since the last update ive either been sleeping or reviewing games, so much that ive not done a whole lot of work on my game. so what have i done on my game?

i realized 3rd card in that my system of dieing needed to be reworked. as it stood for two cards you could just die and be rehealed with full hp/mp and all status ailments cured. as wondrous as this maybe, it doesnt work well with balancing and can force the very kind of gameover i did not wish to create (during event battles if you wernt properly leveled then youd never be able to continue). as restarting the game is something i really wanted to avoid, and even wanting to give the player a better edge through a recovery type of system, i decided on a new system.

from the 3rd card onward you will receive penalties from death like you would in bof3. as i cant govern what happens in battle, rather then having each person who died lose a set amount of max hp, your party will receive a set amount of max hp loss (15 hp per death, per char).

of course after a while the system would break as you cant go below 1 hp and recovering the lost hp would net you additional hp. to fix this i made it so that when you use the recovery system (dieing) more then 3 times, any battle you do thereafter will result in a game over.

now that you have a hp reducing death, how do you recover it? simple, you can either buy back the hp at a designated spot, or if youve prayed at 5 or more athena shrines then you can access it through those. ive controlled it so you cant get any more hp then what you started with.

in the future the amount to pay to recover will rise, and perhaps a more advanced system will need to be implemented when you're able to choose a different party (perhaps i will make every char be deducted rather then singly). for now i rather like this change though i really should of focused my energy on creating more of the game and less of the features. i can even add a wonder essence type item like in alundra.

Hmm, I kept mine simple and fun-loving. If one or more of your guys are defeated during any battle, they're auto-revived with 1 Hp after you win the battle. Only way to get a "game over" is to lose everyone. So players who aren't into the whole strategy thing can easily get by without having to spend money or go somewhere special to get defeated party members back. For players like me, the challenge is to beat it without losing anyone just for the heck of it.

rpg make 1 does this automatically which is nice. i only wish revive items gave more then 1hp.

Hmm, I can understand penalizing the player for losing, but I'm not sure about this. If your next attempt at a boss fight has you with less max HP than before, then wouldn't that lessen the player's chances of winning? I think, actually, console RPGs had had death penalties figured out since the beginning: cut away a large portion of the players' money and send them back to the save point.

my game works differently then traditional rpgs. very rarely do i have a boss battle after a long dungeon. boss battles are more about event timing then a final challenge to finishing off a dungeon. that being said, my game is easy as far as battles go and this holds true for boss battles. the focus is on the story and character development, the battles are there to add an edge.

i can see how hp would impact the player yet i found it palpable in bof3 to lose a few hps upon death. though my hp loss is a bit more severe then bof3's, the very unlikely hood of dieing to begin with should balance it out.

but you could be right in some different ways. since battles is not my focus then i should be directing my energy away from them and to the story. a big revive system like this may not be the best choice for my game. maybe then id stick to kicking the player out and dropping some gps out of his pockets.

said system is now axed. my fellow magonians opinions where quite right in this regard so ive removed the system in favor of the latter.