Hello! I am thinking of creating a text choice game myself and I’m having a little trouble figuring out one part. One of the fun things of a game is whaaaat? Combat. …Which is actually surprisingly hard to fit into a text based game and make it still flow with the story as well as make it fun and fair. My question is, what do you think are the best ways of going about combat in a text game? Set it up on previous choices you’ve made in the game on your strength, agility, etc and use it as such tactfully with the choices you are given in the scene, much like the combat style in Choice of Broadsides. OR there is the lovely turn-base style of combat where you throw a punch, hope to DEAR GOD IT HITS OR THAT BIG MONSTER IS GONNA GO MORTAL KOMBAT ON YOU AND THE FATALITY IS NOT PRETTY …Ahem, much like it is used in the game Zombies! (a very fun game you can beta test on this forum, please do so, it is awesome) and a few other text games I’ve played. But with that it does feel you are relying on the roll of a dice for your hits to land. That would also lead to a leveling up system, but the problem with that is you loose the sense of story. You’ll spend most of the time grinding on lower level monsters until you can go to the final big boss, poke it in the eye and utterly obliterate it with your strength. Yay for the player, but dear lord the writer did not spend hours if not days on typing up text for the final battle to end like that.
In a nutshell for the people that took one look at this and went TL;DR, what is your most favored combat style in a text game or other ways you know that I did not list?
make it like choice of broadsides; the fact that you can choose your type of attack was very beneficial, especially as you can put in things like breach their hull, or fire cannons, or board ships, but you need to have some sort of variation. e.g. make combat choices, so you can go “attack aggressively” which could be good or bad, depending on your skill, then attacking them in turn-based combat…?
Just make sure the combat isn’t too long, or you get a lot of clicking, hoping to end it sooner. Also, another problem of turn-based fighting choose-your-story games is that you cannot backtrack, and can only heal when the gamemaker says you can. So when you’ve gone through one particularly bad fight, you cannot stop, retreat, and heal before starting again; you have to die. I hate that.
A style I’ve wanted to see: you start out with just a basic move, and then your masters/enemies teach you new ones as the story progresses, developing a combat system, combos, etc. This would work with martial arts or hand weapons. A sword fighting example: you start only knowing how to slash, but later are taught to thrust, parry, block, dodge, riposte, combine moves, and so on. Each move has a speed and a damage. So a thrust is very quick, does little damage (until you learn how to target areas, perhaps), but can open for other moves. A slash deals a lot of damage, but your opponent has to be slow or already off balance for you to land it correctly (and could put you off balance if you flub it). You have to guess what your opponent will do next, take some risks, and use everything to your advantage. Opponents could have unique patterns and special moves to learn and exploit, and they wouldn’t be that hard to program (still more than you wanted, maybe), for example, whenever you are off balance, Vlad always attacks with a big slash or special move (random between the two), which you can dodge.
I am working on a system for wizards. As they progress in level the spell list grows. As for the other classes in ths stoey the player will pick up better armor and weapons, which in turn improves their stats.
