for stream of consciousness pseudo-creative posting brainstorming posts

Have you seen the Bystander Effect ?
I swear, I left my Bystander Effect somewhere around here !

sorry i think i broke it

i think i put rivara somewhere but i don't know where

Rivara
HP: 90

Passive: Whenever an enemy takes damage, Rivara gains a stack of Rising Tide. Whenever Rivara or her team mate takes damage, Rivara gains a stack of Soothing Current.

Wavecasting
Cost: 00001
Class: Instant, Magical, Ranged
Cooldown: 0
Description: Deals 5 damage to one target. This ability casts an additional time on a random target each time its successively cast.

Whirlpool
Cost: 01001
Class: Instant, Magic, Buff
Cooldown: 2
Description: Places an invisible buff on an ally that triggers when that ally is targeted by an enemy melee skill. The skill will be countered and the enemy will take 30 damage and be stunned for 1 turn.

Sirensong
Cost: 00002
Class: Continuous
Cooldown: 1
Description: Gain a 25 point shield when first cast. Gain 2 energy and 10 shield at the start of each turn. Continues until stunned or until the shield is broken.

Ultimatum
Cost: 11000
Class: Instant, Magical
Cooldown: 2
Description: Deal 5 damage to each enemy for each stack of Rising tide and Heal 5 damage from each enemy for each stack of Soothing current. If Rivara had more stacks of Rising tide, Ultimatum also stuns for one turn. If Rivara had more stacks of Soothing Current, Ultimatum also makes allies invunerable for 1 turn.

Tempest
HP: 80

Passive: Tempest can't be dealt more than 25 damage per turn.

Stormstrike
Cost: 00100
Class: Instant, Melee, Magical
Cooldown: 0
Deals 20 damage. While under half health, Stormstrike deals 10 additional damage, deals true damage, and ignores invulnerability.

Thunderous Grapple
Cost: 00010
Class: Continuous, Melee
Cooldown: 1
Deals 10 damage instantly, plus an additional 10 damage each turn. The target takes 5 extra damage from all other attacks, and deals 10 less damage with all attacks. Continues until stunned. Continues indefinitely while under half health.

Fury Whip
Cost: 00102
Class: Instant, Ranged, Physical
Cooldown: 3
Deals true damage to a random target equal to missing life.

Surge
Cost: 00101
Class: Instant
Cooldown: 2
Restore 25 life. While under half life, also gain 2 random energy.

Terradon
Life: 120

Passive: 25% of damage dealt to team mates is dealt to Terradon instead.

Stonebreaker
Cost: 00010
Classes: Instant, Physical Melee
Cooldown: 1
Deal 15 damage and stun an opponent for 1 turn.

Earth Shield
Cost: 00101
Classes: Instant
Cooldown: 1
Gain a 30 point shield. While this shield exists, the cooldown of stonebreaker is reduced by 1.

Mudslide
Cost: 00020
Classes: Instant, Ranged, Physical, Debuff
Cooldown: 3
Deal 15 damage to each enemy. Enemies hit deal 50% reduced damage for 3 turns.

Headcracker 00011
Classes: Instant, Physical, Melee
Cooldown: 2
Remove all shields from an enemy and then deal 25 damage to them.

Sorad
Life: 90

Passive: When Sorad doesn't use a skill he gains "Serenity" next turn, which enhances his abilities and reduces their cost by 1 random each.

Truestrike
Cost: 10001
Classes: Melee, Instant
Cooldown: 0
Deals 30 damage. Deals true damage if Sorad has serenity.

Forge
Cost: 00002
Classes: Self, Instant, Buff
Cooldown: 3
Sorad gains 5 permanent damage reduction and permanently deals 5 more damage with each of his attacks. If used with serenity, this skill has no cooldown.

Counterstance
Cost: 00101
Classes: Continuous, Physical
Cooldown: 1
When a skill is used on Sorad, he counters it and deals 15 true damage to the countered enemy. Counterstance continues until it triggered. When used during serenity, Counterstance deals 5 extra damage and continues until its triggered twice.

Forbidden Strike
Cost: 11002
Classes: Physical, Melee
Cooldown: 4
Forbbiden strike immediately executes any enemy with under half life. If used during serenity, it also ignores invulnerability and can't be countered.

In the original game, there are four types of energy (green, blue, white, and red). At the start of each players turn, that player gains 1 energy for each living character they have (3 total at the start). Each character can use a maximum of one ability per turn, and abilities cost energy (a combination of the four colours plus black which can be payed with any colour). This kind of randomization introduces variation into what a team can do (with players opting for more or less variation by selecting different characters), and also restricts teambuilding (it punishes a team that excessively relies on one or two colours).

I'm making one big change here to start, and that's the introduction of a mechanical pie into the game. This could have big consequences because in the original game all effects were balanced and, in theory, getting white energy meant you could deal damage just as often as getting green energy did. If all damage tends to be tied more strongly to green and blue energy, then it might often be that the team that gets more green/blue energy tends to win, regardless of what the player's comp is, which is obviously undesirable. I think that introducing a pie makes the energy system feel more personal for players though, and will help with identifying what a character does quickly (glancing at a character and seeing a lot of white symbols makes it clear that this is a support-type character). In order to compensate for the lack of balance and amplify the feeling of the system, I'd like to change the way energy is generated, but I'm not sure exactly how to do this yet. The first thought is to put biases into how energy is generated, such that a team which exclusively uses blue energy is many times more likely to get blue energy than a team which uses none (but not enough so that an all blue team would be nearly as consistent as a more varied one). I'm not sure this really solves any of the problems (and could in fact excaberate them), and doesn't feel like something the players would really appreciate either. My second idea is to make "mana-fixing" more available through in game mechanics. The original game used two different models (the first one being replaced later in development by the second one), which were as follows:

1) The player can exchange 5 energy of any colour into an energy of another colour. The player can do this any number of times per turn.

and

2) The player can exchange any 2 energy of the same colour into an energy of another colour. The player can do this only once per turn.

The first system is mild bad luck prevention. By the time a player needs to exchange energy they're already in a pretty bad place, and spending 4 energy to fix for one is brutal. The second system serves a different purpose and gives the player a lot more control over what kind of energy they get, while still allowing for some randomness. I prefer the gameplay generated by the second system. More control excaberates rather than helps the sort of thing i am worried about though, potentially. I guess regular balancing can help the problems I am worried about.

Green - Spirit (technical ability, individualism)
Blue - Intelligence (magical power, calculation)
White - Wisdom (creativity, tactical thinking)
Red - Body (physicality, feats of strength)

Something like a Pie:

Body - Physical Damage, Damage Reduction, Stuns, Debuffs
Intelligence - Magical Damage, Damage Bypass, Buffs, Energy Generation
Wisdom - Buffs, Energy Generation/Fixing, Debuffs, Stuns, Damage
Spirit - Damage Bypass, Buffs/Debuffs, Energy Generation

every colour will potentially have every effect, this is just a loose ideqa of what kind of effects would be prioritized in what colour. Magic damage tends to be harder to avoid than physical damage.

idk i am tempted to scrap everything i just wrote hmm

I considered a card-drawing system where each character draws multiple cards into a main "hand" and each card has a cost that can be payed by discarding other cards but i felt like rather than experiment with something like that it would be better to put more effort into realizing the original system better

I'd like some mechanical paradigms that are different from "things do stuff"

In a previous iteration I used multi hits as a major mechanical theme

an ability might deal 15 x 3 damage and another ability might deal 45 damage and the main difference is that the 15 x 3 damage would be more heavily punished by damage reduction and would be better when combined with flat damage increases. I think this might be a little too niche though, since depending on the balancing it basically forces you to run flat damage reduction on your team if you want to deal with multihits

another thing is that damage was generally always dealt/prevented in multiples of 5 and characters had an average of 100 hit points.

sometimes other multiples of damage were dealt when % damage reduction or increases came into play (an ability that deqals 25 damage against a target taking half damage will deqal either 12 or 13 damage)

i wonder how worthile that sort of thing is

-Mechanical Paradigms
-Setting
-Engine Alterations
-Character Design

probably

i can test mechanical paradigms by trial and error if i need to although preferably if i was going to do that i'd have a setting to guide my blind groping

the setting should be something that primarily serves as a means of bringing out the strength of the characters. Fighting games have iconic and interesting characters but often have nothing substantial as far as the setting goes. Whats ryu's story? Blanca's? Scorpion's? I have no idea. Naruto as a setting is probably reasonably decent because the characters all have well defined gimmicks and much of the story is based around pitting them against one another in ways that "showcase" those gimmicks.

Naruto-arena is somewhat interesting because when you see a character in-game after having seen them fight in the source story, you think "i wonder how the author captured the character's nature using game mechanics" but a generic "people fight each other" story doesn't really elicit the same response. Naruto-arena characters are essentially all top-down.

WoN had OCs and the story was largely uninteresting. Something that made the characters feel identifiable was that they all had a rank and clan associated with them (there were, with some exceptions, ~10 clans of characters, each which had three ranks (a rookie, a veteran, and a leader)). Each clan had a fairly identifiable gimmick. There was the fire clan, the summoner clan, the plant clan, and so you can attach to the gimmick, and then be interested in seeing how it manifests on the three different levels, and after that you might even begin to be attached to the character.

I might actually steal that approach, although its hard to work into a proper story, which was somewhat necessary for managing the character-unlock system i had in mind. I could probably adapt it though.

in naruto-arena the unlock system took a sort of strange form.

Outside the client, there was a list of "missions" which described what you had to do to complete them (generally win with certain characters, maintain a win streak, defeat players using certain characters, or a combination of the three), and you progressed and completed the missions within the client. The obvious change to make is to consolidate the "mission" UI into the client. WoN did this, and generated a pretty fancy UI for it along with a more interactive "story mode" with a map and dialogue and stuff. They changed the way missions worked though, by making it so that there was only one metric for any mission (win games). each mission required you used a certain archetype of character though (there were three archetypes), and you also lost progress for losing games, such that the missions formed a sort of tug of war.

One big problem with the naruto-arena system was that a lot of the missions were either impossible or unfair. some missions required you win against characters that were never or very very rarely used for metagame reasons, and often multiple times at that. if these missions were pre-requisites to later missions it could became impractical to unlock a lot of characters. The winstreak missions were also unfun, especially at higher levels. Some missions required things like winning ten times in a row to unlock the character, which most players resorted to win-swapping to complete because it turns out that in a game with matchmaking winning ten times in a row is pretty rare.

WoN missions had a similar problem in that they punished losing, but not nearly to the same degree. Something i disliked about WoN missions were that they lacked the personality of the naruto-arena missions. in naruto-arena, you might encounter a disproportionately grindy and flavourfjul mission (like win 100 times with naruto on your team) which might unlock a character pivotal to the naruto storyline (like a powered up form of naruto). unlocking and progressing through these missions felt flavourful and interesting, i think, and satisfying when you finally completed them. All of WoN's campaign felt like the same thing over and over again. I'd like to more closely tie my missions to the story.

I don't want a UI as fancy as WoN's, because i think the game should primarily focus on the PVP and not make itself off to be something like a single player game. The UI i initially decided on was more similar to naruto-arenas, but integrated into the client and less ugly. The section of the UI would have been called something like "the storybook" and would have included a number of linked "chapters". Each chapter would be a piece of writing that described part of the story, and then list the requirements to complete the chapter. completing chapters would unlock linked chapters, and you'd progress through the story asynchronously (though there would presumably be chokepoints) in this manner. One of the strengths of this UI is its easy to see the "progression tree" and map out where you want to go, what order you want to unlock characters in, and etc. It also makes it easy to read the story and also easy to skip it.

the mission requirements will also be more in line with naruto arena's but not stupid. You might have a quest like "deal 300 magic damage" to unlock a sorcerer.

I think there should be an overarching plotline that gets some percentage of players somewhat interested in finding out what happens next. One of naruto-arena's strengths that I'd like to tap into was the ability to have multiple renditions of single characters (representing the character as they were at various points in the series). This has tension with the ideqa of factions with 3 ranks though.

I don't particularly desire a deep or interesting setting, nor do i have confidence in my ability to write something like that. I think that something relatively amoral/unaligned so that players can root for different teams and there is motive for conflict is probably ideal. To borrow from shounen tropes, sometihng like a war to become god might be nice, although i think I'd rather something that doesn't suggest a definite conclusion, even if its down the line.

I could do a typical war story, in the veins of avatar or gundam or three kingdoms, with some initial event disrupting the balance of the world and various factions suddenly vying for whatever they want in the resultant chaos, although i think that sort of story de-emphasises characters. It might serve to emphasise factions though, which could work out.

Depending on how the story is told this could also change a lot. Third person and First person are the two big ways to tell it i think, with third person focusing more on how each character/faction's story impacts the world, and first person showing how each character/faction cares about and interacts with the world. I think the latter is more interesting but probably more difficult to pull off.

Dawngate wrote a short story centering around a character whenever they released a new one and the writer they had on staff was really good. The characters always seemed so full of personality that it was fun reading about them, even if the general plotline of the game and the world the characters existed in was largely uninteresting itself.

niklor mentions durarara which might be a good approach

I can start off with a hypothetical KNIGHT faction that wants to subjugate the region. these efforts will then be contrasted by the DRUID faction's story, where the druids are just trying to preserve nature against the knights primarily, but the existence of some culminating dark force will be breadcrumbed here. I might then move to a DEMON HUNTER faction which would be investigating the previously alluded dark force but will primarily be dealing with being hampered by the conflict between the knights and druids. The culmination of this storyline will come from a CULT faction who is basically playing up the conflict to complete some sort of ritual and succeeds, which throws off the balance of power and allows for the story to move in another direction.

this sort of story is perhaps not super interesting but i think if its written well enough then it will be good enough. I would prefer if the factions could be played in somewhat different orders though. Each faction will have three characters, and I wouldn't be opposed to introducing one or two aside, who would serve as exceptions and vessels of the plot moving forward where the factions/faction members aren't appropriate for doing so. The chapters in this first arc would then have somewhere between 12 and 14 chapters which result in an unlocked character, and then some which just serve to unlock more chapters. Odds are you'll unlock most of the lower level (apprentice, veteran) characters before you start unlocking the bigger guns (leaders), but they'll be introduced in the story before that.

Another issue is that the game should start with the player having at a minimum a roster of three characters. The gameplay itself is largely disconnected from the story, so it doesn't necessarily matter who these three characters are, but they should be connected to the story in some way. Since there's three of them, it probably makes sense for them to comprise something like a faction themselves.

hmm

maybe just three generic characters flavoured as mercenaries

mercenaries
knights
druids
demon hunters
cultists

Mercenaries: Burster/Pure, Tank/Utility, Burster/Utility

Axiom
HP: 90
Lore: some sort of gunman who was in a lot of wars
Passive: Survival Instinct - Always generates green energy on the first turn.

Scattershot
Cost: Green
Cooldown: 1
Classes: Ranged, Instant, Debuff
Deals 10 piercing physical damage to one enemy and prevents them from defending for 2 rounds.

Aimed Shot
Cost: Red Black
Cooldown: 2
Classes: Ranged, Channeled
Channels for one turn and then deals 60 physical damage to one target. Interrupted by stuns.

Stiletto Fury
Cost: Green
Cooldown: 4
Classes: Buff
Applies a buff which lasts until triggered, countering the first melee or ranged skill used on Axiom. If a melee skill is countered, a 5 point bleed is applied that lasts for four turns.

Marking Knife
Cost: Red
Cooldown: 0
Classes: Ranged, Instant
Deals 10 physical damage to one target and increases the amount of damage the target receives from all sources by 10 this turn.

Axiom's passive makes his opening a lot more consistent but also represents some combo potential when used in combination with other characters that benefit from having a green on the opening turn. This ability gets a lot more mileage when the player goes first.

Scattershot represents an important tool in any teamcomp that seeks to quickly eliminate a single target, as it adds a large degree of inevitability to any burst combo. the ability also serves as a natural way to prevent an opponent from dodging Axiom's aimed shot if its used in the following round.

Aimed shot is Axiom's most flamboyant ability and will probably be what people first notice about him. It deals the most ability in the game by a decent margin and costs a modest amount. In practice i suspect the ability will largely be a trap in terms of its strength, since it'll be fairly easy to avoid the damage one way or another, and two energy is probably too large an investment to just force an ability out of an enemy, and so casting aimed shot will hurt you more often than it will help you. It none the less remains a fun combo piece and a realistic threat that the opponent will need to play around.

Stiletto Fury is a fairly generic utility ability. Its primary purpose is to dodge stuns so as to prevent aimed shot from being interrupted, but also serves as a relatively powerful defensive skill, making it harder to focus down Axiom. The bleed portion creates some alternate line of plays when interacting with marking knife, and otherwise give axiom an invaluable edge when dueling melee characters.

Marking knife is probably what a lot of players will see as the most interesting part of Axiom's kit. It can easily be used with two additional sources of damage (one from each other character) do deal 30 damage for one energy, which makes it very conductive to burst strategies. Marking knife has some additional combo potential for teams that can stack damage sources. Axiom himself can easily provide an additional source of damage himself with Stiletto Fury's bleed, although not consistently as the opponent has the ability to soak the bleed and will more often try to proc the counter with a ranged skill. Aimed shot also provides an additional source of damage, and Marking knife plus aimed shot alone deals 80 damage in one turn, just short of being able to one-hit-kill a lot of characters.

Axiom's kit should make him a core consideration in most burst teams, and otherwise a decent choice for a one-off threat, which makes him ideal as one of the three starting characters.

Bruska
HP: 130
Lore: matriarch of some sort of gang or group of rovers
Passive: Guardian - While above 100 life, half of damage dealt to other characters will be dealt to Bruska instead.

Bash
Cost: White
Cooldown: 1
Class: Melee, Instant, Debuff
Deals 10 physical damage and stuns the target. This ability has no cooldown if used on the target of grapple.

Grapple
Cost: Red
Cooldown: 1 (starts CD when it ends)
Class: Melee, Channeled
Targets one enemy. Deals 5 physical damage per turn to that enemy and prevents them from using abilities on anyone but Bruska. Is interrupted by stuns or if the target becomes invulnerable. Can only affect one enemy at a time.

Piledrive
Cooldown: 3
Cost: White White
Classes: Instant, Physical, Debuff
Deals 25 physical damage and stuns the target for two turns. Costs White less when used on a target affected by Grapple.

Rejuvenate
Cooldown: 4
Cost: Black Black
Classes: Buff
Heals 10 health per turn for 4 turns.

I'm not totally sold on this character design. A lot of bruska's power as a character is spent on her abnormally high health pool, which serves to make her impractical to kill and especially impractical to burst. As a downside, she has little to no damage potential, and so people will not really want to kill her to begin with.

Her passive is probably the biggest reason to have her on your team, as it provides a way to reduce some of the damage your more high-target characters will take from burst-comps at the start of a game. a 90 health character will take 120 or more damage to nuke, which puts them out of range of a lot of combos.

Beyond her passive, Bash is a consistent and relatively cheap stun, which is good utility.

Grapple feels like it has too much counterplay at the moment. I might make it so invulnerability doesn't interrupt it and then give it a fixed duration so it isn't too oppressive against teams without stuns. Grapple+Bash represents a potentially unfair degree of lockdown so i want it to have a good amount of counterplay.

Piledrive is the one high-value skill that Bruska has. A two-turn stun without significant setup requirement is a pretty big deal, and serves as the second reason one would have to play Bruska.

Rejuvination exists primarily to get more mileage out of Bruska's passive. Its a very efficient heal and makes Bruska especially formidable in a duel (which is important because she will often be the last person remaining on your team), but will generally not be a key ability because healing bruska isn't especially relevant most of the time.

Bruska primarily serves as a relatively effective stunbot, having two seperate abilities that stun using different colours. Stuns will always be valuable and so Bruska should find her way into a lot of teams by virtue of having a lot of them. She's also a noteable form of counterplays to archetypes that i suspect players might find frustrating, especially new players, and thus serves an important niche as a beginner character.