I agree with you on the duelist and fighter class designations, they should probably be switched. I like the Sky Whaler as he is though. The design just works for me.
Defender's Quest 2 - Weaselmancer and cast preview
I’m working on a TD game myself using the Haxe port of Richard Lord’s Ash ECS framework. Maybe in future you might want to take a look at the ECS paradigm. Its pretty cool to work with.
Couple a things:
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The “fighter” designation is a placeholder word. Terevan is a crowd-control Slak replacement, designed for chopping up lots of targets at close range. Basically she’s a berserker but we haven’t decided if we like that word or not.
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The “duelist” designation is not supposed to bring a rapier-fencer to mind. The greatsword is intentional. This is a guy who focuses on devastating crippling strikes, focusing on one target at a time. He’s more like Markos from the original game, but not exactly the same.
I am not the best person to talk to about this sort of stuff though, you want James for that (our writer). You’re just hearing things here second-hand from me so I wouldn’t make any final judgments just based on what pops out of my mouth.
- “New Guy” definitely has a backstory and a lot more characterization than we’ve so far revealed, the same goes for all the other characters. If something is confusing, rest assured we’ve got more to show later on.
EDIT: To be sure we do appreciate your feedback and always take it under consideration!
I didn’t mean he looks generic in terms of writing, backstory or characterization, I meant his artstyle.
Alongside all his team mates - and especially compared to the DQ cast - he just looks… eh. Maybe his personality, backstory or something else makes up for the ‘Generic Fighter Dude’ appearance. 
Yeah that’s a fair assessment. Well, this is only a first pass, plenty of time to give more attention to these things before release.
I kinda like the ‘generic’ dude. I suspect that as he levels up his appearance will change in accordance with his skill tree. Looking at the other characters there is a ‘level 1’ type feel to all them…like there is room to grow. I mean look at the fighter’s yellow bandanna…its screaming for a skull and bones insignia (hint hint). And you just know that the Demolish-er is going to be fitted with some high-tech eye-piece once he ramps up.
Speaking of skill trees, do you plan on branching skill trees so as to create multiple specializations per class? Would be great for replay-ability.
So the current design we’re thinking about for skill trees is not totally set in stone. Broad strokes:
We found in the original game that our trees kind of tended towards a few optimal builds with some obvious dump skills and, and the fine granularity of allocating skill points across 36 characters became tedious.
Our mantra is that an interesting choice is made up of options that are:
- different
- balanced
- limited
- clear
So we’re going to be designing the skill trees much more around “okay at this tier do I want skill A or skill B” without any of that affecting/limiting your other choices later on.
So more like this:
And less like this:
So basically, the Bastion (switchable at will at equipment / booze buildings) and Cthulhu Saves The World (permanent) system? I was a fan of that.
A while back you were tinkering around with the idea of tiered upgrades for specific skills, though.
So you could come across skill A, Fireball. Instead of putting 9 points into it, picking Fireball would have opened up 2 new options to put one point into to unlock that improvement. Damage Over Time Fire damage, or Explosion Radius. And maybe two more branches from there, I forget.
Was that system dropped in favor of this one? This new one seems much, much more streamlined. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Less time fiddling around with skills (which I loved doing in DQ, honestly), but also significantly less character customization.
That idea is definitely still on the table. It’s going to come down to playtesting to really figure out what the final answer will be, which will come in once the DQ2 engine is finished and DQ1HD is out the door. I’ll stay in touch as things progress!
I’m probably a bit too old-school for this. I have those bouncy animations associated with flat and boring flash games that use this kind of eye-candy to catch your attention before you start noticing how the gameplay sucks… That’s of course not going to be the case of DQ2, but yet I’d prefer the game to not wiggle around like crazy…
About the skill trees - I actually think that skill trees are a good thing. That is, the “few optimal builds” of the original game are not to be blamed on using a skill tree instead of the tier-ladder. The reason why there were a few optimal builds for each class was more or less simply due to how the various skills worked (or didn’t work).
Now, what was wrong with the original skills? Some were underused because their mechanics was unclear (i.e. swiftness for berzerkers was very hard to compare with other skills…) and some were underused simply because there were crystal-clear better alternatives (i.e. armor pierce on archers would only ever make sense on levels without knights, or knight’s armor break requiring only a few points to work efficiently).
Now, if you introduce tier-based skills, any underdogs will stand out even more, because nobody will ever use them as a prerequisite for something else. And one possible solution for these underdog prerequisites is to introduce skill synergy - that is, making the power of a certain skill depend on its level as well as the strenght of prerequisite skills or points invested in that branch of the skill tree. With tier-based skills that’d seem a bit stranger.
One question is, how many independent skills would you imagine for each class? How many different “builds” would you expect to see for each character?
To be clear, we’re thinking about doing away with pre-requisites entirely. The model being considered is one where skills are a series of atomic A-or-B choices that aren’t dependent on one another.
I know, and it seems to me that it will promote “a few optimal builds” even more, because nobody will even consider the underdogs 
I associate those bouncy animations with Strategy RPGs. Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, Shining Force, all of them.
Traditional Tower Defence (which mostly seem to be flash games) games have characters perfectly immobile until an enemy approaches, which I never liked. So the fact that DQ2 is bringing over a little slice of SRPG animatedness is great to me. Makes all the characters seem alive with their idle animations.
Oh I see what you mean there.
Well, as far as I can tell this kind of boils down to the same thing, right? It’s all about the design of the skills themselves. Either they’re balanced, or they’re not. If they’re not balanced, an underdog skill might still be chosen because you have to cross through it to get to the one you actually do want, but I’m not convinced that’s “better.” Then people are only really using it because they “have” to, and it’s still a dump skill, I would think people find that annoying.
The advantage of the tier-ladder to me is that the choice itself is very clear to the player, do you want this, or that. Things are way less obfuscated and its easy to make one choice at a time, and if anything, more builds should be possible than with the previous system. Synergies will definitely be a consideration and we’ll probably have at least 2 or 3 builds in mind for each character when designing the skills.
Also, if its unbalanced, that will also become very clear and so we can adjust it during playtesting*. The trick here is that since you have a limited party it’s basically enforced hero mode, and so you will have to think carefully about what role you want a particular character to take on for a specific battle. Since you only have a max of 12 rather than 36 this time around, we are building a little intentional overlap into some classes – so you could say, spec the duelist and the champion strongly towards high DPS single-target, anti-armor “can openers”, or make the duelist a crippler/bleeder/debuffer while the champion focuses on tanking.
*Honestly we could have been a LOT more aggressive in smoothing out the balance in DQ1’s skills, one big reason we didn’t go as far as we could have is because of our weird multi-release development cycle, we were constantly afraid of undoing a “finished” game and having to rebalance each level by hand.
To that end we’re even considering doing away with respec costs entirely and thinking of skills more as a “loadout.” (Obsessive per-battle twiddling would only be required/designed for at high level play of course).
Anyways, that’s the basic idea so far. If this conversation goes on any further into more design detail, I suggest the use of the “reply as new topic” feature. 
That’s where the synergy comes in - it might on its own be a dump skill - as a simplification, say that it increases DPS by 5% when there are other options that increase it by 10%. But if this dump skill ALSO increases effectiveness of the skill it is a prerequisite to, then it might suddenly become less-than-dump skill. Meaning that it wouldn’t be a skill you would want to invest to alone, but would make a sense coupled with the next one.
Well, I asked what your goals are exactly because I have a feeling that with tier-based skills, you’re suddenly creating possibly way too many possible builds to choose from - and that might swamp the player. And on the other hand, if you fail to come up with 10 “roughly equally interesting skills”, you might end up with a ton of possible options out of which just 2-3 make sense.
Yea, that seems to be the norm these days :), I only see paid respecs where the currency is money-making-premium.
Ah I see. Good thoughts here! Tell you what, when we’ve got more stuff rolled out we’ll be sure to do some detailed write-ups on it and get it out to testers like you as early as we can.
Will recruiting those heroes be optional-ish in any way? I really hate in TDs like DQ where you have a limited cast of towers to place, and then you don’t place all of them. Maybe it’s OCD. I mean, if you don’t recruit a guy, the story changes slightly (slightly different levels are unlocked instead), but you’d still need that guy for a later (maybe last) level/chapter, so that the storyboard isn’t a mess and the backstory is pretty much the same no matter which person you refuse to recruit (and when you complete the game you could have all levels unlocked by not recruiting unlocked, but only the first ones, and you need to complete them to unlock the ones after, until it reconnects again, wait let me do a drawing of that).
P.S.: I think this is a good occasion to use the IRC chat.
Being able to choose A or B for skills reminds me a lot of how Bastion handles skills for weapons. I also liked in that system that you could change it at any time when you go to the forge.
I love all these animations! They’re looking so slick. Can’t wait to see them in game!
Fair enough, but just because that’s the conceptual design, doesn’t mean their weapon choices make any more sense. Or any more sense to the mechanics being extracted from those weapon choices. I’m mostly looking at the duelist with a greatsword dealing crippling strikes to a single target with this one. I suppose losing a leg or arm is a sort of crippling strike, but kinda breaks the standard RPG tropes. Good? Yes and no. Confusing to standard RPG players? Also true.
And I should probably clarify my critique with the Sky Whaler. He mostly looks like the NPC that gets left behind. It’s a bit of the way his hair is less defined and more playdoh, a bit of the way his spear is a simple fishhook, a bit of the way is his pose is very standard, and a bit of the way his clothing is merely slightly more colorful NPC fair (although I do think the colors are quite good). There’s character there, it’s just muted to what usually ends up being NPCs in most RPGs or maybe a little better. In such an otherwise distinct and varied lineup, I just feel like he doesn’t live up to his peers visually.
PS: Bitey’s left cannon could use some more contrast in the details at that.
I was thinking more like this binary tree:
Skill selection is a binary operation which locks in a skill for a given tier and opens up one of two paths for skill growth. So you get builds like A->D->K as illustrated. Player choices are limited, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. The cool thing about this setup is that its easy to map visual changes of a character class based on skill selection.