So right now I’m planning out the ideas for a game and I need some ideas.
The game I’m working on it a high-stakes fantasy combat game.
I have 3 kinds of (things) you can use.
Items. Items are stored in your backpack in a limited quantity and must be dragged to your hotbar to be used. Your hotbar consists of only 5 slots, and opening your inventory leaves you extremely vulnerable for a short duration of time.
Magic. Once you learn magic, you are able to cast spells by using a “tool” bound to it’s own set keybind. Pressing the tilde key will make your character put away whatever they were holding, and make their hands start to glow. They can then proceed to enter in keys (q e r t f) in a specific sequence to queue up a spell, then click to use it. This mean a fireball spell may require qqet click to be fired off. Very arcade-y spellcasting.
Skills. This is where I need ideas.
Skills cannot simply be tools due to the nature of the limited hotbar, nor can they be bound to each individual key on your keyboard (mobile support). I need some sort of system that is able to accommodate a large variety of skills without needing to overcomplicate their uses. Things I’ve considered:
Alternate hotbar. Pressing shift could swap out your hotbar from items to skills, where upon pressing the number keys will select the skill. I’ve been told by friends that this might be a little annoying to do.
Making it a combination of defined keys. Such as holding shift with a sword out making you block, clicking whilst blocking making you do a pommel strike. I do not believe this would work well due to the extremely limiting amount of skills that can work like this.
Radial menu. May work, but would probably be very hard to use on mobile, along with making you move your camera accidentally.
I can provide more context on the variety of skills, if needed. If you have an idea for how to make skills work whilst still being mobile-friendly, please let me know!
Personally, I would probably just not make 5 magic spells, 5 items and the skill since that would be a ton of abilities to use; it would probably be extremely hard to learn and confusing to new players. Instead, I recommend you decrease the amount of abilities - for example 2 spells and 2 skills. This would be a lot less confusing and more intuitive and would let you just bind them all to keys.
Speaking of items, I’m not sure how your purchase system is going to work but be careful to avoid “drugging” (nothing to do with drugs), it’s basically people using lots of these items during combat resulting in potential unfair or pay 2 win encounters.
Make sure that the combat is intuitive - players shouldn’t suddenly get surprised by their enemy suddenly healing themselves back to full health or teleporting away and killing them from behind. This can result in your game having terrible new player experience and being generally unfun.
Spells aren’t bound to individual buttons, they’re casted via a combo of input for each individual spells, much like arcade game combos. Nor will you start off with 5 spells, you’ll at most be able to make good use of 6 consecutive spells before you completely run out of mana. It will be a learning curve, but deliberately so.
What purchasing system? I don’t intend to let people use robux to get items…
Finally I don’t really see how this helps with my original question; I asked how skills should be used, not their quantity…
Edit: A better way to put it instead of “used” would be to select a skill, much like an item skill in say rogue lineage
Spells aren’t bound to individual buttons, they’re casted via a combo of input for each individual spells, much like arcade game combos. Nor will you start off with 5 spells, you’ll at most be able to make good use of 6 consecutive spells before you completely run out of mana. It will be a learning curve, but deliberately so.
Alright, though you should probably make it less crucial to use 5 different spells at once but rather combinations of 2-3. It will make your game definitely more fun for newer players.
What purchasing system? I don’t intend to let people use robux to get items…
Can you please give me a bit more information of how the items are going to be acquired?
Finally I don’t really see how this helps with my original question; I asked how skills should be used, not their quantity…
My suggeston was to make them used with keybinds, same way as spells. Right now I have another suggestion though. Maybe make spells usable by drawing some sort of pattern on screen? Some games did that and that could let you use skills with keybinds instead. This could work if game is third person.
About spell combinations: I’m basing it off of a competitive game on steam, forgot the name of it, where spells are casted like so. I don’t intend spellcasters to be a beginner-friendly class, a wizard who uses magic items would be much easier to get into.
Items are either obtained in chests, crafted if you have the right classes, bought with money gained from selling items/stolen.
That last bit still isn’t relevant to my question, I have a competitive game I’m basing the spellcasting off of already, I’m looking for ways to select skills. Keybinds are gonna be really bad for mobile if you get more than say 2 skills.
It’s a slow & methodical roguelike where getting hit can shave off huge portions of your health. I need skills to be easily accessible so players can easily reply to an attackers own attack. Low level spellcasting is far more utility/support based, instead being used for mobility and follow ups on stunned enemies, whereas high level spellcasters gain the ability to pre-queue spells and use them right away (allows for a more aggressive approach).
Okay, I think I found more or less the best solution for my case.
If you press a number key whilst holding shift (temporary binding as some classes actually use shift), you equip an entire class. Skills and perks as well. You can then mess around with your inventory as much as you’d like; “classes” are not inventory items, but moreso like different modes.
Let me describe it a little bit clearer:
Shift 1 is a knight class, and shift 2 is a thief class.
Pressing shift 1 grants me all the active abilities of a knight. That is, holding shift allows me to block, clicking whilst holding shift allows me to do a pommel strike, and pressing e allows me to select the cleave skill.
Now, pressing shift 2 rebinds my knight’s block ability into a sneak ability. Holding shift allows me to sneak around, my q skill becomes pick-pocketing and my e skill becomes lockpicking.
This is by no means a perfect solution, but I think it fits the bill reasonably well.
EDIT: Passives, unless stated otherwise, also carry over across classes. You mostly just swap out active abilities. An example of a passive that doesn’t carry over is “enraged”, a state a beserker is constantly in as long as they have the class equipped. Or a “punished” class that heavily lowers your damage in exchange for increasing the strength of skills the more hits you land on an enemy.