question “Whats your formation!?”, just prior to the surprise encounter. Prehaps you could have skills in game where surprise mattered for encounter placements (Like getting a few hexes movement before combat starts for real – mobs would be allowed to have such skills as well of course)
I must agree with Samuel, in that if this game is trying to be old school, then we really shouldn’t be warping our characters anywhere.
The Grotesque Tactics games does a similar job of real time movement vs turn based combat. If you can sort out the pathing issues that comes with having both movement types on and off then I am looking forward to tossing my Money your way.
I agree with Samuel, positioning the party members before start the combat is IMHO wrong, at least for ambushes or when the party enter a room/area where enemy are.
However, can be useful to give the player the possibility to set a “formation” to the party.
Formation certainly sound like the best option.
Although, when I think about it, in these kind of games I always want my group to stick together. It’s not like there’s tons of room to move around in dungeons, and even in the outside areas the camera doesn’t zoom out completely.
Depending on how many characters are in your party, I just want them to stay relatively close to each other without having some idiot mage getting stuck behind some stairs miles back, and wait for him to catch up with the rest of the group once combat starts. Just a “square” shape, instead of a long extending line would be fine.
I think having a handful of easily accessible formations that you can set yourself would be fine. In my experience, annoying things with party movement are the party splitting up and taking separate paths through unknown dungeon sections (and half the party blundering into rooms of enemies), and trailing characters getting stuck behind doors or in corners because the invisible string connecting the party goes through walls and the PCs can’t. Some sort of ‘stay within 5/10/20 feet’ option might reduce this. Enemy action should make formation choice tactically important: too spread out and ambushing brigands get in amongst your party and target spellcasters, while tightly bunched groups get caught up together in nets and webs.
Re: positioning of party for expected fights, how about an option to place the grid on the board when not in combat? Could be useful prior to opening doors etc to place characters on the grid exactly where you want them (and justifiable in the circumstances of adventurers exploring hostile territory). Ambushed parties could be snapped to grid by the computer as planned as a function of being startled.
I really feel like formations are the way to go. However, more importantly, I think if possible you should go the Jagged Alliance 2 route, which is: only initiate turn-based mode when the enemy has seen you. If you see the enemy, but he doesn’t see you, you can move your party members into position while still in real time.
The word ‘hybrid’
springs to mind here :have 1st round be the surprise round and those who manage to pass the initiative roll get the chance to reposition themselves before combat begins(both yr chars and ai’s chars) . This way even the same battle done over and over again has some variation induced to it(also this allows for a easy and proper ambush mecanism say some special ai units(these would presumably always roll max or near max initiative) get to place themselves right behind yr spellcaster)
Yes, formations would be perfect. You have a pre-defined set of formations you can choose from and when combat starts, the heroes take up their designated places. This is, when combat starts, every character walks, jumps, runs this his designated position in the chosen formation.
I would say that you should use a player-defined formation for non-surprise situations. When surprised, the configuration should be randomly mixed up, so that one of the hazards of surprise is that a vulnerable character is suddenly caught exposed on the front lines and needs to take a turn to reposition.
“…developers ceased to make turn-based games. Not because all devs were morons but rather simply because no one – including gamers – was interested in turn-based games any more at that time.”
This isn’t true now, and has never been true. There has always been an interest from consumers in turn-based games.
I have to agree with Screeg. I’ve never stopped loving turn based games. They were always a way for me to play Dungeons and Dragons when I didn’t have the time nor gaming group to play the game for real. To this day I still go back and play the old X-Com game and it broke my heart when X-Com Apocolypse and even DnD based gamespulled away from Turn-Based. You can’t tell me that players (even most players) lost interest when there are games like Civillization and Heroes of Might and Magic that still sell. No I believe it was because of a Fad in game development that led to every new developer and game programmer thinking that Real-Time was everything.
Just to echo previous suggestions, I would like to see some sort of formation based system as well.
Also, Baldur’s Gate had a function that allowed you to turn the auto-follow feature for your party on and off. I would like to see that flexibilty in this game as well.
I have not read the other comments but in my pen and paper RPGs I DM, I have the party set a marching order. A menu could allow the player to chose in what shape the party moves by setting tokens into a hex grid and making the party move as a whole in this shape, ie the fighter up front, with the cleric right behind to heal, with the rouge trailing up the rear ready to flank left or right. I believe Baldur’s Gate had a system like this.
An option could be to start combat with a friendly and opponent turn in which you can only move, and only move up to 3 hexes (or more depending on the nature of encounters in your game, with which I have no experience). This turn having the aim to set up your formation.
The toee set formation option works really well for this even when exploring,
toee falls down on this when entering doors when this becomes random, this is a pain and gets your magic users dead, how about an option to set a ” through door formation” , this could be limited “set front rank only” with subsequent ranks random to reflect the difficulty of getting through a door in formation. Or each character could have a percentage chance of staying in position (wich increases with level), those that succeed are allocated positions, those that fail have their positions switched, if only one fails
If only one fails it switches places with the character with the lowest successful score.
Selectable formations certainly seems the way to go. Some good ideas around ambushes and using doorways; definately need to have varying levels of formation disruption around those events.
You guys need to hurry up, I’m running out of ways to play TOEE.
Every update leaves me wanting more.
The formation should be based on party statistics such as stealth modifiers or speed or whatever stats they will have. So if they get ambushed because they failed to spot the enemy they should be in random starting formation but if they see the enemy first they should be in the formation that you choose for them before combat. The turn based system is the only way to play pen and paper rules, mage and archer type characters can suffer attacks of opportunity while casting or shooting with ranged weapons. That is why in turn based combat you always move your character away from enemy before casting or shooting. In real time that is impossible since the enemy follows you constantly. Also there are a lot of other spells and attacks that have to be turn based, charms, fears etc… in real time you cannot realy count seconds how long they will be feared etc.. RPG was always about statistics and turns and careful calculations not hack and slash as fast as you can press your mouse button. The “action” rpgs are for kids and iphones
but really every serious RPG fan loves the statistics and hours spent making tactics for fights and character development.
Got to agree with Termix in the above post could not have said it better myself.
First I would like to to say how ecstatic I am in a seeing a comeback to my favourite genre…There is so many fans for turn based tatical fantasy games like Choas Chronicles that if you guys do this right it could lead to the rebirth of this type of game!
Anyway I have one burning question for the moment and I did not know where else to post it so here it is:
Q: How are you guys going to handle the difficulty scaling in Choas Chronicles?
(With turn based tatical games you have a lot more time to think about your actions, this leads to more thought out play and room for errors, also with five controllable charcters I’m worried that I would not find the difficulty scaling to be challenging enough? My Hypothesis for this being that in stand alone games your character or group of characters generally gets to a point in the any game when they become “God like” normally this occurs about three quarters of the way into the game. For instance finding the “+5 flaming sword of dragons breath” combined with “+5 Drake armor” = Ulmost unkillable. Or having every powerful spell unlocked and upgraded.
O fcourse the answer to this is to have enemies that scale with you and a really smart A.I so they do not just all attack the unkillable guy at the front but rather try to use tatics to beat us players. A game is only as good as it’s A.I. Of course this is all speculation at this point but i did not know where else to ask this question.
Regards and keep up the awsome work, Crowtac!
I don’t agree with most people here about surprise = all your formation is random. sure if it is a surprise the people at the back can find themselves ambushed from behind but I don’t see any reason why my formation would suddenly screw up just because someone surprised me.
Thanks for all your input! We’ve been discussing formations, pre-combat positioning by single-player movement, an initial movement-only round at combat start as well as character placing at combat start. And if we had more time it would be tempting to turn those results into a separate blog post.
For now, your exploration (real-time) characters will remain on their present position when a combat starts. We found that this feels too immersive already to give it up, so even though it would be easy to implement and provide extensive control over each situation we’ll try and avoid initial movement-only rounds or character placing at combat start.
Instead we are now going to add your control over the already-existing formation (that you probably know from the trailer) by letting you order your chars from front to back. Additionally, we are going to evaluate single-player movement to allow more sophisticated character positioning before combat.
You guys should do a kickstarter at kickstarter.com.
Fortunately, we don’t need additional funding.
What are you doing for surprise and moving through doors?
@fred ‘Instead we are now going to add your control over the already-existing formation (that you probably know from the trailer) by letting you order your chars from front to back’
if i’m getting it right the formation is fixed but you can determine that your tanks are in the front, and casters in the back. seems ok for me.
Yep works fine but it does sound a little safe. The toee random order for surprise and doors is too hard . I personally would prefer something in between but you are right it would work fine.
By single-player movement, do you mean moving characters individually?
That is desirable, because sometimes you want to position your rogue/wizard/etc. in a special position before initiating combat, not to mention scouting/sneaking.
The current formation system in Chaos Chronicles allows you to set your characters to the front, middle or rear line. By doing this, you can move your weak characters to the end of your group.
Before opening a door with a possible encounter behind, you just wait one or two seconds until your formation is positioned.
I think, this system offers the player a good compromise between the manual micro positioning system of ToEE and given formation types like in Baldur’s Gate.
Regarding single-player movement outside combats: since we are using a turn-based combat (which is single-character controlled), we are looking for a fluent and comfortable way to move our group outside battles to explore dungeons.
We don’t want to have too much micro management outside our battles, because the dungeon crawling part has a different focus than the combat. That’s why the player can choose the leading character to do some class specific action like disarming traps, but it will not be possible to move every character by themselves. The party use to move as group and not as selection of single characters.
One reason for this decision is the initiative system of OGL 3.5: as soon as the player is able to put all characters in position before the combat starts, the RPG based part of the initiative becomes less important. If the player runs into an ambush, he should face the consequences in form of a random start setup.
Well, the ToEE system doesn’t necessitate micromanagement (crappy pathfinding nonwithstanding); most of the time you group select all of your characters.
The benefit of the single-select option is that it affords the player more freedom (e.g. cast invisibility & sneak around with your Rogue/Wizard; leave a wounded/incapacitated character behind; use disposable NPCs/summons as bait; etc).
The drawback is the amount of power it gives the player and that it complicates/precludes some scripted events and such.
I understand either choice, but am hoping for the ToEE approach, or at least some compromise e.g. letting you send out a lone character independent of the party.
Also, can it be inferred that there is no stealth gameplay? (sneaking/non-combat invisibility)
If comment 33 is a correct understanding of what you intend to do that would be a big disappointment. the ability to move characters independently outside of combat is a key part of strategic play.
How does sneaking with a rogue work?
Comment 33 makes a good observation.
A good idea might be to have set amount of time of “Combat preparation”, IE 5-10 seconds to move your units via RTS for combat positioning.
And outside of fixed fights, this “Combat Preparation” time could be used to flee. Similar to Final Fantasy XIII’s encounter system.
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<3 Hexagon grids. On a side note, just last year I prototyped a 2D Hexagon grid (Intended for a TBG). Still too new to programming to do much with it, but the grid did manage to get the basic elements (Was able to scan for adjacent hex) xD
I like the way toee does it. Caracters start from the possition they are in when combat starts if they happen to be spread out or in different rooms so be it.
The only part I dont like is the way it handles doors.
You should just abandon this buzzword goal of ‘immersion’. People interested in turn-based can deal with abstraction.
As I see it, the problem emerges from the difference between expected and unexpected fights. I would suggest to treat those two somehow differently or give the player an option to do so by himself (e.g. move all party members together / at the same time to the same spot or give a few seconds for real-time-repositioning IF NOT AMBUSHED*).
* I like the idea of ambushes in this kind of game
I prefer the immersive aspect in the sense that, if you’re not taking the trouble to *move your party in combat-ready formation* as they explore, they CAN be at a disadvantage if ambushed or surprised.
I would allow a set formation(ie party member 1, 2 in frotn 3,4 behind or if in single file 1,2,3,4. In the event of an ambush type fight taking an almost FF type approach in that they can be surprise attacks from the front(they get a bonus to initiative), a back attack(attacked from behind but no bonus to initiative), or both(attacked from behind enemy gets initiative bonuses). Then balance it to the type of enemy, for instance an orge might attack from behind but it is not going to surprise your party, but stealth type mobs might very well. Perhaps certain skill choices of party members might help to mitigate this(such as maybe bonuses to initiative themselves or bonus action points of some kind on the first turn, or perhaps bonus defensive stats)
I was just watching your video on steam. At first, watching them run, I thought it might be an action-rpg and it looked interesting, but meh. Then I saw the fireball and was sweet, that is how a fireball should look and games always screw it up. Then I saw the hex grid and realized it was turn-based. Hex turn-based. I didn’t even finish watching the video because I wanted to buy the game. Unfortunately it shows as early 2013. Sigh. I was practically throwing money at the screen.
BTW. I like the realistic art style and hand-drawn automap. Always wanted that in a game, I don’t get why more games don’t do that.
Any new information coming soon?
sorry for being impatient
As I was saying back on your previous host, I’m concerned about what it sounds like you’re doing with stealth and surprise, party formation, and lack of the ability to separate your party. I share the view of Fred and Anonymous 33.
Scouting carefully ahead with a stealthy rogue (or its equivalent), with the rest of the party waiting behind is quite important, and a major element of games like this, including ToEE. Scouting is strategic, and when you scout ahead, and learn the position of the enemy, you should be able to use that knowledge tactically to position your own party in an optimal way, not simply rely on a dice roll for surprise or initiative.
I think the best system would be to have a selectable set of formations in a formation screen. You could move your party members around and set it how you like. Then your party would try thier best to hold this formation as they moved around the world. When combat starts, yes they might not be in the perfect setup, but they are close. In addition, feats or abilities or whatever you choose to call them in this RPG could also be available for an extra couple of hexes moved at the start of combat to tweak your start if you choose to take those.
hi there please can u tell me when the release date for the uk
@Michael: at the moment, we can’t tell the exact date but it will be Summer 2013.