Secret project: Skills and Spells
Say you’re chopping some type of mob, and you want to do something other than ordinary old chop-chop-chop with your giant monster-chopping flamberge. What do you do? Well, if you’re playing Final Fantasy VIII, you select the GF command over and over and over. But in my game, should you happen to point your magical wiimote targeting cursor at something and chop the B button, a few things will happen. First off, the action will pause; since you won’t be able to act for the next few seconds, it seemed only fair that the mobs would suffer the same limitation. The more interesting component of the process is that a radial menu will open around your target.
I know what you’re thinking — holy shit yes, a menu! But it’s more exciting even than that makes it sound. From this menu you’ll be able to select (also via Wii remote pointage) the skill you want to use, and then use it! What are skills, you ask, not unreasonably? Skills are special combat abilities you’ll gain as you level up, and they can and do vary by character. In case you missed it, I just subtly revealed that there are multiple playable characters available in this game — that’s just how completely freakin’ crazy I am. That’s like an extra bonus update.
So what about spells? No, spells aren’t just what we call skills when your character is wearing a dress instead of armour. They’re a totally seperate mechanic, but they’re accessed through the same means; the nunchuck stick can switch you from the radial skills menu to the radial spells menu. The exact mechanical differences between the two will be the subject of a later post; for now, suffice to say that there are non-trivial differences.
Once you’ve selected your skill or spell, well, that’s about all there is to it. Recall that through the magic of the Wii remote’s pointer functionality you’ve already chosen your target and the whole thing becomes clear; your skill or spell executes targeted on whatever you were pointing at (also what the menu opened around). If that target’s out of range? No worries — that skill or spell will be "redded out" and unavailable. No problems with accidentally wasting something or any confusion about whether or not you can use it. Just a fluid skill-usage system designed to reduce the time you spend playing with menus and get you back to the choppin’!
Why select the radial menu with the pointer? It seems to me that unless there are more than 6 or 8 skills/spells available at once, then using the analog stick is probably easier — fine controls with the pointer tend to be a little flaky. You could assign “Swap between menus” to the B or Z buttons and then use the stick to pick the appropriate thing.
Comment by Stephen | 5 April 2008
Tentatively there are nine total skills per character, and I haven’t settled on an upper boundary for spells yet (but it’ll probably be around there).
Selecting with the stick instead of the pointer is certainly an option; I went with the pointer primarily to keep the control metaphor consistent — everything else about skill usage is handled with the remote and not the nunchuck — but I’m certainly open for a change if it turns out to have poor usability.
The other thing I don’t like about the current setup is that the B button opens the skill ring… but is also the button to use for canceling out of a menu. It’s probably more intuitive if you can make your menu selection with the button that opened the menu in the first place, so I may switch B with C also. I’ve had it both ways at one point or another, weighing my options.
Comment by Darien | 5 April 2008
Say you’re chopping some type of mob, and you want to do something other than ordinary old chop-chop-chop with your giant monster-chopping flamberge.
I’m not sure why I’d ever want to do something other than hit things with a flamberge, though.
Comment by Dave | 30 April 2008