Game Projects

Basic Stuff

Text-based

Pure magic-based combat.

Magic System

Different magical moves are grouped together by color -- white magic is what you expect for example.

Spells cost some amount of some type of Mana (usually 1, though more powerful ones will cost more). This can either pull from your personal pool or things in the environment, and once used up it doesn't regenerate (though it can be built up by other magic).

Spells are crafted via a simplex PGCS of Essences, which are scattered around as the prize for beating a gauntlet of enemies. Your Mana and environment Mana regenerates between battles in a gauntlet but your health does not. Beating all the enemies in there will give you the essence.

You can create whichever spell you want, provided you have the Essences for its construction.

Beating enemies will also give you XP, which when you level up will allow you to add additional personal Mana slots of whatever color you desire, health, or personal Enchantment slots -- basically spells that target you can hit one of the slots and be permanent. Unless disenchanted of course.

World

The world is a grid of regions which form smaller grids. You start in one of them randomly. There are no barriers to moving around, however if you die, you restart at the central Nexus (the centerpoint of that starting grid).

Each region has its own Nexus somewhere. It's guarded. Once unlocked you can transport there from any other Nexus, and vice-versa.

Regions are based on magic color combinations, and all combinations are represented. Whatever map procedurally generates like this (it's just a simple spiral pattern) wraps back into itself in all directions.

Each color has one essence associated with it, and so a white region will only contain white essences while a white+red region will contain a spread of both.

Map Revisited

Given the magic system, there's 255 possible regions. The easiest way to handle this is to make a 16x16 grid where all the regions are randomly distributed. As for that missing square, just make void that you won't start out in and that the adjacents just pass through. Maybe something related to an eventual end goal.

Essence distribution can just be a simple modulo function of the 5x5 grid of a region. Nexus location is random and replaces one of the essences.

Mapping

It makes sense that the world is represented as a couple maps and you can move around easily with the arrow keys rather than the more cumbersome text-based way. Battles will probably use a different system as well -- there's a heck of a lot of stuff to keep track of.

Enemy Distribution

Each of the 255 types palettizes 5 enemies as needed.

Regions will pull from whatever enemy types they can -- like white+green+blue can use white enemies, white+blue enemies, all three, etc. Some enemies can potentially never be encountered and that's fine.

Enemy Generation

Enemies are all Chimeras. I'll probably use a similar approach with Caverlasting.

Enemy names are randomly generated according to one of the langs.

Their body parts pull from a palettized list of animal/plant parts, which are chosen from a bigger list by seed. The list of parts is important in the magic system. Each enemy has 2-4 of them.

Their moves are distributed among those parts evenly. Move names are based on the part and also pull from a list of words based on what the move actually does -- An enemy that has a disenchant spell attached to its claw might have "Claw Unchant" or "Dispelling Claw" as the move name; it just depends.

Enemies gain elements according to their colors and these get randomly attached to their magical attacks. They don't necessarily have every possible one -- a red+blue enemy might only have red magical attacks for example.

Parts might take more or less damage when targeted by damage. This affects the enemy HP in different ways. Up to N-1 might also block all damage or even absorb it as health, including overfilling. It's pretty rare but it can happen. Filling out your Bestiary or using Blue spells is essential here.

Physical attacks just deal damage. These have Dodges attached to them as outlined in Caverlasting. Same timed reordered mechanics as well.

Magical attacks have to be avoided in other ways -- probably by using the magic system to your advantage.

Special moves do various things. They aren't elemental but they're a replica of the magic system, except deleterious to you (anti-protection or protection on self, killing off environmental Mana, poisoning you, etc).

Behavior

Enemies have an Intelligence slider.

Each move type has some set of conditions hardcoded in that make that move make sense (like if the player has a protection spell, dispel it). More intelligent enemies will trend towards doing things that make sense, while dumber ones will follow Instinct.

Enemy Instinct gives them a weighted preference for different kinds of moves.

Both Instinct and Intelligence can be adjusted with Orange magic.

I'm not sure how many possible moves an enemy can have. It'll probably be something I'll have to adjust as I go.

Tiers

Harder enemies will be at the end of a Gauntlet or guarding a Nexus. These have:

More health and intelligence

Worse attacks

Parts that block or absorb attacks

Some more Nexus stuff

The Nexus lets you craft only spells that are geared to the region's elements. So like you can't craft white spells on a black+blue Nexus, but you can craft black or blue spells. This introduces some more limits, particularly since Nexus-guardian enemies are harder to deal with.