Making a new accessible combat system!

Hello! In this blog post I want to take a minute to talk about how the combat system is going to work in TierraMon!

As a monster collecting game, you will constantly be changing what TierraMon you use, and what enemies you will be fighting. In a visual turn based RPG, this means you are bombarded with information constantly. Both passive information such as health of yourself and your enemy, and the menu's that allow you to take different actions.

In audio games conveying this information is difficult, either a lot of time is spent reading out menus, or there is too little depth too it. So here's how I'm attempting to approach it!

 Moves are in position based on type - In every RPG game there are really only 4 categories of moves, those that only do damage, those that are purely defensive, those that modify the stats of yourself or the enemy, and hybrid moves. Such as those that steal health from the enemy. So every TierraMon has one move from each category, and they are all in position! So let's go into detail of the four categories. As well as that, neither the player or the enemy can use the same move twice in a row, meaning you can strategize around what you know is on cool down from your opponent! 

 The offensive move will always be the UP arrow key, and upon selecting to use it your Tierra Guide will explain how the move works. But this means no matter what type of TierraMon you pick up, you know what button to press if you want just pure damage. But there will be a large amount of variety to this. Some Offensive moves will harm the user, others will have a large chance to miss, some will do the most damage while the enemy is at max health, some may even do more damage based on how much defense the enemy has, or they might even lower your own attack, making future attacks weaker in that combat! 

Opposite the UP arrow key, is the down, and there is the Defensive. These are when you know you need your TierraMon to survive longer. Healing yourself, increasing defense, giving yourself a chance to dodge, or even giving yourself a thorn like effect are all options for defensive. These will never directly deal damage, but they can certainly help deal it!

Then we have the Left arrow key - This category is known as "Magic" , and with it you can do a large number of things. Magic is the skill to impact enemy stats, and sometimes effects your own. In this category you will find spells to absorb the enemies life force, to decrease their attack for the fight, disable moves, and the like! This category is almost always offensive, it will not effect the stats of your TierraMon except for those that heal your own TierraMon.

Rounding it out, we have the right arrow key, which are special physical moves! These moves are attacks that give your own TierraMon an advantage, while always dealing damage. A defensive blow will deal a bit of damage and increase defense, another attack will deal damage and make it so that your next attack will deal more damage! These will only ever effect the stats of your TierraMon, as well as doing damage of course!

With this approach my goal is to make it so that in combat there will be very little fiddling in menus, but still have a lot of strategy. As you can probably guess, a lot of these moves will combo well with one another. So the key to victory will be finding the TierraMon that have moves that combo well together for the situation. But what moves a TierraMon have isn't the only important thing! So is what type they are!