actually 4 girllikes running under windows 2000 simultaneously (please forgive our lag!), we work on stuff sometimes :3
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Last night, I had a dream about an RPG class system where abilities were assigned by slotting Tetris blocks into class-specific shapes. Has this been done? It feels like it must have been done somewhere.
I can't recall which, but there was SOME where if you wanted to upgrade a weapon, you had to actually make part of your weapon out of special enhancement cubes you got because it was all voxel based, but those were just individual cubes, not shaped tetrads
Was that in Fromsoft's 3D Dot Game Heroes? I know it was voxel based and played around with that set up.
I'm not sure, it was long enough ago that I initially thought it was that, but also thought it might be the Cube World alpha
Cube World is a mysterious beast I've only heard of from Friends at the Table tangenting about it. But that does track with what I've heard of it.
excellent! the ravages of time have only partially consumed my mind!
The spirit cubes also had special effects based on type. Wind runes being insane.
I love to imagine these as equipment that can then glow in game the way slotted materia does in FFVII Remake. Introduces the trade off of
"Oh man, this weapon has SO many slots... but it looks goofy as hell."
The Mega Man Battle Network games sort of do something a little bit like this later on with all your passive upgrades like HP being done in a grid system like this. But it's a static rectangle that gets bigger over time and not a more specific shape like this
Ah I miss the Navi Customizer. It even had fun quirks like putting two colors together that matched or on an important line could produce glitches with unintended effects. I really loved that system.
reminds me of kid icarus uprising with slotting the various powerups and items you can bring with you into a stage in a grid, the more powerful stuff has larger / more messed up looking shapes
not quite the same thing but it's close-ish
Oh, this is kinda how it works in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days! It's not class-specific shapes though: IIRC I think it's more just Resident Evil inventory "Fill the grid" style. But your levels are also part of this loadout!
Yes, I'm glad I wasn't the only person to think of this. Different abilities/equipment/stat upgrades were different shapes and you only had so much room to slot them in.
https://kh.wiki.gallery/images/5/51/Panel_System_KHD.png
It was sort of done in Infinite Space, where you configured your ships with various configurations of suspiciously tetronimo-esque blocks, and the license grids in Final Fantasy 12 and the updated versions sort of conform to shapes that need to be filled out to get class benefits. Can't say I've ever seen it in this specific form, though.
Infinite Space is a great shout-out. I remember the ship management being more entertaining than the battles themselves.
Yeah it was i think meant to evoke the feeling of being the captain of a ship where you're trusting your crew to do the actual fighting, but it just ended up being kind of weightless. It's a shame, because it is honestly i think one of the most interesting games Platinum ever released
We do a similar thing in Celestial Bodies, though the specific "class" forms are less restrictive (the "normal" ones are all rectangles, smallest is 6x2): https://selkie.itch.io/celestial-bodies
Dang, that game looks nice. You've obviously put a lot of thought into the grid system.
Thank you! Yeah, it's the key linchpin of a lot of the game, it serves as both character creation and a hit-grid.
God, this feels incredibly familiar, but I can't place where.
The splatoon 3 card game has you play cards that place blocks in the shape of the guns
my girlfriend has played a touhou fangame called touhou gensokyo survivors that has a similar grid system with better items being shaped weirder but i haven't seen it with the funny shapes like this!
I've seen crafting systems that use tetrominoes or other shaped blocks to represent the item components. Haven't seen this for skills, though.
Ghostrunner does something similar; skill upgrades are added to your character by slotting obviously Tetris-inspired shapes onto a grid.
Minecraft quark mod has an extension called "quark oddities" which has the option for "matrix enchanting" which is similiar i think to meganan battle network.
IMO: This is an entire genre of games referred to as inventory management games, such as backpack battles and backpack hero.
