Skillz!

Phew! Just finished up with the majority of the player skills. There will be over 200 once everything is done. Next up is going to be working on the AI for enemies you face in battle. I want to set up a ProLog style infrastructure. This would do three things: 1) It would allow all enemies to draw from a single set of rules. This would help improve performance by limiting the amount of objects every enemy needs. 2) The single set would allow for easy creation of new enemies. 3) I think it'd be really cool.

I've gone over to Touch Arcade and asked for people's input on what they would like to see from enemies in an RPG. What I would like to do is take people's suggestions, interpret them into prolog-esque rules and then build the enemy AI to interpret those rules. Hopefully this will make the battles feel much more dynamic than the repetitive attack spams that a lot of party-based RPGs are (still love 'em though).

As I continue to build the battle system and reading people's thoughts on random encounters and grinding, I become more and more convinced that the way to go will be to have fewer battles that are longer and more engaging. To be honest, I'm not sure why more games haven't gone this route. Having longer and more engaging battles just ups the importance of good AI.

After reading tons of forums and playing researching as many iPhone RPGs as possible, I think one of our main goals has to be to eliminate grinding from the balance to TEoR as much as possible. I'm not sure how simple that will be, but I think having good AI is a good place to start, since then you're not dependent on a player's party simply being able to survive an attack every five seconds.

I look to have more on the AI and battle in general towards the end of the week.

  -Lazer