How to make IF combat interesting?

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

Some historically similar or potentially relevant discussions:

Ideas for combat scenarios in a tactical combat game?

Hi, everyone! Tohm development is slowly (but surely!) progressing. Here’s the latest video: youtube.com/watch?v=4Gh5Jc4nbyU The next major pre-alpha work will be adding lots more interesting creatures and groups of creatures to challenge players in battle. I think it would be great to include ideas from players in the alpha. Does anyone have any ideas around monster concepts, especially monster abilities and tactics? Here are some Tohm combat basics to inspire your creati…

Combat and combat training

Twine Version: 2.3.16 Story Format: 2.36.1 I have built several things already into my game, such as time/date and using it to set events (https://intfiction.org/t/using-time-and-date-to-set-events), managing stats so they don’t exceed a maximum or fall below a minimum (https://intfiction.org/t/minimum-and-maximum-stats-settings), assigning a name to stats (https://intfiction.org/t/giving-stats-a-name-as-well-as-a-value), adding a passage header only to specified passages (https://intfiction.o…

Conversational Combat

Been trying out various options for combat in my game this week, and I was a bit surprised there are so few options. The only combat system I can find at the moment that works is a pretty dodgy one called attack that has a habit of dropping the user out of combat. So I thought I might try to build a simple one that uses menus. Basically, here’s what I want to happen: The player enters a room with a hostile creature. The game immediately starts combat and rolls initiative for combat order. If …

TADS Combat System

I’m mulling over a possible combat system in TADS which will aim to turn combat encounters into a form of puzzle. I haven’t done any coding for it yet, but mostly planning out mechanics and trying to optimize the number of verbs it would create to lessen the potential learning curve. Right now, the system will have gun-based combat in mind (clearing doorways and rooms, suppressive/covering fire, cover, area control, grenades, combat mindsets and goal setting, etc) Wondering if anyone else has …

Combat in IF

Hey all. I’m currently playing around with writing a single player, multi-character IF/CRPG hybrid game. Exploration would be the meat of the game and would be classic IF. With regards to resolving combat, clearly it would need to be interesting and tactical, as opposed to spamming ‘attack foo’ over and over again. I’m currently leaning towards switching over to a single screen tactical grid which would use letters to identify heroes and monsters instead of graphical icons. Would people find …

Combat handled as a conversation

In examining the needs of this game, a big burly Conan-meets-Gor style sword-and-sandal adventure, I’m taking a look at combat. You’re only ever going to be fighting one person at a time, and I want it to be more complicated than “attack Thog with sword / g / g / g / g” until Thog is dead, repeat. First, you should be able to BOAST before or after combat; you should be able to TAUNT, MOCK, SLANDER or INSULT an enemy before or during combat to enrage him; you should be able to DEFY an enemy, LA…

Combat Extensions in Inform 10?

Lots of people are interested in having combat systems in games… but it’s not clear to me that there will ever be enough in common between what two authors want for any attempted generic combat extension to be that useful. Has there been more than one game using Armed? (I commented on this before…) There haven’t been a lot of published combat extensions besides Armed. Inform Attack which lives on as Kerkerkruip Attack, but I don’t know how plausible it would be to use it outside of Kerkerkr…