Dissidia Sedecim - A recreation of FF6's combat engine

All right everyone there's a new demo out, now with menus and Squall as a playable character.

I've also completely revamped the damage formulas, I'm no longer using FF6 as a basis for the formulas and I've started using something simpler, more adaptable. Here's how the melee damage formula works, for an instance

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/594h2hkndw

Changing the formulas also meant changing the entirety of the game's balancing. I've made it so nobody can easily hit 9999 damage,  nobody can easily have 9999 HP. In this demo things aren't 100% balanced yet so a few attacks are still overpowered, others underpowered.

Why nerf everyone? This type of RPG really shines when you can make your team work as one, it shines when each action fills its own niche. When you can easily do really high damage, there's no encouragement for teamwork, there's no point in using a powerful spell over an equally powerful physical attack, every action feels samey. 

I've set things up in a way that putting together a party with complementing abilities you can multiply your damage fivefold. For that to work, a character with really good physical offense should be doing at most 2500 damage per hit. That's the best melee user, the bad ones will be doing something like 700 damage. Average, 1500.

Similarly for HP, a character with the best possible HP should be at 5000 HP, and that's at the expense of defense and evasion. I'm balancing things so that you can't have it all. Your character is geared for HP OR defense OR evasion, but not everything at once.

Another big change I've made was consolidate magic and physical defense into one stat, magic and physical evasion into one stat. There are two ways perspectives from which I think this work.
Enemy attacking the player:
When the player is gearing up their party, they don't know what kind of challenges they'll come across in a dungeon. Enemy parties are randomized, enemy actions are often randomized, so the player can't exactly know what to prepare against and that's not fair. On top of that, the player often can't even tell if an enemy's attack is of magical or physical nature. If a character has been built for powerful defense or powerful evasion, that strategy should work effectively, period. 

Specially because building a tank character means you'll sacrifice evasion and HP. There are three armor classes, heavy, light and swift. Heavy gives you defense, light HP and swift evasion. Having great defense means you'll rarely dodge, having great evasion means a few hits can kill you.


Player attacking the enemy:
Most enemies will have the same defense value throughout the entire game. This is so that the player always gets consistent feedback from how much damage they're doing. It'll be easier to compare physical vs magical damage because they'll both be adjusted against the same defense value. It'll be easier to get a feel of how strong you can get from 10 extra points in attack from your new weapon. 

If I want an enemy to have better magic or physical defense, I can just adjust a single value that increases their resistance against those types of damage. But that's to be used sparingly. I wish players to get what they expect to get as often as possible.

As for evasion, I've removed that from most enemies. They simply do not evade, you always hit. I believe that if a player tells their character to do something, then they should succeed. The only exception will be enemies whose gimmick are their impossibly high evasion, like the Cactuar.


I believe these changes allow me to better adapt into a single game a character that has a 15 hit limit break, a character that can't equip any armor at all, a character whose only skill is "Jump".