An idea I’ve got for increasing replay value in Epic Battle Fantasy 5 is hiding equipment and maybe some other stuff in semi-random locations.
For example, when approaching a boss that’s weak against fire, you’ll find a treasure chest with a randomized fire weapon inside. You don’t know which player the weapon will be for, so in each playthrough you may need to use a different player as your main attacker for the boss fight. This seems like a good way of making players use weapons they might never otherwise use.
I think in Newgame+ I’ll have to take all of your equips away and reshuffle them to take full advantage of this (though they will keep their levels).
I might do something similar with enemies – where the weaker enemies in battles are swapped with similar enemies on some playthroughs.
I’m not working on this yet, but something I have in mind for Epic Battle Fantasy 5 is dungeons that are seperate areas from the main world map, and contain optional content. (much like Battle Mountain in EBF4)
Dungeons could be caves, buildings, and other hidden areas. Foes in them would always be at the same level as your party, and they would not give any experience, but you could keep loot as normal.
This format is convenient because:
It’s a good way of locking away premium content. The free version is still a complete game, but there’s extra dungeons for the full version.
Dungeons can be played at any time. You can try to beat them as soon as you find them, or come back to them later. Either works.
I can later make more dungeons or add rooms to them easily. I can’t really do this with the normal world map since it’s stuck to a fixed size and layout.
Dungeons can be very hard. You don’t have to beat them all.
It’s a tidy way of doing achievements/progress reports. For example, you can get a little notification when you collect all of the treasure chests in a dungeon.
Towns will feel less cluttered because the interiors of houses are seperate maps.
But yeah, it’s basically Battle Mountain but split into tiny little parts, hidden all over the place. I’m looking forward to hiding some really bizarre dungeons for people to find.
Hey guys, me and Ronja spent the last 5 days in Birmingham for the EGX expo, which is a huge games marketing event thing. It was our first time in the city, and we really liked it – it feels like a cheaper version of London I guess.
While there we spent a lot of time with Jimp and Jay from Massive Monster/Armor Games. They were showing off their games and made this video which I guess sums up the experience:
Massive Monster are working on The Adventure Pals and Never Give Up, both games that I’m personally interested in playing later on Steam – the earlier Flash versions were already a lot of fun.
Yooka-Laylee was a big thing there, but we didn’t want to wait an hour to play it, so we only watched others. It really does look like a modern Banjo Kazooie, which is all I want from it. <3
Snake Pass was another major indie game, and one that we got a chance to play. It’s a platformer with bizarre snake physics, and looks very similar to Yooka-Laylee visually. Very interested in this one.
Other interesting indie games we saw included BrawlOut, ForgottOn Anne, Dead-Cells, Overcooked, Y2K: A Postmodern RPG, She Remembered Caterpillars, VA-11 HALL-A and Black and White Bushido. All of these will be going on my “play later” list.
We weren’t very interested in the AAA stuff, especially since the queues were huge. There was also a retro-game section, some talks, cosplay shows, merch sales and gaming competitions. Tons of stuff to do, but we spent most of it in the indie games section, chatting to devs as well as looking for obscure games.
Besides EGX, we also saw a bit of Birmingham: The library is super impressive. We saw a bit of Kaleidoscope Man being filmed (crowds were running while tanks “fired”). We got tasty Indian Burritos from a place called Wrapchic.
And we had an awesome night out with a big group of the indie devs! I felt like a bit of an imposter since I wasn’t showing my games at EGX though, and Ronja’s… not really in the industry at all. Maybe someday.
