Patchwork Battle - A new Crafting-Sim / RPG currently In Development

[jlach]

Hi everyone,

I had been working on a project called Vilotto which, due to life events, got put on hold (you can read about it here: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=87197). Due to new time constraints I have decided that I would instead work on completing my "other" game idea. So with that said, I'm coming once again to touchArcade to talk about the new game, get some feedback, and generate some discussion around it.

Concept
The concept and design philosophy behind Patchwork Battle is "Build your party". Now, when I say "build your party" I don't mean chose from a predetermined list of 6 characters and go on your marry way. Instead, I quite literally mean build your party (more on this later).

Once you have your party built you then use them to enter the arena and fight wave after wave of baddies. The battle system is your typical Turn Based RPG battle system, utilizing an ATB (Active Time Battle, see here: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/B...ve_Time_Battle) battle system. After each wave of baddies is defeated you can either continue on to the next wave or go back to your lab to upgrade and/or build more mimics.

Build Your Party
So remember when I said "Build your party"? Yeah, let's talk about that because it's a vital part to Patchwork Battle and is, in my opinion, probably the coolest part to boot.

You are in charge of assembling your party of mimics to defeat the endless wave of baddie mimics coming after you. This is done by collecting mimic body parts, hearts, souls, and memories and putting them together to create your mimic. Essentially, instead of crafting your weapons and armor you are crafting your party member. It should be noted that there is no equipment in the game. Everything is tied to the body parts, hearts, souls, memories, and upgrade crystals of the mimic.

Build-A-Mimic
So now that you have a brief introduction, let's get into a little more detail on this. Mimics require a head, a body, 2 arms, 2 legs, and a heart. Each and every body part has some stats attached to it (HP, STR, DEX, etc). The stats for your mimic are determined based on the sum of it's parts (plus any synergy points).

The heart of the mimic determines the mimics base class. There's a lot more to it than that, however. Each body part also has a Class attached to it. The 8 starting classes are: Mage, Sorcerer, Priest, Druid, Warrior, Knight, Rogue, and Archer. Each part also has a class value assigned to it (hearts are assigned a value of 3, body and head are assigned a value of 2, while arms and legs are assigned a value of 1). The higher the class value of a class the stronger that classes skills and bonuses will be.

So looking back at the previous paragraph you may have realized that you can mix and match classes. You're not stuck with having just a Warrior. You can have a Mimic with the heart, head, body, and legs of a Warrior but the arms of a Mage. So you now have a Battlemage, of sorts.

That was a great segue to the next nuance of the "Build-A-Mimic" shop, which is the ability to unlock an additional 8 mimic classes through building mimics. By combining certain classes together within your mimic you may unlock a new class (Example: Warrior + Mage = Battlemage). When you've unlocked a new class you will be informed and you will have to dismantle your mimic, losing all of the parts you used to build it*, in order to collect it's heart. Classes are sublcassed (ie: Battlemage can use parts from Warrior and Mage and get full bonuses from both).

My mimic is souless!
Actually, no he's not... unless you want him to be, that is. Okay, so that was a pretty bad segue. I apologize for that.

As you advance through the waves of baddie mimics you will, without a doubt, find some souls. These souls can be put into your mimics to give them a personality. The personality of your mimic will provide it with bonuses in certain situations. For example, a mimic with a "Courageous Soul" will get a +DEF bonus when put in the front line.

Souls are reusable, meaning you can have the same soul in multiple mimics. If you remove the soul from a mimic it's not lost. In simpler terms - once you find a soul it's forever usable. This is huge because it's opened up the door for a neat nuance to the battle system.

Mimics on your same team who share the same soul will be "Soul Linked". Soul Linked mimics provide bonuses to each other, depending on the soul. For example, two mimics with the "Courageous Soul" may share damage with each other, meaning when one mimic gets attacked it takes some of the damage and the other mimics take some of the damage (i.e: 2 linked mimics will take 50% damage each, 3 will take 33% each, etc).

Amnesia?
Mimics don't have Amnesia, silly! They don't have any memories because you haven't given them any memories, yet. You are in control of them, remember. What they have, or lack, is all up to you.

I have not fleshed out the memory system completely yet but I will say this - Mimics can be given memories which will determine which skills they have available to them. Memories can be unlocked by defeating baddies and/or leveling up current skills.

* I'm not sold on the idea of losing parts yet. Just something I'm tinkering with!

And there you have it, a brief overview of my new current project. As always, please provide as much feedback and ask as many questions as you'd like. The more I can flesh out the above details with suggestions from the community the more I can assure you guys that the game will be what YOU want, not only what I want.

I should note that the initial release of Patchwork Battle will be for the iPad only. I hope to follow the release soon afterwards with an update that makes the game universal. I'm currently targeting a December 1, 2011 release date but hoping I can finish it a little quicker than that!

Many thanks for reading!

[FelixGSTLA]

I really like the idea of the entire party building premise. I just hope there's a large variety of parts available.

A few questions:
-Is this game going to be more of a battle-focused game or a more story-focused one?
-How will battle encounters work in this game? Will the game have a random encounter style battle system, or are you planning a different type of system?
-What kind of graphics are you planning to use for the game?

Anyways, I'm looking forward to seeing how this game turns out!

[jlach]

Originally Posted by FelixGSTLA

I really like the idea of the entire party building premise. I just hope there's a large variety of parts available.

A few questions:
-Is this game going to be more of a battle-focused game or a more story-focused one?
-How will battle encounters work in this game? Will the game have a random encounter style battle system, or are you planning a different type of system?
-What kind of graphics are you planning to use for the game?

Anyways, I'm looking forward to seeing how this game turns out!

Thanks for the reply!

Answering your "I just hope there's a large variety of parts available." comment is a prefect time for me to talk a little more detail about the parts.

But before I get into that I want to talk about "Memories", which were mentioned briefly in my original post. I have decided to scrap the idea of "Memories" and handle skills differently (thanks to a suggestion from my brother). I'll talk about this in the next paragraph or two.

There are a total of 8 parts available for use when building a mimic: Heart, Soul, Head, Body, Arm (x2), and Leg (x2). Each part has a class assigned to it and a set of stats attached to it that's appropriate for that body part and that class. What I mean by that is, a leg with the class of Rogue will have more Dexterity than the head of a Rogue. This makes sense because a Rogue uses it's legs for most of it's movement.

Parts also have skills attached to them. These skills are, once again, appropriate for the body part and the class. The leg of a Rogue may have the skill "Dodge" attached to it because dodging is done with the feet, while the arm of a Mage may have the skill "Fire" attached to it because Fire is cast through the staff being held in that arm. Make sense?

I'm going to sidetrack for a moment and talk a little about skills. Skills are your typical skills you see in every RPG. They do damage, heal, buff, etc. Skills in Patchwork can level up. The more you use the body part that has that skill (ie: the more you use the skill) the stronger that skill (and body part!) gets. Body parts can have multiple skills attached to them. Some skills will require certain conditions to be met before they become usable. For example, "Quick Reflexes" may require the mimic be equipped with two Rogue legs before it becomes usable. Likewise, the spell "Mega Flare" may require 6 Mage parts before it becomes usable.

Now back on topic of parts. Parts have quality not unlike you see in the average RPG - White, Gold, Blue, Purple, Orange. The higher the quality the better the stats on the part.

Part drops are semi-randomly created. The lower quality parts will be randomly generated based on a set of criteria I set. Once you start getting into the Purple and Orange colored parts, those are not randomly generated but instead set by me. I expect to have well into the hundreds (maybe thousands!) of different parts at release. The only challenge to this, for me, is going to be attaching skills. I cannot expect to have hundreds or thousands of different skills, which means each part cannot have a unique skill. Maybe only some parts have skills. Not quite sure on this yet.

So there's a little more detail on the parts. I hope that helped to answer at least some of your concern on the number of available parts to mess with. Now to answer your other questions -

- The game is battle focused (after the building of the mimics, that is). That way it plays out is not all that unlike Battleheart, except turn based. You build your party and enter the arena. From there you fight wave after wave of baddie mimics and collect loot. After each wave you can go back to your lab and tweak your party. You can always start off at the beginning of the wave you left at. Of course you can go back to the previous waves as well. I have not set a limit for the number of waves yet but I expect it to be high, maybe endless. Oh yeah, there will eventually be Multiplayer battles as well. This may not make it into V1.0 but def. V2.0.

- I think the above should have answered your second question as well. If not, let me know and I'll expand on it.

- The graphics will be 2D. I'm working with an artist to finalize the style. What we do know is that each class will have it's own material. Any part with the Rogue class will be made of brown leather, a Knight will be steel, a Wizard red cloth, etc. When you put your mimic together it will look like a patched together thing where nothing matches (assuming you mix and match classes).

I should have a small demo of the Build-A-Mimic to show off the next few weeks

[jlach]

Just wanted to share the first piece of concept art with everyone. What we see here is the Wizard class, built out of cloth.



As I mentioned earlier - the hat, arms, body, and legs (not visible) of this Wizard can be taken off and mixed and matched with the other classes to create some really crazy looking mimics. The other classes will also be made out of materials fitting for that class, i.e: Metal for Warrior, Leather for Rogue, etc.

I hope ya'll enjoy the first concept! Brian McDonaugh did a great job on this! =)

[Bitsandpixeltester]

Originally Posted by jlach

Just wanted to share the first piece of concept art with everyone. What we see here is the Wizard class, built out of cloth.



As I mentioned earlier - the hat, arms, body, and legs (not visible) of this Wizard can be taken off and mixed and matched with the other classes to create some really crazy looking mimics. The other classes will also be made out of materials fitting for that class, i.e: Metal for Warrior, Leather for Rogue, etc.

I hope ya'll enjoy the first concept! Brian McDonaugh did a great job on this! =)

As an art instructor I am in love with this. Keep up the amazing work! I really love how this is developing in front of our eyes. Brian did such a great job portraying texture with vibrant colors. Beautiful!

[jlach]

And now for some more concepts!

Priest, made out of Cloth.


Archer, molded with Leather.


Knight, ready to protect your party in his armor made of.... tin foil! rawr!

[jlach]

And one more.. A taste of what one of YOUR mimics might look like =)

[nao]

This all sounds very cool and I love the concept of deep customization in party building. All there is left is to see it in action. I'm curious to see how the animation (attack / skill casting) would look on these characters made out of materials.

Be sure to add tons of weapons and accessories to further customize the skills of characters, and also make sure the skills provide some kind of a synergy between characters and items. ie. the addictive power of battleheart.

Anyway I wish you the best of luck in this project and hopefully it would look great. And also a Universal app would be good too

Cheers

[jlach]

Originally Posted by nao

This all sounds very cool and I love the concept of deep customization in party building. All there is left is to see it in action. I'm curious to see how the animation (attack / skill casting) would look on these characters made out of materials.

Be sure to add tons of weapons and accessories to further customize the skills of characters, and also make sure the skills provide some kind of a synergy between characters and items. ie. the addictive power of battleheart.

Anyway I wish you the best of luck in this project and hopefully it would look great. And also a Universal app would be good too

Cheers

I'm in the process of building the Build-A-Mimic system. I should have some early rough demos ready in the next few weeks. It's turning out to be really cool.

As for part drops.. I'm not going to get into the loot system I created but I will say that there will be PLENTY of drops. While some parts may not be completely unique there will def. be enough variety.

As for animations, you're going to have to wait and see on that. I have something really neat designed out but I'm not ready to talk about it (or show it) yet. It does, however, play off the strengths of the artwork and really adds to its charm.

Also, thanks for your suggestions and comments! =)

[denlor]

Man ! look great and i love the concept ! If you need beta tester i will be in! I am using an Ipad 2 =)