Planning and Concept creation
For this project I wanted to create a puzzle game disguised as a turn-based combat game, to achieve this I wanted to use the strategy mechanics that turn base combats use to create the puzzle of defeating the boss.
By this I refer to use mechanics such as status effects, elemental type damage, critical hits, chances to miss, etc... all this will be used to create a puzzle in which the player must defeat the boss, for this the player will have to fully understand three key things.
What can he do, what can the enemy do and what causes what.
This is heavily inspired by JRPG style games such as Earthbound, Pokemon and the Final Fantasy Franchise, I decided to make the setting be Euskadi and adding elements their folklore into a more traditional fantasy setting.
Production
For this project I did quickly create a design for the main concept, however I did severely struggle to make the gameplay of a turn base combat work as intended, mainly in the coding side, despite consulting others or the internet, I struggled to make the code work as intended and I kept getting issues that made a crucial part of the mechanic not work.
I was short on time, and I could not rework the mechanics with the current issue, instead I attempted to create a version of the game that least worked as a sandbox to display the intended mechanics.
For the assets and the presentation of the game I decided to use simple sprites and models with various effects and sounds and a simple background environment in 3D.
Making the mechanics of a turn-based combat game was not too difficult, the challenge presented is for the player to figure out the correct order of actions to manage to defeat the boss, I made diagrams with the theory of how the puzzle should work, however I did encounter the issue that once again a mechanic did not seem to be possible to be coded in the way I imagined so I decided to leave it in the sand box version.
Blueprints and Code
Final Thoughts
In the end I could not fully finish the project, whoever, I managed to create the main conceptual mechanic as I envisioned it for the prototype.
The concept is not fully realised to its fullest potential due to a lack of time and my own knowledge of coding, in the future I could also rely in instead changing the mechanics to a degree to better represent the concept but with the assurance that the correct mechanics are detailed in the Game Design Document and other design documents.
Link to game