I teased this a few months back, but now, it's time I unveiled what I've been working on! This skill point system is all eventing, and this is just a tech build of it. The Icons are essentially placeholders, and the only finished skill tree is Dustys sword skill.
Mechanic wise, all party members gain a skill point every two levels, (with the exception of one character, who gains two every four levels) and all skills cost 1 point each, and every skill tree has four skills, which you will gain in a fixed order. I will change this with future criticism, and suggestions.
The inner workings of this consist of variables, switches, and conditional branches. I'll go further into the mechanics of this in another post if I decide to. But what do you think? One skill point every two levels? Any suggestions? The inner workings of this system is a very coherent mess, and changes require changing, and adding other things.
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Aaron N.
Nice! I'm impressed that this was all done by eventing. That's a lot of thought put into a system… I always tend to do the most uninteresting things. Y'all are innovative as hell here on GDU.
I was thinking about it as I was watching, since I was thinking that if someone had accumulated a lot of skill points and wanted to use them all at once: is there a way to use multiple points on one character at a time? But that might be kind of complicated, and it doesn't seem like you'll get those skill points too quickly, so that's not a big concern.
I'd like to be able to pick up some skill points by doing quests and stuff, though, not just by going up levels. Picking them up from defeated bosses? Stuff like that? Change it up a bit so that the player has incentive to go and do side-quests and really explore the world. But then again, you should keep the skill point supply limited so as to not throw too many skills in there…
You should keep track of how useful each skill is, too. There isn't too much incentive for a player to earn more points or use them if you don't build up with the power of the skills bit by bit. I'm not interested in having 10 skills for one character if all I'm ever going to want to use is that one really kickass, powerful move. Though I'm sure you know all this already 😛 Feh. Just writing what I think!
Also, excuse my lack of game terminology — but when you say every skill tree has four skills, does that mean the members of your parties can only gain four skills each? Or can they have multiple "skill trees"? sorry if this like super obvious, lol
Christopher [REDACTED]
Thank you so much! As for your question:
Every party member has four skill trees, and they can learn every skill from every tree.
So say: Dusty has two skill points. He can either use two of them to gain two sword skills (which would be cross cut, and two step slash). But if he wants to play it smart, and maybe increase his dexterity to critcal hit more, (which might be OP along with his last leadership skill: Critical Acclaim, but I'll see how it works out in playtest once its fully implemented) or maybe put one into "Swords", and one into leadership, so he knows Cross Cut, and Attaco which increases a party members damage, so he can help Maxwell do more damage.
Hopefully that makes sense, but I plan to balance things out like they did in Dragon Quest 8, where you had a limit to increasing your skill profiency until you reached a certain level, encouraging you to more wisely spend your points.
And that suggestion on side quests giving you skill points is a very good idea. I think maybe I'll make it so later skills cost more points, giving the player a reason to do side quests.
Bruno
That's cool, this could add a lot of variation on the difficulty depending on where you spend your skill points, you should also make some of these skills be the weakness of some bosses.