Most recent update September 29:
Loot Pursuit is a lighthearted, humorous simultaneous turn-based RPG with a battle system sort of similar to Grandia where you can mess with your opponent's actions and has an environment inspired by Zelda and Mario that has a strong influence in the battles.
It's a little difficult to explain, so I've got some gifs! The game is still very early in development so I haven't nailed down all the mechanics yet, but this is some of what I've got so far:
One click to attack
Dash attack to hit the enemy harder and further
Hit enemies against walls for extra damage
Instead of only having stats determine the outcome of an incoming attack...
...players have multiple options, such as hitting the enemy first...
...dodging to put the enemy in a position where it can be hit against a wall...
...or one character can protect the other.
Spin attack to hit multiple enemies
Not so good against singular opponents...
...unless...
Traps can hit enemies too! Use them to your advantage!
The design philosophy is this: I love turn-based battle systems, but think there's a lot of untapped potential. Strategy RPGs add unit location and attack range to the mix, but I don't think they go far enough. It seems like all the innovations developers make aren't what I want in such a system... so I'm making it myself.
I'm trying to make the abilities have multiple uses and strategic benefits in different situations. Using a spin attack next to a wall is just the beginning.
It's designed to be a small game so I don't get in over my head with more than I can manage. It's got plenty of potential for sequels or using the battle engine in another game with different characters if I want to do more with it.
I actually got a previous version of this game about 90% complete a while ago, but it was very different and was the first game I ever tried to make, so I made two main mistakes with it - the first is it was too complex for a first game and my code became utterly unmanageable so eventually everything I fixed broke something else. The second was that there wasn't enough variety to the gameplay. When I attempted to make Shards as a video game I tried to fix both those problems, but I went too far in the other direction while designing it, and the gameplay turned out to be too technical to be fun.
With Loot Pursuit version 2, I'm solving that problem by this time not trying to make such an accurate simulation of battle, and instead am building upon tried and true game mechanics.
One of the big factors in my decision to redesign Loot Pursuit rather than use a different setting is that I already have most of the character sprites needed for it, which means a lot less hand usage will be required for the graphics (my hands are injured, so having most of the character animations already made helps a lot).
Injured hands? How am I making this then? Aside from the graphics, about 99.9% of the work has been done with a head tracker. It's too clumsy to draw with, but I can use C2!
The primary target platform is PC and it's intended to be played with a mouse (or head tracker like mine), but I hope to be able to put it on mobile and maybe Xbox one if I can figure out how to get it to play well with a controller instead of a mouse or touchscreen (the interface in the screenshot is an early version of the mobile design, I haven't decided the best way for the PC UI to work yet). I'd like to put it on mac and linux, but they depend on the state of nw.js which will hopefully have its kinks ironed out by then.
Something I've also learned is that even if something seems like it would be fun to play in your head, it can be different than imagined when made real. Because of that, I am currently committing only to a prototype to find out how it plays. If it's fun, then I'll keep working on it.