Back at it again with another devlog, this time about some new additions to combat that were revealed last week. Going to actually cover them more in-depth this time.

If you want to find an archive of previous RED: Shadow Maggots update posts from my Twitter page, you can find them here.

The attached video is hosted on my channel, but its unlisted since it’s too shitty to show the entire world, especially without context. Maybe I’ll get rid of this text format and just put together an actual development video log every two weeks or something. This text wall will have to do for now though.

The battle systems in RED: Shadow Maggots are largely inspired by the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi games. Both have very responsive turn-based combat, especially during the battle animations! The player is given ample opportunity to make various inputs (quick-time events I guess) during attack/defend sequences to influence the impact of the attack.

Defense System Changes

The first big change to combat in RED: Shadow Maggots is the replacement of the quick-time meter used when blocking enemy attacks. Tapping the screen when a bar fills up to the red zone is nice and all, but it’s probably a lot more engaging to stare at the attacking enemy in anticipation of the movement they slap you.

To properly block an enemy attack, you must now press the screen right before damage is dealt. You only get one attempt at blocking for each attack, so if you block too early then you get hit for the full damage amount, same if you miss the block timing completely. However, if you manage to block within the perfect block window, then you mitigate some of the damage you would have received!

There will be various effects and mechanisms in RED: Shadow Maggots that increase/decrease the perfect block window (and maybe even apply additional effects when Perfect Blocks are successfully performed) but right now, the length of the perfect block is about 0.15 seconds. For comparison, the timing for a parry (similar mechanic to Perfect Block) in Dark Souls 3 is 0.13 seconds.

I did want to keep the bars since they can help people who have slower reaction times, but they do divide your attention on the screen and I couldn’t figure out a way for people to look at a dynamically changing perfect block bar indicator while also staring at the enemy attack.

Charge Meter

The next big improvement to the game is the addition of the enemy charge bar. Every few attacks an enemy makes is guaranteed to be a Super Critical attack, dealing a large amount of damage. The charge bar acts as an indicator of how close the enemy is to unleash such a blow. The goal of having this system is to give you (the player) one more reason to think about which enemy to attack first, especially in battles where every enemy is equally dangerous to you.

This system is also in place to give enemies a chance to land a critical hit on you in the first place, because random crits don’t actually exist for enemies. I personally don’t like random crits as a mechanic since you can’t prepare for them and they never make the game more fun when they come at you, especially when your opponent is an AI.

Battle Line

Suppose you had a situation where multiple enemies were going to land a Super Critical hit on you in the next turn and you had no idea which one. It’s times like these where I take a gamble and begin save-scumming (turning the game off and relaunching every time the dice don’t roll in my favor) to get the best possible outcome. Of course, save-scumming isn’t fun, but it’s also not fun when I’m put into this scenario in the first place.

To solve for this scenario, the Battle Line was added. It’s basically a line drawn from the enemy to your player character to indicate which enemy is going to attack which of your characters. I thought about the addition of this mechanic for a long time since it breaks traditional turn-based RPG norms of not revealing the enemy’s next move. The only other game I’ve seen this mechanic used (the same game that inspired this mechanic in the first place) is Monster Hunter Stories.

Whether or not the addition of this mechanic makes the game too easy will just have to be seen through playtesting. However, the rest of the game will be balanced around the idea that you know the enemy’s attack target.

That’s All Appreciate you slogging through that massive wall of text, might have to bunker down to work on animating some characters. Sometimes I skip a week or two (or three) if I need more time to put out a progress update. Radio silence shouldn’t be anything new to TF2 fans though haha…