A couple months ago, I showed off a little demo of a Tales fan game project that I was working on. Unfortunately, life (and games) got in the way of dev for a bit, so I'm not as far along as I'd hoped. Still, I thought another little demo is in order.

Everything explained below is demo'd in the video.

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Video Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwnzkvy5Sz0
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This time, rather than show off the melee aspects, I'm showing how magic will work and how it will be used in combos so magic characters are not out classed by melee.

Magic is in 3 levels, like melee: Low, Mid, and High level. Generally, the higher level of magic, the more damaging, flashy, and expensive it is. It also has a longer cast time. If no action has been performed, or the spell you're trying to use doesn't combo off from your previous spell, the full cast time is activated.

During casting, you have an increased resistance to being staggered by an attack. Higher level magic gives you a higher stagger guard, giving you a chance to get off a cast before the melee character breaks you. A few hits and your cast is broken though.

After a successful cast, you can then combo the next level spell immediately off of the lower level without having to cast. In addition, you can also combo magic off of melee attacks as well, in the same order.

Low -> Mid -> High

or

Mid -> High

or

Low -> High

During overlimit, a sort of limit break, all casts are immediate (for now). In addition, you can cast spells in any order during overlimit, rather than in ascending order only.

A short video, at both the top (for lazy non-readers) and bottom of the page shows off what I'm talking about.


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Video Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwnzkvy5Sz0
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There's still alot to go in terms of fine tuning, but the system itself seems to flow fairly well. What do you think?

Characters:

Jade Curtis (in green) -- Tales of the Abyss
Yuri Lowell (in black) -- Tales of Vesperia