Hello again and welcome to Fogworld’s DevLog! This time I’d like to talk about how I design the familiars you can find in the game from a gameplay perspective.

Combat in Fogworld is fought in turn-based 5 vs 5 matches, similar to games like Final Fantasy or Darkest Dungeon. When you have five members in your team, it’s important that each member has their own role and specialty. To make each familiar in Fogworld feel unique and useful in combat, I’ve designed them around a five Archetype system that is based on the “Holy Trinity” of Tank, Support and Damage Dealer.

The "Holy Trinity" of RPGs

Tank, Support, Damage Dealer. Team based RPGs often use the so called "Holy Trinity" of archetypes, where each character falls within one of these 3 categories.

Damage dealers do exactly what it sounds like. They deal the majority of the team's damage and usually are the ones who defeat the enemy.

Supports make sure that the rest of the team can do their job. They heal wounded allies, provide useful buffs and remove negative status effects.

Finally, Tanks protect their team and stop the enemies from doing what they want.

This system originated from MMOs like World of Warcraft, but nowadays it can be found in pretty much every game where more than one character runs around.

Some games have different variations of these, which better fit their design. For example, League of Legends uses a system of 13 different Classes that they design Champions around. Systems like these give designers/developers a foundation to go off of when designing Characters, classes, roles, etc.

For Fogworld I wanted to use a system like this, but found a few challenges when adapting the Holy Trinity for a turn-based "JRPG" Combat System:

Adapting the Trinity

Damage Dealers:

Adapting the Damage Dealer Archetype was fairly straight forward, but I wanted to avoid the pitfall where every damage-dealer plays essentially exactly the same, they just have a different coat of paint on. 

To do this I've created several parameters I can tweak when creating a damage-dealer: Differences in Damage-Type, Damage-Spread, Damage-Speed and Resource-Management make every damage-dealer-familiar feel different.

Tanks:

The Tank archetype was more tricky to adapt. Classically a tank would protect its team by utilizing an aggro system in PvE games, or by engaging and physically hindering the enemy in PvP games.

Neither approach works super well in Fogworld's Combat System. Instead, Tanks in Fogworld often have "taunting" skills that prevent enemies from targeting the tank's allies for a few turns, but they don't do anything against AoE moves. To remedy this, Tanks get shielding skills that provide their allies with a damage-soaking HP-Barrier.

That means that Tanks have all the tools they need to protect their team from different attacks, if you can use them correctly. This is important, because you'll only need one Tank and can fill the other slots in your team with more proactive members.

Supports:

The Support Role is usually the most boring role, just spamming healing abilities on allies to make sure they don't die.

I wanted to avoid this pitfall at all costs, so I gave Supports the widest range of things they can do. They can attack (and deal decent damage), heal, buff an ally or debuff an enemy in several ways. Therefore, it's important that you use turns and available resources wisely to get the most out of your Supports.

Also, when it comes to healing, there's a bigger focus on regeneration or healing-over-time effects, so you can't just spam attacks and only heal when an ally is about to die.

Finally, I wanted to mention that these Archetypes are merely guidelines when designing new familiars for Fogworld. Familiars can fall into more than one Archetype or somewhere inbetween two archetypes. I believe that pigeon-holing a familiar into one role can make their design stale and uninteresting, so I'll add abilities as long as they fit into the familiar's theme, even if they don't belong to its archetype.

A practical Example

This is Wartoise. It's one of Fogworld's possible Starter-Familiars and it falls into the Tank archetype. It can taunt enemies, buff its own defense and heal itself. 

But since it's a Starter, it also needs to be able to defeat enemies on its own, so it has several damaging abilities and a high Attack-Stat. To fit its slow nature and "Mountain-Turtle"-Theme, these damaging abilities are not very 'bursty' and will need multiple turns to take out enemy familiars.

This way, you'll be able to customize your Wartoise and use it as a Damage Dealer and aren't forced to use it as a Tank.

I hope this little overview over how I adapted the Holy Trinity into my game was helpful. Don't forget to check out Fogworld's Twitter page to see all the new stuff since the last DevLog! If you have any disagreements, feedback or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Until next time, have a great day!