So my game TORRE started from the idea of this other Fire Emblemy game. The idea was to experiment with attacks that wouldn’t use Hit Chance, since people tend to complain about it

Play DICE EMBLEM here: https://calixjumio.itch.io/dice-emblem

The idea was to have attacks always do something. If your attack misses your next attack is boosted, if its dodged or blocked you chirp away the enemy defenses, everything would give you some sort of progress. HOWEVER that didn’t gave much play. You would always hope for that direct hit, or for the enemy to roll bad, or even if your unit got empowered attacks you would think “why couldn’t I got two good rolls instead?”

The fancy mechanic of spawning things was something that came out of nowhere, but I’m super ready to bring it back if I make a bigger game, but i’m not gonna talk about that mechanic specifically.

So for TORRE, I wanted the different kinds of damage to have meaning. Meaning that an attack that removes a boot wouldn’t be immediately inferior to an attack that removes a shield. I did so by adding effects to the Boots and Shields.

Boots can now be spent to move more, meaning you can rush to your opponent leaving you slightly unprotected, you wont be able to dodge attacks if you run forward.

And shields now consume energy, same coing used to attack. Meaning you would get tired faster if you keep attacking. You won’t be able to defend and attack without exhausting yourself and leaving you open.[1]

The other issue I had was that at the beginning characters had 3 or more outcomes for their dice, like a weak attack to dealing double damage. But in practice that meant too many possibilities. In a 1v1, if both had either hit or miss, that means there’s 4 results… now multiply that for every other attack you can perform and the planning and strategy dies.

For that I removed entirely the idea of having a dice to roll and made the attack certain, your archer attacks can be dodged and shielded, your wizard attacks cannot. “But that removes randomness, didn’t you want to, like, check that shit out?” yes!, but I discovered the AI was enough hidden information to have the random element to it, yes it didn’t actually had any RND calls, but as a player you still wouldn’t know.

Added to that, and this was unexpected, I added the LUCK mechanic in a slightly different manner: it gives you a bonus, and triggers when you need it, but it has a chance to show up. LUCK is a stat that is hard to acquire, meaning you might get one lucky unit per run. But it’s variability is enough to have it be the extra randomness needed. You dont get to choose which benefit its gonna give you since it could block an attack or refresh your energy, you just have to plan ahead in case it triggers.

There’s so much stuff I discovered with these two games, and I’m super excited to try and match the different things and learnings from them.

Thanks so much for reading!

[1]Now that I think about it I might make attacks only boots and shields, but naming them weak and strong attacks, I could try and make that change in TORRE, if you are interested please comment below and let me know!