I’ve been thinking about making a game where it’s pretty much built on (1) the combat system, with character weights corresponding roughly to classes in combat, (2) developing characters over a campaign of combats. Each scenario is a battle, with a room-based combat system (e.g. in a church, each room counts as a ‘room’, (a large open area might be split into multiple ‘rooms’), each turn the player moves characters between rooms or orders characters (e.g. to cast a spell/shoot into an adjacent room, attempt to retreat/charge/whatever when in a room in combat, i.e. there are enemies in the same room).
The focus is the combat, and the character development between combat, when the player allocates food/items/skills. Characters gain/lose weight based on food allocated, and bigger is not always better. (Maybe also based on food eaten/found in combat, but I haven’t thought that aspect through yet) e.g. a light character will be faster and agile in combat but have less hp or attack power, a heavier character the opposite, and the weight system would have a split between fat, muscle, and other, with the amount of muscle being important too. (So, e.g. bringing a character up to 600 lbs but without developing any muscle mass means a very slow and relatively weak character, probably not a great move, but maybe that could be good for a spellcaster/gunslinger type where strength/mobility isn’t so important)
Class system – basically just a rating (light/medium/heavy/immobile) based on size. I think basing it on ONLY fat might be interesting, as with variations in muscle weight you could have a strong ‘medium’ being heavier than a weak ‘heavy’. I’d tie this to a picture updating (probably pre-drawn AI pictures. I don’t like this solution but it’s easy, and to change it is as simple as swapping jpgs) and some modifiers by class, again, really not sure what yet, other than mobility debuffs, and maybe encounter-scaling. (hp/attack/etc calculated based on weight/muscle mass already)
Mostly I’m looking for suggestions on the combat aspect. I think heavies should in general be stronger than lights if there are several people in a room, (more hp/damage) but weaker 1 on 1 (agility becomes much more important then), and I want the game to encourage having a mix.
ENGINE
I said I was making my own and that’s because I know how to program but I was always too lazy to learn the easy way (using other people’s tools) so I just build my own shit. If I actually finish the project, it will probably have a fairly basic GUI, and an ‘engine’ that somebody else could repurpose. It won’t be professional, but it might save time if somebody wants to dive into the same language and make a different game. (FreeBASIC; it’s possible I could port it to C as a .dll) I don’t know if this would be interesting to anybody but I think I’d end up most of the way there by making the game anyway.