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KickStarter Chronicle of Ruin

Ironmonk

Augur
Joined
Sep 29, 2014
Messages
463
Location
Mordor
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/954260789/chronicle-of-ruin



Saw about this game on PC gamer, seems interesting.

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Chronicle of Ruin is a real-time tactical Japanese-style RPG. A bit of a mouthful, isn't it? But, with roots in so many games and (sometimes long-neglected) sub-genres, hours upon hours of trying to fit Chronicle of Ruin neatly into a predefined genre has brought me to one conclusion: the usual classifications just fall short.

"RTTJRPG? Is it.. real-time Final Fantasy Tactics?"

Sort of, but the way it plays out is a bit more Fire Emblem-esque...

"So it's a real-time Fire Emblem clone!?"

Rude, but getting warmer. Imagine a Fire Emblem where you commanded your units in real-time, except your units weren't just individuals, but entire squads drawn from a wide range of classes. You then used them to not only complete objectives and engage in strategic traditional turn-based combat across the stage, but also to explore the world in an up close and personal fashion, same as you would in a classic JRPG.

"Oh! So it's like Ogre Battle meets Final Fantasy VI!"

Bingo! Close enough, anyway.

The only problem now is that we live in a world that hasn't had an Ogre Battle game in nearly 20 years. I can't really say "X meets Y!" when you might not know "X", can I? So, without further ado...

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Hello, my name is Andrew Silverman, Chronicle of Ruin's (lone) developer, and I'll be your guide through the game today.

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  • TRPG meets JRPG, with a real-time twist - Experience a unique gameplay fusion of the large-scale army management of a TRPG in with the intimate elements of classic JRPGs, tied together with real-time map control.
  • An Engrossing Narrative - Journey with a cast of memorable, complex characters through a vividly detailed and morally ambiguous world.
  • An Army at Your Command - Lead an army that grows from a handful of unseasoned units to up to 50 veteran fighters.
  • Nearly 40 Character Classes - Shape your army as you see fit by managing your units growth among 28 standard classes and 10 unique hero classes.
  • A New Take on Strategic Turn-based Combat - Battle in a refined version of the classic combat system designed for creating engaging tactical encounters with a focus on class interplay, timing, and intelligent battle management.
  • Dozens of Meticulously Crafted Stages - Adventure through detailed stages that combine the unique characters and compelling stories of JRPGs with the the strategic demands of TRPGs.
  • Deep Character Customization - Customize each of your units so that no two are alike through a wide range of equipment options, hands-on stat growth, and flexible class design.
  • An Expansive Crafting System - Outfit your army yourself by crafting everything from mundane consumables to legendary weapons and armor.
  • Releasing for PC, Mac, and Linux summer 2017
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Nothing escapes the ravages of time. Stone crumbles, metal rusts, people grow old and die. All things end in dust, crushed fine by the turning of the ages. The lone weapon against such an inexorable force is constant vigilance.

But even that can only hope to stave off the inevitable for a while longer.

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Amidst countless generations of unbound war and reckless destruction, peace had always been a distant dream. Twenty years ago, that dream was violently realized when the Traitor King Weyrin unleashed his curse upon the land. In a matter of weeks, the entire kingdom of Galamonde fell under its shadow.

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The remaining great nations of Valessia, Ondora, and Zaragos managed to broker a truce quickly enough to hold the curse at bay, but the land it blighted endures, a festering threat in the heart of the world.

In the ensuing decades, what was once open warfare has devolved into restrained hostility, as the powers that be struggle to hold themselves together under constant threat of outbreak, uprising, and the inevitable resurgence of total war.

In Chronicle of Ruin, vigilance is the distant memory of a world unknowingly on the brink of its end. Centuries of chaos and strife have hastened it to this decisive moment, wherein one final push against its cracked foundation will send it all plummeting into the abyss.

Your view over the precipice and into the blackness beyond is seen through the eyes of your party members, a diverse group of characters from all corners of the world, each a fully developed and integral part of the game's tale.

The Influences
'Story' is a hard thing to frame in a game like this without being harmfully reductive or giving everything away, especially when you're trying to keep things to a Kickstarter-appropriate length. Rest assured that more details will come in updates, but for the here and now, I think that the most important thing to convey isn't the precise specifics of what the story is, but how the story feels, and that's best done by talking about its influences.

Stylistically, the game's greatest influence has been the work of Yasumi Matsuno; namely, Ogre Battle, Tactics Ogre, and Final Fantasy Tactics. I have a deep and enduring love for their strong focus on their worlds' overarching high politics and the ways that characters exercise their beliefs and agency within the tide of massive geopolitical turmoil that's turned the world into one big moral morass. Hitting the balance of the political and personal that these games strike so finely is one my my highest aspirations for the story.

Structurally, the narrative's greatest influence is another timeless classic: Final Fantasy VI. Final Fantasy VI's story was one told through the lenses of multiple characters, and it was never afraid to swap them out and move forward through a new viewpoint. That feeling of each character having worth, purpose, and self-contained motivation, of a story with a unifying cause rather than a single obligatory protagonist, is a driving force behind Chronicle of Ruin's narrative and has shaped it on both the macro level of the world story and the micro level of the moment-to-moment interactions the characters have with each other and their surroundings.

This game does begin as the tale of one man's mission, but it quickly escalates into something much greater. This isn't a story that revolves around an individual's quest to fulfill his or her destiny. It's one that focuses on a disparate bunch of people working together through a hostile, unpredictable world, in which there are no promises of easy answers or happy endings.

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Like most TRPGs, Chronicle of Ruin puts you in control of an army, starting with a scant few recruits and growing to eventually encompass up to fifty seasoned veterans. In this game, your units are grouped into squads of five, which you command at three basic levels:

The Tactical Map - In which you control all of your squads in real-time across a stage that illustrates a broad region of the world.

Battles - In which one of your squads faces off against an enemy squad in strategic class-focused turn-based combat.

Garrison Points - In which you assume control of a squad's leader to explore and interact with a location in traditional JRPG style.
 

boot

Prophet
Joined
Dec 20, 2015
Messages
1,016
Location
Bartow, FL
This is the first kickstarter that I'm actually interested in. Sheeit

:takemymoney::takemymoney::takemyjewgold::takemyjewgold: they can have it
 

boot

Prophet
Joined
Dec 20, 2015
Messages
1,016
Location
Bartow, FL
Hello, my name is Andrew Silverman

This is what bothers me the most

but seriously as long as he sticks to the Ogre Battle formula it should be hard to screw this up. I will tell him to add a toggle for the QTEs. I'm sure he'll listen.
 

Abu Antar

Turn-based Poster
Patron
Joined
Jan 19, 2014
Messages
13,514
Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I will add this to my wishlist but will not back. If they manage to release it, I'm willing to pay and play.
 

Jrpgfan

Erudite
Joined
Feb 7, 2016
Messages
2,008
Got to know about this game only now(I don't even remember how lol).

Looked pretty good, actually. It's a shame it didn't get funded.
 

Kaivokz

Arcane
Joined
Feb 10, 2015
Messages
1,499
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=68046.msg1408219#msg1408219


New info:

DEVLOG 1: COMBAT

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An outdated shot, but it'll do for now

Combat. Fightin’ stuff. Swords and sorcery. In Oathborn, combat shares an equal burden with army management as the central components of gameplay. If this game’s going to work at all, the combat really has to grab people. So today, we’re going to talk about how Oathborn achieves that goal.

We’re about to get a little into the weeds here, so if you’d rather watch a video, rest assured that I’ll get a more visual demonstration together soon.

DESIGN GOALS

While Oathborn’s battle system follows the general framework of traditional JRPGs, my overarching goal with the combat has been to make something with strategic depth more akin to an SRPG such as Final Fantasy Tactics. Their combination of class systems, positioning, and environmental elements has always provided me with a richer gameplay experience than traditional JRPGs that, even when they do incorporate some degree of these elements, tend to focus on the patterns and baked-in weaknesses (or gimmicks) of individual enemies

The bullet points below aren’t all-encompassing, but they’re a few of the key ideas that I’ve tried to bear in mind in making a combat system that lives up to those aspirations:

  • Classes have roles, and squads have synergy - When everyone can do everything, differences in classes, characters, and abilities are just window dressing. Every class should feel different and have its own niche (or niches), and the array of units that make up a squad should give each squad a different playstyle, purpose, and win condition in battle.
  • No filler combat - No brainless battles allowed, no grinding encouraged. Every turn you get should be a potential tactical decision, and every fight you fight should shape the next steps you take outside of combat. That being said, difficulty settings are in place to allow you to adjust how forgiving (or unforgiving) you want combat to be.
  • Make every ability useful - Status effects that are actually worth applying! Knights with a Guard skills that you really, truly want to spend a turn on! Varied damage types so you aren’t always just picking the option with the biggest MP-to-Damage ratio! Every skill in the game should be worthy of your consideration.
  • Incorporate Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre-style mechanics - Originally less a design goal than an amorphous “taste” goal, this principle ended up completely shaping the other points by inspiring the systems and opening up the avenues for differentiation in characters and classes that lets units work well together and against each other.

That last point brings us to the first big key component of Oathborn’s combat.

THE ELEMENT SYSTEM AND BONUSES

In Oathborn, there are four elements: Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water.

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(A shocking choice of elements, I know.)

Every class in the game has a variety of skills, and (mostly) every skill is aligned with one of the four elements. At any given time in combat, one of the elements is the dominant, or active, element. If you look back at the screenshot at the top of this devlog, you'll see the fire element at the top of the element bar, indicating it as the dominant element.

Use a skill while it’s associated element is dominant, and that skill gets a bonus. Throughout combat, the dominant element periodically changes. Again, looking at the opening screenshot, you see that the current dominant element is fire, and if combat continues the next will be water, and then earth, and then wind. When the dominant element changes, the strength of all elements levels up, increasing the power of the bonus a skill receives.

Let’s look at the mage’s Fireball skill as an example of how element bonuses increase:

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With Fireball, it’s easy to understand the effect of elements. A little bit of extra damage, a medium amount of extra damage, a ton of extra damage. However, not all skills can simply increase their numbers. Status effects, for instance, have this problem. You can’t double-silence someone. There’s no such thing as double-sleep.

The solution to this issue is to have four specific element bonuses that tend towards certain types of skills:

  • Power: Power skills, like Fireball, receive a linear increase in strength that corresponds with the element level -- +25%, +50%, +75%. Power skills tend to be single-target damage and healing abilities.
  • Wisdom: Wisdom skills have their MP cost reduced by 25%/50%/75%. Wisdom skills tend to be expensive, powerful skills and often affect multiple units.
  • Finesse: Finesse skills reduce a unit’s delay until its next turn by 25%/37.5%/50%. Finesse skills are generally buffs and debuffs.
  • Vitality: Vitality skills restore 20%/35%/50% of a unit’s HP and MP. They’re usually threat-generating/reducing skills and other defensive skills.

The goal here is to provide every skill with strong incentives dependent on circumstances.

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Every skill's icon is formatted according to its element and bonus for easier visual reference. Icon art is super, super WIP

Let’s take a look at this in action, using one of the starting classes, the disciple:

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The disciple has four skills:

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From left to right, Heal, Dispel, Pressure Point, Barrier. Once again, icon art is super WIP

  • Heal - Water, Power - Heals a friendly target for a moderate amount of HP
  • Dispel - Water, Finesse - Removes all negative status effects from a friendly target
  • Pressure Point - Earth, Wisdom - Deals heavy damage to a single enemy target
  • Barrier - Earth, Vitality - Provides a friendly target with Barrier status, reducing magical damage received by 50%.

As you can see, the disciple is built around two elements of the four elements - water and earth. Most classes are structured like this, so that half the time all things are equal among all of the skills, and half the time, you get bonuses to multiple -- but not all -- skills that provide you with an interesting decision to make.

If the dominant element in combat is fire or wind, all things are equal between a disciple's skills and there’s no special incentive to choose one of these skills over the other beyond the circumstances of combat. But what if it’s water or earth?

Water - Heal and Dispel are both water skills, and receive Power and Finesse bonuses, respectively. Heal’s Power bonus is straightforward, and when you need a big heal, it gives a big heal. But what if you need a heal and one of your units has a nasty status effect on them, like silence on a mage or blind on a scout? Which do you choose?

Remember what Dispel’s Finesse bonus does:

  • Finesse: Finesse skills reduce a unit’s delay until its next turn by 25%/37.5%/50%

It’s at this point, you’d want to survey the battlefield. Utilizing the Finesse buff often enables you to leapfrog enemies that had their turn most recently. Sometimes, it even lets you leapfrog the entire enemy team, and in effect, get a free turn before they get to act again. Even if you can’t leapfrog all of them, if you can jump some of them in the turn order and have your team take care of the others, you’re getting two turns before any enemy has another opportunity. You could Dispel now and Heal next, with zero risk.

Of course, this all depends on the specific circumstances of combat, which you’ll have to evaluate yourself.

Earth - Pressure Point and Barrier are both earth skills, and receive Wisdom and Vitality bonuses, respectively. Pressure Point is a disciple’s primary offensive weapon, and as a healing class, it’s more expensive to use than offensive skills are for damage-oriented classes. However, with the right build, it can be absolutely devastating, especially against Ruin-aligned targets (more on Ruin soon). Disciples and the classes they rank up into are also the best tanks versus magic damage in the game. Barrier is one of the ways in which they accomplish this.

So, it’s your Disciple’s turn, and the dominant element is earth. What do you do?

Well, if you gotta Heal or Dispel, those are both still options. But now, with earth element up, that previously expensive Pressure Point is a much more attractive choice, especially if there’s a potential Ruin-aligned target like a mage, scout, or ninja. Or maybe it’s just late in the fight (or a series of fights) and you’re low on MP, but thedDominant element changed to earth at just the right moment to make Pressure Point just cheap enough for you to use and save the day. It happens all the time.

Alternatively, maybe that mage is in the back row and you know that you’re not going to do enough damage to kill him before he gets his next spell off, which you’re pretty sure is going to knock out some of your units. Instead of having to choose between healing and applying Barrier, Barrier’s Vitality bonus allows you to do both in a single turn, and potentially save multiple units by casting Barrier on an ally while the Disciple reaps the healing benefits. Vitality skills are an excellent way for tanks in Oathborn to remain healthy and utilize buffs without having to sacrifice their turn or that of their allies.

This is a very narrow range of situations for a single class encompassing two of the four elements. Every one of your squads in Oathborn will have five units of a variety of classes constantly thrown into a much, much greater variety of situations. And while I’m sure that it sounds like a lot, rest assured that it’s easy to get familiarized with in the span of a level, and I’m working hard to make everything as concise and visually digestible as possible.

ALIGNMENT: FAITH, RUIN, AND THE DAY/NIGHT CYCLE

In addition to element-based skills, some classes also have access to alignment-based skills. Alignment is a spectrum in Oathborn, with Faith on one end and Ruin on the other. Along the spectrum, there are five degrees of alignment - Strong Faith, Weak Faith, Neutral, Weak Ruin, and Strong Ruin. Alignment-based skills don’t receive the same bonuses as element-based skills. Instead, they receive bonuses when used by a unit of corresponding alignment, at their preferred time in the day/night cycle, and against units of the opposing alignment.

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The alignments of Oathborn's six standard starting classes

Take, for example, the valkyrie. The standard valkyrie is a Weak Faith class, and one of her skills is a Faith ability called Faith Bolt. In a vacuum, Faith Bolt does a moderate amount of damage. However, because the valkyrie is a Weak Faith class, it gets a small damage bonus when she uses it. If she uses it during the day, it gets another damage bonus. If she uses it against a Ruin-aligned character, it gets another damage bonus - smaller if the target is Weak Ruin, larger if the target is Strong Ruin. Similarly, while the standard valkyrie is a Weak Faith class, there are ways in the game to modify alignment, and if you worked her into a Strong Faith class, the Faith Bolt would get even more damage. This would come at the cost of her being more vulnerable to Ruin-based attacks.

The advantage of alignment-based skills over element-based skills is that they don’t require the elements to power up to levels 2 and 3 to reach their maximum potential. The second you get into combat, that Faith Bolt is going to be as powerful as it’s going to be. Or as weak as it’s going to be, if it’s at the wrong time of day and without any good targets.

Grouping units with strong Faith or Ruin capabilities together can make powerful teams for wiping out enemy squads of the opposite alignment, so long as you’re careful about the time of day. On the other hand, having a squad of mixed Weak/Neutral alignments can make it so they’ll be ready to fight no matter the time or opposition.

THE THREAT SYSTEM, FORMATION BUFFS, AND VICTORY BONUSES

… Are just some of the things I’m going to talk about in the next combat devlog. Writing this, I can see that it’s already sprawled out quite a bit more than I had originally intended, so I figure it’s a better idea to get your feedback on what’s here rather than jamming in even more to overwhelm.

(Plus, I meant to get this up last night, and as I’m writing this, I still don’t have the art I wanted for it together)

Besides combat devlogs, other subjects in the barrel are unit customization, class details, story and worldbuilding, character profiles, and more. Between these larger “official” devlogs, I’ll also be updating here with smaller, less structured updates on specific progress that I’m making with the game.

Thanks for making it to the bottom, and please, please feel free to give me whatever feedback you want on the devlog, whether that’s about the systems I talked about today or the format of the devlog itself. You can let me know here, on Twitter at @ruinousa, through Kickstarter, or email me directly at ruinousa at gmail.com, which you can also find on the website, oathborngame.com

Till next time
 

Kaivokz

Arcane
Joined
Feb 10, 2015
Messages
1,499

Pixel art still looking beautiful.

Can some mod change the name of this thread to the new name? Oathborn: The Chronicle of Ruin
 

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