@Millenial: That's great, you recognized all the things I was trying to accomplish, so... that feels good! To respond to your ideas...
-Once you equip an item, rather than dragging it back to the item menu, let the player directly drag it to a different characterYeah, this is actually something I was meaning to do and it must have just slipped my mind... thanks for reminding me!
-Let the player use certain skills (such as Heal) outside of battleAnother good idea, I just need to figure out how the most intuitive way to do this.
-While in battle, let clicking on a character with a full time bar switch the active character (in case you want to use a skill a different character has and don't want to attack just yet)Another good idea... I'll try and put this in as well.
-I couldn't remove skills, but I'm guessing that once there's more they'll be exchangeable once you reach the limitYeah, I didn't bother actually coding the unequipping of attacks, part because there's no clear place to put them to unequip, and part because there's really no reason to since attacks just exchange places when you equip them.
-Healthbars for the characters would be nice since I'm so used to using them to tell if my characters are at say 50% health (Not quite sure where you could put them though)I don't think that'll be possible given the space on the screen, I'm already cramming the battle screen corner to corner with all the data I can fit. BUT, I could draw the health text as yellow and then red as it gets lower so there's a bit more visual cue.
@Liveandlearn: It's not that I don't know how, but moving characters like that causes other problems, including draw depth confusion and the necessity of run animations (something which, as I said earlier with attack animations, would be very hard to coordinate). Every single item does in fact have its own sprite, but, the item sprites and shapes and angles aren't made to actually be drawn on the characters. You can see the equipped items in the HUD, but otherwise no.
EDIT: @Titanium, who posted while I was typing...
-Do you have a story yet?
honestly, nothing totally definite yet. I have the characters very clear in my mind, and I have some good ideas on how the game could start off, but I still need to think of the entire story arc...
-The character designs look good and I want to see personality with them. Will there be voice acting.
I've got their personalities down perfectly. There's not going to be any voiceacting, the costs of that far outweigh the benefits.
-How long do you plan on making it.
Depends on the story I come up with. Can't say yet.
-Have you ever done an RPG like this before? (My Guess would be yes. You can't do it this well on your first try.)
One of my first games was an RPG similar to this, though I never finished it.
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Aside from some of the excellent suggestions people are making, I need some help for ideas. I'm in the process of programming the status effects--as of now the last detail to be added before I start really designing the game itself--and I'm not sure what types of effects to use. Here's what I have so far..
POISON - gradually saps health after each attack the character makes.
SCURVY - this is the rarest status effect, it causes the character to be completely immobilized. Their actionbar will no longer refill until the status is cured.
Those I'm pretty confident about, but there still remain BURN, FREEZE and SHOCK, related to fire, ice and electric attacks, respectively. I want to avoid having any two status effects being too similar (or else why even bother making the distinction?) So, does anyone have any ideas what the effects of those 3 status effects could be?
Edited by banov, 17 May 2009 - 10:26 PM.