Star Power by NickMakesGames
In “Star Power,” You play as the leader of a party of three adventurers exploring a goblin filled dungeon
Your party consists of:
EDRIC, THE ORANGE PALADIN who fights with his sword
Edric is also impervious to hammers.
LANA, THE PURPLE ROGUE who fights with her shurikens
Lana is also impevious to arrows
ERIYAL, THE BLUE MAGE who fights with her electric magic.
Eriyal is also impervious to axes.
and YOU, THE SLIGHTLY SLEEP DEPRIVED LD CONTESTANT who fights with ratings.
How does fighting with ratings work? Like this:
At the start of your turn, you may apply ratings to your party and to the enemies they face. When you hit “CONFIRM,” the following things will happen:
-enemies will attack first. They will attack with the weapon that you gave them the highest rating on, because that is the weapon they will feel most confident with. They will deal damage equal to their rating on that weapon. Enemies also target the lowest rated members of your party, because they appear the most vulnerable.
-players will attack second. Players will also target enemies with the lowest total star rating, and deal damage equal to their player rating.
-Finally, enemies will receive bonuses to any weapons that you rated with only one star. Receiving such a low rating makes them self-conscious, and motivates them to train more and increase their skill with that weapon. The bonus gets factored into their damage and their rating with the weapon when choosing how to attack.
Your party consists of:
EDRIC, THE ORANGE PALADIN who fights with his sword
Edric is also impervious to hammers.
LANA, THE PURPLE ROGUE who fights with her shurikens
Lana is also impevious to arrows
ERIYAL, THE BLUE MAGE who fights with her electric magic.
Eriyal is also impervious to axes.
and YOU, THE SLIGHTLY SLEEP DEPRIVED LD CONTESTANT who fights with ratings.
How does fighting with ratings work? Like this:
At the start of your turn, you may apply ratings to your party and to the enemies they face. When you hit “CONFIRM,” the following things will happen:
-enemies will attack first. They will attack with the weapon that you gave them the highest rating on, because that is the weapon they will feel most confident with. They will deal damage equal to their rating on that weapon. Enemies also target the lowest rated members of your party, because they appear the most vulnerable.
-players will attack second. Players will also target enemies with the lowest total star rating, and deal damage equal to their player rating.
-Finally, enemies will receive bonuses to any weapons that you rated with only one star. Receiving such a low rating makes them self-conscious, and motivates them to train more and increase their skill with that weapon. The bonus gets factored into their damage and their rating with the weapon when choosing how to attack.
Ratings
| Coolness | 45% | 1497 |
| Overall | 3.00 | 704 |
| Audio | 2.38 | 679 |
| Fun | 2.78 | 789 |
| Graphics | 2.14 | 1021 |
| Humor | 2.39 | 723 |
| Innovation | 3.70 | 182 |
| Mood | 2.23 | 982 |
| Theme | 3.44 | 470 |
As for graphics, the things that were there were good, but it could have benefited from slightly more sprites. Also, the sound effects were a bit too noisy for me.
Doreen Konbberts remarked on this. I posted a self reminder to me over on DoCo. I'll try to take a whack at it when I have a good chunk of awake hours again!
--TaoPhoenix
Still, it's a cool take on the theme and I really would love to see this idea fleshed out somehow.
Apr 20, 2015 @ 3:00am
I went a few floors in before giving it up. From what I saw, it doesn't seem like there's much room for error. Since you can between rounds totally set everything up it's pretty easy to play perfectly and it just becomes a bit tedious to do the math for it. "
Hi StuffedGravy.
Nick has a tendency to make hard, math-strategy based games. Setting up things in between each round is precisely the point - it's not about real-time attacks. It's whether you can find optimal strategies.
See Undermined from LD29 by the same dev. (Different online handle.)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=29805
I got interested in that one because "playing perfectly" sometimes has a surprising twist strategy! That may apply here.
I haven't yet seen any recovery of health on this game though, so eventually your guys will just get ground down, and it becomes how many floors do you last until you do.
There's also no clear indication of how to "win". So it's a little harder to talk about except "I made it X floors".
Nick, it seems you found a new game dev framework. It might be nice if you ported Undermined over to this with that modular stats file we were talking about and then it would be interesting to see what it takes to make a 5-miner win.
--TaoPhoenix
It's an interesting, original concept. Good difficulty curve. Interface is easy to use.
Two main gripes though:
- First, it's really slow-paced, especially on the later levels. Attack animations being pretty much cosmetic, a skip option would have been great.
- Second, the random stats are a bit too... random; I got a couple levels that were pretty much impossible, while my final try on Level 5 was litterally a freebie. (Then again, that last one is to be expected of randomly generated puzzles...)
Pretty good overall. Good job!
One UI note: It's really handy to have the target reticule on whichever of your character is going to be targeted. By the same token, it would be really handy to highlight the weapon(s) of each opponent that will be used based on the current star assignment. You can currently just find the highest number, but it would be helpful for quick readability to have the weapon icon highlighted in some other way.
I feel like the graphics could have used a little work, but it wasn't too distracting. A tutorial would have been appreciated.
Highly innovative take on Turn-based RPG. Look forward to see more from you!
(Also, hooray for TVGS!)
I think you explained something wrong though. I assumed 'rating' meant the number of stars I gave it, but I think you meant the final value you get after adding the stars with the stats they already have. In that case, the enemies attack with the weapon that does the most damage, not the one that you gave them the best rating on.
Awesome game! I think the main thing that could use improvement is the graphics. It kinda worked in the minimalistic style, but it would be cool if there were better graphics.