Nova

Doing my small part to normalize the idea that early game footage isn't going to look polished or even decent.

The naked sprite is actually facing up, btw. Haven't actually made the sprite yet.

It's hinted at in the Chaos Quest settings after beating the game, but PotF has a hidden aggro control mechanic where enemies are more likely to target allies with the highest SP. In other words, enemies will likely attack the ally that can reduce the most damage.

For those that don't know, Prayer of the Faithless adds a twist to the typical JRPG turn-based combat system: Instead of a guard command to reduce damage, a character's Stamina Points (consumed when using skills), will reduce damage instead. This means that blowing all of your SP on powerful skills will leave your party members open for heavy damage during the enemy's turn.

Prayer of the Faithless is a difficult game. I'm certainly not ashamed of that. However, difficulty just for difficulty's sake wasn't what I was going for, either. Having a party member die in 1-2 hits is certainly hard, yes, but that doesn't necessarily make it fun. What keeps battles tense is always the threat of death looming over you and your desperate attempts to slow it down. When a game over happens, I wanted it to be because the player had exhausted all resources, all strategies, and was at the end of their rope, not because an enemy swept the party at full health with a high damage AOE strike that you couldn't have seen coming or prevented.

In other words, death had to be fair. If a player sees the game over screen and says "Okay, let me try x next time" instead of "WTF how did that happen?!" then I think I have achieved my goal.

Hence the above gif. This mechanic is never directly explained to the player for a number of reasons, but a big one is that it's not a guarantee that enemies will only attack players with the highest SP. I'd rather give players the tools they need and let them figure out how to use them than be told exactly what to do, especially on their first playthrough.

Originally, it was the opposite! The optional Chaos Quest setting to have enemies target the ally with the lowest SP was how the game was initially configured. I thought it was best to have enemies enact the same strategy that most players would have: attack and defeat the enemy with the lowest SP. After testing this, however, I found that players stuck to a strategy of having one ally attack, then when that party member inevitably gets killed, players would use revival items to bring them back only for them to get killed immediately afterwards. This loop of death and revival and death was because players wanted to finish the battle as quickly as they could so they could save on resources, not realizing they they were wasting much rarer and more expensive resources with their current strategy. Not only was it more wasteful, but utilizing only one of three party members was disheartening as the dev who put a lot of time and thought into the other characters and how they fought. With this mechanic change, the path to death is slowed down enough to allow for more wiggle room from the player to figure out how to tackle a fight.

So anyway, those are my thoughts on PotF's difficulty and how a mechanic change can affect player behavior. This was a little impromptu, but let me know if you want to see more long-form thoughts on various game design difficulties and challenges I experienced when developing PotF.

Thanks so much for reading!

Prayer of the Faithless won RPGMaker.net's award for Commercial Excellence!! A huge thanks to everyone who cast their vote over the past month!

In celebration, the game is 80% off on both Steam and itch for the next week! If you haven't already, please give it a try!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1878350/Prayer_of_the_Faithless/

itch.io: https://vermillionnova.itch.io/prayer-of-the-faithless

Testing a dialogue retrieval system and I will use Monty Python quotes for the test text and you can't stop me!