Interesting features

[Zefk]

About:
I will be listing random features here.

Status: Not finished

Traps in disguise:

We all can probably name simple traps. Most of the time they are noticeable.

• Holes
• Spikes

• Falling/floor spikes/other falling objects: A good disguise trick for this is to have some floor spikes shoot up if a jump is not high enough or if the spikes are a different color, but colors warnings would not be a disguise trap.
• Chests: We are always excited about a chest, but there is almost no hesitation in opening a chest or effort getting to it when it appears. A chest that walks or runs away makes it a little challenging. Also, not all chests will be safe to open. A chest can hold many disguise traps. Poison objects, shooting fists, bomb, fire, magic that can turn you into a helpless doll, and an endless amount of stat changes or penalties.
• Furniture: Be careful in dungeons. A simple chair might be lethal. This can really surprise a player.
• Terrain: A simple flower could be a disguised enemy and you might get hurt unless you have some way of detecting it or are very careful.

Interesting features:

• Change of weapons: Animation during weapon change can be very appealing. In an ARPG with Alley Ai(s) the weapons can jump out of one character's hand and drop into the other character's hand. Also, there could be a telportation animated effect.
• Menu: The characters graying out would look nice when pausing the game. This can give total concentration of the main character for browsing through a small menu with the character in the center. The character having a small glow would be best to capture the players eyes.
• Actions/emotions: To really like a character facial feature changes and emotional responses are needed most of the time. A simple flicker for damage might not always be enough to feel for the character. A character yawning during sleep could replace the zzz bubble. Also, your ally/player character getting bashed down might make things a little challenging.
• Number bouncing damage: This not only lets the player know how much damage is being inflicted, but looks really cool.

Ally AI:

A few common features that make people happy with alley AI are:

• Border detection: Nobody likes it when their ally is trying to run to you and you need its help fighting, but it cannot because an impassible layer that they are not detecting is blocking them. A simple move up, down, left, right checking script would save time. That way you will not have to go to the ally, so they can follow you again.
• Call to arms: A call to arms feature is good too. All allies would run to the currently playing character. That can be used if the player is in real need of help.
• Distance check teleportation: The ally will teleport to the player when he/she gets too far away from the player. Good for magic characters.
• Multiple projectiles: At least 2 different projectile weapons are nice to have. That way one ally can melee while the allies support from behind.
• Healing magic: Healing items are good and all, but those could take time to make or money might be limited. A magic user that can heal the characters over time or can trade HP (it has a ton of it) to other players.
• Healing pick: The option to pick which character to heal or to heal all characters is very useful because no on likes healing one character at a time.
• Alley movement options: Telling the player to stay away from the enemy and shoot would be helpful because you do not want your support to run into the enemy and die.
• Shielding magic and defend: Nobody likes getting hurt and a way to prevent that is with shielding magic. Especially in the case of disguise traps because you want to protect your alleys. Being able to block or defend yourself in a game is better than taking full on damage.
• Training Ground: It is absolutely annoying when the player has to fight enemies that are too strong (EX: bosses with no weakness) and the others are too weak to give the player much experience. A training ground could give the player exp at the price of currency. Either they are false magic creatures or a place where hordes of monsters need to be cleared out. Also, this could be a tower village where the player has to fight to the top or bottom.
• Switch/assign key: Being able to cast magic quickly and switching weapons without much effort is a must. Ex: Holding a key/button down and pressing up, down, left, and/or right. No one wants to pause the game just to cast a spell, but sometimes that would be needed or time could slow down.
• Projectile delay: A delay in projectiles can allow the character to move and hit an enemy before the ally is struck. Also, this could allow the player to attack more than one enemy at a diagonal angle.
• Projectile damage range: A collision range is one of the most important features because if you hit an enemy, then they should take damage! A lot of time in games I played the character hits the enemy, but the character was not directly facing it, so no damage taken. Most likely the projectile was not its own entity in these cases and some distance check with animation was used.
• Ally detach and longer distance check: Allowing allies to detach from following and go after enemies is better than having them follow the hero until the hero moves into range. A lot of time the hero can be fighting and the allies are not detecting it because they are not in range. This could be an option setting in ally behavior controls in case the hero wants to avoid this enemy.
• Targeting single enemy: Having all the allies attack one strong enemy can be a good choice because it would out weigh the damage caused my other weaker foes.
• Switching: Switching between allies is always a good thing because each one has their own sets of skills. Switching can be in a follower order or in the case of no followers the main character would just poof to another character or being.
• Sparkle follow path: Who said that the allies had to always be with the hero? They can go off and fight while following a sparkle path.
• Checkpoints: Marking checkpoints can help make an exact path to follow for allies.
• Heroes turn villain: Heroes turning into an enemy and back into an ally due to certain treatment is an interesting feature.
• Random attacks or main player only:A lot of time with ARPG with followers the player is the only one ever targeted by enemy magic. A lot of the time the followers never use their magic abilities at all. Random magic attacks by enemies or enemies that attack the strongest or weakest in the group would be much more interesting. Although, this can excluded bosses because they normally the strong bosses bombard magic like crazy.
  
• Going through Allies: This is better because attacking an enemy can be quicker.
• Allow ally switch during menu: Having to switch between allies in order to switch weapons, use items, equip armor, etc. This can be annoying.
• Instant item access: It is annoying when one gets bombarded to death by a boss with a triple strike attack. Not allowing inventory access during this to heal oneself is ridiculous.
• Rapid strikes: It many ARPGs there is a pause to let the enemy to attack. That is understandable, but a massive pause after every attack is just dumb. An ARPG is not supposed to be turn based....

Thoughts:

• Exp bottles
• Exp trade
• Friendly terrain
• Terrain self defense
• Enemy chest spawner
• Creating villages
• Enemy village spawn
• Gang spawns
• Character appearance change based on exercise
• Magic that can change the character appearance to desired age
• Random missions
• Village attacks
• Apprentices
• Spawn structures
• Random item chest. This can be a spinning wheel and a bad choice can hurt the player
• Spirit storm. Plain Rain is getting plain boring in games these days.
• Running
• Save points that heal mp and hp
• Blocking attacks
• Moving blocks
• Picking stats to level up and able to save stat points for later
• Exp bar to next level and exp gain display
• Different days instead of Monday, Tuesday, etc
• Ability to automatically pick all enemies for magic attacks
• When picking stats to level up...show changes to mp,hp,etc
• A ringing sound for when the players health is low, but only have it go off for a few seconds. It can be annoying.
• Day and nigh cycle that can follow different colors than normal.
• Send items to a storage. That way the player can buy more.
• "Some big chest to hide some stairs that go to lower floors" - Good idea Diarandor.
• "random mini dungeon discovery/detection while traveling" - Good idea Stormfruit
• "knock out the chest in order to open it" -Called Mimics
• Monsterhouse- Hordes of enemies. Most likely strong enemies that surround the players. Leaving no way out, but to fight to the death or beat them all.
• Multiple charged attack. EX: Charging the bar 8 times for a powerful attack.
• Plant a seed and get an item or grows a tree house where you can do various activities
• Weapon upgrades
• One time magic items that can be bought for non-magic users
• Items to bring the player back to life after death
• Flying swords could lower the amount of animations needed for sprites
• Damaged by attacking monster
• weapon/magic levels and different magic attacks per weapon.
• Different punches and other movements. The same punch combination can get super boring.
• Magic attack types: Following magic blast attack, blast on command in one direction attack, zigzag blasts, circular blast, over wall blast, and multiple ground trail blast.
• Training items - these can help the player gain more experience. Maybe they have side effects like slowing down the player.
• Powerful attacks that can happen after a certain amount of successful strikes or charging up levels
• Maintain charge for attack when knocked down.
• Lock on enemy
• Multiple Lock on
• Spinning wheel platform
• Magic item to change seasons
• Time travel. Changes in the past affect dungeons in the future.
• Code to pass to different games
• Raze and lower water levels
• Wheel turner (changes the path for the hero when touched at different points.)
• Carrying ice to put out fires
• Putting boulders in holes to travel down a path
• Make all tiles the same color (possibly with a time limit) - take the fastest path
• Item chests to stray hero off the path
• Double jump
• Projectiles bouncing off walls
• Switch places item
• Magnetic glove to pull toward and away from areas. (Move other metallic items)
• Statues that come to life (when taking the treasure)
• Walls that close in
• Floors that fall away

Weapons & science fiction thoughts:

• Sonic Rifle
• Particle gun
• Pulse Rifle
• Colony
• Force Fields
• bypass
• Sentry Units
• Sentry Guns
• Cyborgs
• Robots
• Megaton explosives
• Synthetic
• Trackers
• Vents
• Remote ships
• Stranded ship
• Parasites
• Aliiens
• Clairvoyant
• Telekinesis
• Psychic
• Pyrokinesis
• Telepathic
• Clairaudient
• Clairsensitive
• Remote-viewer
• Lucid Projector
• Lucid dreamer
• Precognitor
• Retrocognitor
• Psychometrist
• Intuitive
• Psychographer
• Medium
• ESP
• Esper
• Psycophoner
• Physical ectoplasmic medium
• Psychic Surgeon
• Elevators
• Plant Veggie parasites
• Religious groups
• Clones
• Curse infusion
• Scanners
• Biosuits
• Temperature
• Terraformers
• Planetoids
• Rovers
• Androids
• Loaders
• Armored arm tanks
• Dropships
• Pods
• 9ner
• Drop
• 5by5
• Robotic parts
• Soul Pods
• Medic Machines
• Sticky Bomb
• Gas race

Types of robots: Here and here

Types of Legendary Creatures: Here

Unique Names:

• Franfixa
• Tuzlagaldra
• Titta
• Disa
• Epiza
• LyudMilia
• Domina
• Gianna
• Fete
• Mimzy

A great place to generate names: here

[MetalZelda]

Follower AI are a pretty interesting feature (There's a "basic" example on Return of the Hylian SE), but making a AI like you described require a very long time to do, basically, the follower has to constantly analyse what surrounds him, the script has to determine it's path, when he should attack, when he should defend himself, this is probably one kind of a script that would take weeks to make, but, this could be interesting, I already planned things like that for some boss battle so it is on my todo list as well

[Zefk]

Follower AI are a pretty interesting feature (There's a "basic" example on Return of the Hylian SE), but making a AI like you described require a very long time to do, basically, the follower has to constantly analyse what surrounds him, the script has to determine it's path, when he should attack, when he should defend himself, this is probably one kind of a script that would take weeks to make, but, this could be interesting, I already planned things like that for some boss battle so it is on my todo list as well

Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2) exposed me to this feature on the SNES. A very beautiful game graphic wise, but the followers got stuck a lot and did not always act 100% correctly. The Super Nintendo was good times and I think the Seiken Densetsu games are good with follower features. I think it is amazing that these games were coded in 65816 ASM on SNES. Seiken Densetsu 3 (also for SNES) is even more beautiful, but only in Japanese. I heard there are English patches somewhere. ASM is really intense, but can do amazing things on weak hardware.

[Stormfruit]

If I may add, there's also sidequests (of which most Zelda games have a huge lack), motion-detecting projectile launchers (like flying pots and spear traps), hero/ally control transfer (for ally-specific gameplay segments, like in Majora's Mask and Wind Waker), nodes for resource gathering, and random mini dungeon discovery/detection while traveling the world map (Dragon Quest Monster: Joker had this with random unmarked islands that always had new treasure)

[Zefk]

The features you mentioned sparked some more ideas for this post. I will add them later.

Also, I mentioned chests that run away and hold traps, but I never mentioned a killer chest. It would be hilarious to have to knock out the chest in order to open it. I am not sure if I mentioned this. Sometimes there are hordes of enemies that surround and attack a player or allies. Normally all exits close until the enemies are defeated or there is no way to get past the foes. I first encountered this a long time ago when playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. The same type of trap occurs in Swords Art Online anime. I cannot recall the name of the trap type.

[Diarandor]

Chest traps are always cool and very typical of many JRPGs (mainly from the old-school Square Enix JRPGs) and some ARPGs (Secret of Mana games, that you have already mentioned, and even some Zelda games like Link's Awakening has slimes hidden in chests). I personally like more the idea of an enemy coming out from a chest instead of the chest being an enemy itself, although this is just a personal preference. We definitely should put a few of these traps/enemies in Children of Solarus, just to have more types of enemies.

It would also be cool, for future games, to make some big chest to hide some stairs that go to lower floors, although this is not a trap. (I like a lot this kind of secret passageways, like caves hidden behind waterfalls, etc.)

[Stormfruit]

I mentioned chests that run away and hold traps, but I never mentioned a killer chest. It would be hilarious to have to knock out the chest in order to open it. I am not sure if I mentioned this. Sometimes there are hordes of enemies that surround and attack a player or allies. Normally all exits close until the enemies are defeated or there is no way to get past the foes. I first encountered this a long time ago when playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. The same type of trap occurs in Swords Art Online anime. I cannot recall the name of the trap type.

The killer chests actually would make a great trap. Also, they're usually called mimics.


And the second trap you mentioned is called a monster house; they're very common in roguelike games, but the doors usually only close if you stumble upon one in normal Zelda games.

[Zefk]

@Diarandor

Chest traps are always cool and very typical of many JRPGs (mainly from the old-school Square Enix JRPGs) and some ARPGs (Secret of Mana games, that you have

That is true. Square makes creative games and they are very beautiful, but I feel like they were going to add more features and quests in Secret of Mana.  Just one example is the push feature in the game. There was not blocks or anything besides people or enemies to push.

Secret of Evermore is like a one player copy of Secret of Mana and it also has good graphics, but I am not a fan of the character development.

@Stormfruit

monster house

That is the name! Thank you.