#also a digimon/symphogear crossover sounds rad and you should tell me about it

[amber-gimlet]

If you still need someone to talk shop about Living Legends with, I volunteer as tribute, assuming you'd be fine a rando you've never talked to (who's only knowledge of the game comes from the posts you tagged for it)? I'd have left well alone, but then I remembered the Digimon/Symphogear crossover I've been aching to talk about for a quarter of my life now, and well, Empathy Spike. So yeah, if you don't mind talking with someone who isn't well informed at the moment, I'd be happy to listen.

You are a kind soul, and I will take you up on that offer. A long game design ramble under the cut.

In order to make boss fights both unique and capable of taking on a group of players, I had to design my own mechanics. I’ve tried a couple different things, but the one I’ve settled for using across multiple bosses has been the Engine or ‘Meter’ mechanic.

Anytime the boss completes a certain condition tied to the use of its kit (some different conditions I’ve used for different bosses include stealing energy with Dishearten, blinding more than one enemy with a single use of Sunlance, activating one of its special moves, etc.) it adds a Counter to its Meter. The meter will usually have some sort of fancy thematic name based on the boss’s themes, but most of them work the same.

Each meter is tied to a specific high-cost move the boss ordinarily wouldn’t be able to build up enough energy to cast in the normal flow of combat. Once they have enough counters, they can be spent instead of energy to use these talents, many of which are powerful enough to turn the course of a fight.

For example, the dragon boss fight (wip) is actually five different ‘enemies’ tied to the same location because I wanted to try making a boss fight where you could destroy limbs. The Head alternates between casting Furious Rage (a high damage single target melee) and Sunlance (a single target low damage ranged attack that blinds an enemy and all adjacent enemies). For every additional enemy besides the target it blinds with an activation of Sunlance, it gains 2 Dragon Counters per additional Blind.

Once it has 8 such counters, it can use them to cast Inferno, an extremely high damage attack with a large radius that could potentially wipe a grouped up party. However, it still has to cast Inferno normally, it just doesn’t pay energy.

Another boss fight, Caterine, Fallen Knight of Chaos, works a bit differently. Her Meter gains counters when she activates her one of her special moves (talking about those is its own post), and once she has 10 counters…

….nothing happens. Yet. Caterine’s meter ability is Form of the Reaper, a Reaction talent. Reactions occur, as the name suggests, in response to a specific trigger. For, of the Reaper triggers when you would drop to 0 hp. Your hp instead becomes 13 hp, and you automatically summon a conjured weapon (more of them later), specifically the Death Scythe. I’m still considering modifying the talent to be a different conjured weapon, because I’m not sure that weapon works with her kit. I also set it specifically so that this meter casting of Form of the Reaper can be used even if Caterine has already used her reaction, since part of her normal build is built around using a different reaction attack*.

*Technically the only restrictions on Reactions and Interrupts is that you can’t use multiple reactions for a single trigger in a turn, and taking damage from an attack and specifically going to 0 hp are arguably different. But it’s still very much a grey area, so I decided to just go ahead and put in that she could use it even if she had already responded to that trigger just to save myself some headache later down the line.