Project Conceptualization

Hi! Im the system desginer on this game and I wanted to talk a bit about my design process. 

I started off wanting to make a game with systemic and emergent gameplay without suffering from a huge scope. I decided on RPG as a genre, wanting to use the turn based nature and systems reliant gameplay to represent the ideas I wanted in the game mechanically rather than worrying about making everything work organically in real time.

Wanting to have identifiable forces that the player can interact with to execute their plans, I decided to base the game off of an element system. I initially based it off of the chinese element system to have intuitive non-transitive interactions between them.

I initially had the idea of a grid based overworld, thinking of classic OSR hexcrawls. From there you would be able to start combats, pickup items, bait enemies into fighting each other and all that fun. Talking about my project with other people they quickly made me realize that it would probably work better to fuse the overworld and the combat and use tactical RPG combat. My experience in the genre mostly comes form tabletop games so I had to dive into the video game counterparts of this genre.

Simultaneously, I was learning how to play classic board games such as Mancala and Go. They use extremely simple rulesets and yet they have tremendous strategic depth. Inspired by this I sought out to include some of this feeling into my game.

I begun to think that maybe I could use a system where you attack using AoEs that apply elemental effects to groups of tiles. The effects stay, applying a status effect to creatures that stand in those tiles. The only way to remove an effect from a tile would be to use one of the two elements that defeats it.  I came up with my unique set of elements: Fire, Storm, Crystal, Dark, Slime.

Taking advantage of the fact that my game is turn based I decided to make a paper prototype to try out the systems I was putting together. It confirmed I was on the right track as it was certainly fun but it definetly had a lot of holes. I wasn't happy with my elements as a couple of the interactions they had weren't super intuitive (for example, Slime beats Dark because ???) and the effects they currently had were not very balanced. Also, we quickly figured out the fastest ways to deal buttloads of damage, and it got me thinking that I was sort of straying away from my initial goal of having emergent gameplay and having the game be a space for experimentation. TO solve this I needed to rework the game into having objectives other than "Kill all the enemies" to force the player to think more laterally and not fall into the same cycles every combat.

I was thinking of other posibilities of element groups and possible alternative objectives for my game when I thought it'd be interesting to have to defend something from the monsters (I was playing a lot of Into the Breach at the time). I thought maybe it would be interesting to have to defend your village's crops from monsters and then I remembered the concept of crop rotation. The rock-paper-scissors nature of the game kind of reminded me of the cyclical nature of crop rotation, so I thought maybe I could replace the elements in my game with fantastical magic crops. Planting a crop in a tile where a beneficial crop is already planted boosts it into working more effectively. Aesthetically I also found the idea of plant wizards using crops to take out enemies more satisfying. I then cooked up another paper prototype, and the game is shaping up to look pretty fun.