Hey folks! I want to devote more time to writing about game design. So I wrote this, I hope it is interesting or useful.

Over the last couple of days, I redesigned several of the combat abilities in my tactical RPG--Daughter of Dreams. These changes affected two of the playable party members, Sonya and Lydia. In this post, I will discuss the changes I made and my reasoning for them.

I also made a video covering the same topic that shows the abilities in actual gameplay.

First, an overview. During combat, every party member has action points (AP) and magic points (MP) that they use to cast spells. They also have health points (HP) that do the HP thing. These resources are replenished between every battle, so there is no worrying about wasting resources or healing between fights. Then, each character is designed with one resource that they specialize in. Sonya can do more with AP, Lydia can do more with MP, and Duran can do more with HP.

For this redesign, I started with a goal. I wanted Lydia to be able to restore the party's magic points (MP). My reason for this is that I wanted Lydia to play a bigger role in the team. So, instead of just regenerating her own MP, I thought she could also give MP to allies. However, I have previously tried a few methods of MP restoration and encountered a problem. Lydia became an "MP Battery" and was most effective when just restoring MP to allies who could do more damage with it than her. This led to very uninteresting strategies.

I discussed this with my brother and discovered there was actually a second problem that led to the MP Battery problem. Sonya could not restore her own MP. Sonya can restore her own AP, Lydia can restore her own MP, and Duran can restore his own HP. So why is this a problem? Isn't it natural that the MP character would be responsible for MP restoration? The issue was that Sonya could not perform her main ability to gain AP without also spending MP. This made her unusually dependent on Lydia's MP restoration. She was very weak when not supported by allies, more so than either Lydia or Duran (who uses HP to cast his spells).

So I actually had two problems, and I needed to address both.

• Sonya was too dependent on MP restoration, for a character that's supposed to be about AP.
• Lydia was not a team player, being unable to use her MP to assist her allies.

Now that I had a better idea of what was actually bothering me, I could sit down to address the underlying issues.

• Sonya's AP restoration no longer costs MP. This completely replaces her regular attacks, since there's no longer any need to conserve MP. This way she continues to operate (be fun) even without MP. To balance this change, I made her AP damage scaling ability cost a little bit more MP. After I made this change, it became obvious that it was a good decision, because both Lydia and Duran already could regain their respective resources without spending any other resources. This brought Sonya's abilities more in line with theirs.
• Lydia can now donate MP to her allies. Instead of a straight-up MP restore, this allows Lydia to support her team with MP by giving them hers. To balance this new ability, I also buffed the MP that Lydia could gain from her basic attack. This makes it effective to attack first to gain MP, then donate that to the ally that needs it the most.

The first change freed up two spell slots for Sonya since she no longer needed her basic attacks. So I had the freedom to design new abilities for Sonya that would further address the above problems, as well as make Sonya more of a team player herself!

• Sonya can convert stored AP into MP. This gives Sonya her own MP restoration as well. However, it is not very cost-effective compared to Lydia. In exchange, this technique synergizes with Sonya's own AP mechanics, especially effective because of the newly reduced cost of her AP restoration. Also, this spell works on allies, giving Sonya a way to support her team.
• Sonya can also convert current AP into stored AP. This is a bit trickier to explain without more context, but the gist of it is that Sonya can defer her actions and spend them later. Or she can convert those stored actions into MP! And, this storing of AP works for allies as well, again giving her a bigger role in supporting the entire team.

Finally, I will touch briefly on Duran. I made no changes to his HP-based abilities, feeling that I was very satisfied with his utility already. However, he also had the Team Player problem. This will be addressed by one of his later unlocked abilities--Lifelink. This mechanic allows Duran to share damage between enemies or share buffs between allies. This gives him a role in the team by allowing the team buffs from Sonya or Lydia to hit more than one target at once, multiplying their effectiveness!

I am sure that I will continue to make adjustments to the ability design until the game is shipped (and maybe after, against my better judgment). But, I am very pleased with the improvements I made this week, and I found it an interesting challenge. It required me to identify specific problems and make several fairly dramatic changes.

When I started this task, I thought that I would only be looking at Lydia's abilities, but by the end, most of the changes happened to Sonya! When I do redesigns like this, I try to consider every possibility and not get stuck in old ideas that may no longer be working. Sonya was designed first, and it had been too long since I considered her abilities. It appears she was due for an update for a while now!

Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments if you have your own ideas about MP restoration, and feel free to ask questions. I also discussed this topic on the GameMaker Forum, if you are curious about some of my early ideas and advice that informed these changes. Finally, if you want to see more about Daughter of Dreams, then follow me here on itch!

- Cloaked Games