Hey Blades Princes! Wishing everyone an excellent 2019 so far and hoping that everyone had an enjoyable holiday! To commemorate this new year and development progressing smoothly, here's our first devblog of 2019 to discuss our activities and the main changes being implemented - in particular our relationship and combo systems that made their debut during playtesting between November and December - our current focus.
Influence of Relationship System on Game Play
The relationship system plays a central role in shaping Blade Princes dynamics while simultaneously altering their powers. By building stronger bonds among them, their benefits grow rapidly: when characters work together on missions they gain bonus stats; each level of relationship also brings not just stat bonuses but visual novel events between two characters as well. At maximum relationship levels between two characters you gain access to an ultimate visual novel scene but will also gain the highest possible stat bonus along with powerful item called a Memory which works like a Pact but much stronger!
The relationship system in Blade Princes Academy aims to add another dimension of depth and life-simulation by helping players track their own progression, observe its effects on your decisions about who to team up with or nurture within their relationship dynamics. So far as I can tell, players earn relationship points by participating in missions together with chosen Blade Princes and engaging with dialogue at Academy Hub Park or engaging in dialogue options within Park.
The relationship gauge is divided into levels that you gradually fill over time, providing access to personalized relationship dialogues for every Blade Prince duo you select as bonus stats are awarded upon advancing with them. When your gauge reaches full, you will have the choice between True Friendship or True Love; each option offers you its own powerful Pact depending on which way it was chosen.
Synergies founded upon modifications are at the foundation of combo mechanics.
Combos may seem off topic, but they still connect back to your character in one way or another. Spell combos have seen significant advancement over the last month. Spell combinations rely on synergies among characters; there are 10 alterations available and each Blade Prince can cast three to four of them - these conditions form the basis of any combo! We ensured every character needed another person in order to initiate them successfully.
Specific changes depend upon which characters and attacks you select, with Tactical Pause mode highlighting enemies with combinations that require particular adjustments, while Blade Princes offering combos are highlighted in gold. Successful combo execution triggered visual effects including screen shake and prominent "COMBO" messages to highlight increased damage output by your tactical moves and emphasize increased damage output.
It has taken multiple iterations of this feature for it to become easily and visually understandable when the right conditions were met for initiating a combo with specific characters, spells, and enemies. A visual emphasis feature was necessary and we believe we found one!
On top of that, you may have also noticed that we decided to make the distinctions among damage-dealing spells, healing spells and buff spells more apparent by adding colored filters (red for damage spells; green for healing spells; blue for buff spells and yellow for affliction spells).
Development and Creation of Park
The development of the Park was driven by an increased need for new panels in the Academy Hub following Blade Princes reworks into more distinct heroes, as well as removal of panels such as Recruitment and Cemetery from playback. Suppressing these panels altered character dynamics to an unforeseeable degree, leading to unexpected consequences in game play.
And thus was born ParkDialog! Quickly becoming choice dialogues to facilitate narrative development and give you some options for taking narratively in the narrative realm, we still found one issue when designing its design: we realized that choices at the conclusion of missions weren't working anymore.
Dialogues at the conclusion of missions remained, though less customized due to less unique heroes at that time. While we enjoyed this feature, it no longer fit within the game because originally these dialogues allowed you to build relationship points before Central Park existed.
We have invested extensively in developing the Park, along with its enhanced dialogues, designed for more distinctive heroes and personalities and serving as upgrades of end-of-mission dialogues we had before. They offer personalized, well written dialogue that promotes long term relationships besides missions alone.
As previously discussed, our changes to the system required new ways of developing your characters' relationships outside missions; one such solution was The Park. Furthermore, to maintain narration and dialogue quality we made the choice not to include choice dialogues at mission ends.
UX has also evolved significantly; The Academy Hub now contains two main panels dedicated to relationships:
