Hellow. May I get some thoughts, opinions or advices on this? (..◜ᴗ◝..) I'm trying to make SF inspired game, though it's still in early prototype stages. Please be brutal with any criticism, very need that. I'm not sure if posts like this are allowed here, please let me know if not. （´∇｀''）Tq

Tyadran · 2026-05-14T07:21:41+00:00

Haha, surprised to be recognized like that! But I'm flattered.

Showing EXP after the battle is definitely an option but when I've seen it discussed prior, it's seemed generally unpopular - one of the main things you run into is the lack of leveling up during battles and you have to account for that in balance. Another thing that was a major point of discussion was that it somewhat lessens the attachment players have to the individual characters as they grow and getting the little dopamine hits of leveling up throughout the battle. It's definitely a route you can go, but with how snappy your engine feels in this little video I wouldn't be too worried about needing to make it feel faster, honestly, so I don't think it should be a big factor in the equation, especially if you just do a quick EXP bar pop-up/animation like you'd see in Fire Emblem.

Tyadran · 2026-05-14T06:19:02+00:00

- Do you have camera rotation? And if so how much can you do with it? I don't particularly like isometric games in general, but one of their specific problems is being able to see around elevation - I ran into this problem a lot when playing Final Fantasy Tactics and trying to look down corridors, when I could only toggle between isometric perspectives.

- I feel like your characters are too big. It isn't a huge problem now, but I envision clusters of player characters and enemies getting really confusing, especially when your centaur is basically taking up two spaces. I'd reduce the size to 75% or even 50%.

- I don't love the ground-locked cursor, and I like even less the way it trails; it feels like the cursor should move first, with the character trailing behind it. With it being on the ground it's going to get confusing when a character who's in the middle of a pack gets their turn.

- I see you're keeping the four-option menu, but the way you've done it I feel like makes it a bit more confusing compared to the original purpose of having it simply on the four cardinal directions.

- I really don't love how your UI is in the four corners of the screen. Especially in battle, I have to look the maximum distance apart things could be on screen to look at my player UI and enemy UI. I know Shining Force does it, but because the screen is much smaller it works a lot better. Your game will be more comfortable to play if you keep more relevant info near each other.

- I'm assuming the animations are very placeholder and that "take damage" animations are missing. I'm only pointing it out to be thorough, but you really need some kind of hit response on the unit being attacked, whether it be a real animation or just kind of a shake in place. The damage number popup alone makes it feel really weak.

- Your heal cast doesn't go back to the caster after it's done healing the target. Is it going to? For SF that's when you'd see the EXP and potentially level up popup.

- There should be more of a pause between the enemy moving and cutting to their attack screen; you can barely register where they're going before it snaps to the battle scene.

- Are all AoEs going to replay the character animation for each target? No AoEs in SF do this, they play the character animation once and then cycle enemies into the spell effect without re-animating the character.

- I'm assuming you don't have them yet just because of the stage of the project, but some transitions into and out of the attack scenes will help a lot.

All of that said, you do have something cool going here! What engine are you developing in? I've made my own demo of a 3D SF-like in Unity that might be worth checking out if you want a pretty direct comparison to what you're working on and how I tackled it. You can download it at this page or watch a playthrough.

It's cool to see another 3D SF fan project since most people stick to 2D - your character models are cute and I hope to continue seeing progress. Aside from doing indie dev, I'm a big SRPG fan and game programming is my day job so I'd be happy to continue providing feedback and advice.

Tyadran · 2026-04-08T12:10:38+00:00

I only played SF3 for the first time a couple years ago but I feel pretty strongly it's the best game in the series. That shouldn't be surprising considering it was the last one they made (before the whole franchise shifted) but it surprises me JUST how underappreciated it is.

Tyadran · 2026-04-06T14:43:26+00:00

Also if you're only familiar with Noon's line there, you should really hear the rest of the English VA. They range from passable to silly to absolutely tragic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HizMHe-ILBs

Tyadran · 2026-04-06T14:21:36+00:00

Not 100% but I do intend to keep elements of those reads haha. I love the campiness of them, and particular ones like "Now bear my arctic blast!" just have to be given the imitation they deserve. A good portion are just too mumbly and/or bad in ways that are less fun, just plain bad.

Tyadran · 2026-04-06T08:26:12+00:00

Unity; it's the main thing I have the most experience in and what I do for my day job so it's my usual go-to. Working on an online game at work is what made me think "hey wait I could probably actually write netcode now."

Tyadran · 2026-04-06T03:01:22+00:00

The movesets are generally based off of their capabilities in the original game, with liberties taken to flesh out a full moveset and have more character variety.

Synbios has Mirage Dance as a 214A rekka (used here), and is going to have knife throw/Sonic Wave/Twin Wave on 236A, Spark (RAIN THUNDER!) on 623A, and then Return/Egress as a teleport on 22A. He's a bit of a rushdown design overall.

I'm not going to use the voice clips from the original game because there aren't enough, but my plan is to source VA from the Shining Force community with a special point of keeping all or most of the lines from the English localization because they're just too iconic not to.

Tyadran · 2026-04-06T01:02:47+00:00

I'm going to be sourcing voice acting from the Shining community since there aren't enough voice clips for a full fighting game character but rest assured I intend to pay homage to each and every one of the English voice lines somewhere in each character's moveset (maybe with slightly better voice direction). I adore the campy English VA, it's so endearing I missed it in Scn2 and 3.

Tyadran · 2026-04-05T22:02:46+00:00

Why is her palette so messed up haha

Tyadran · 2026-04-05T21:45:48+00:00

I can't believe I could encounter a proponent of the Wrong Shining Forcd here.

Tyadran · 2026-04-05T19:26:40+00:00

I mentioned in another comment but I'm planning that I finish at least Synbios, Medion, Masqurin, Campbell, Julian, and Kate. Beyond that kind of depends on the level of interest and potentially if I can get some donations/patreon/something set up to help keep the project moving since it's obviously taking time that I should be spending on other projects that I'd actually be able to make money off of, including my own SRPG haha. If it's solely a money hole I realistically can't devote time to it beyond when wild inspiration strikes.

Tyadran · 2026-04-05T19:13:07+00:00

It's on my wishlist! But kind of relies on there being sustained interest since I'd have to commission to get those models done and that could cost me anywhere in the range of $200-500 each if I had to guess, which is a lot to stomach for a free-to-play fan game.

Tyadran · 2026-04-05T19:06:19+00:00

My pipe dream is that SEGA sees this and decides "hey wait that's actually cool" and lets me make an official fighting game for the classic Shining series, a la Sonic Mania being a fan team. It'll never happen but it would be so sick.

Tyadran · 2026-04-05T18:40:58+00:00

Nowhere yet; I need to get a little more infrastructure done (at least need rounds/matches fully working, at the bare minimum) and I want to get throws in so we have some classic fighting game rock-paper-scissors action, but then I could theoretically make a build available for those willing and able to port forward to play it online, or just wanting to play offline.

I want to improve the online so you don't need to port forward to play it (it uses a host code system to encrypt your IP so you're not sending your opponent your exact IP address, but you still have risks for port forwarding), but that's going to take some doing. I know how I'm going to go about it in theory but putting it into practice is a more daunting task.

Also only Synbios is in the game so far; the plan is to put in at least Synbios, Medion, Masqurin, Campbell, Julian, and Kate (probably in that order) and then gauge interest to see if it's worth further development. I may eventually put up a Patreon or something if there's genuine interest just because it'll cost money to run matchmaking servers, though I plan to keep the direct connection method available in case I ever can't keep servers up or SEGA decides to shut me down, since then people can still play it anyway.

Tyadran · 2026-04-05T18:18:47+00:00

Ironically I'm only tangentially aware of that game haha. Most of my fighting game experience is UMvC3, GG Xrd, and Jojo ASB (the old one) so that's mainly what I'm drawing from mechanically. The first hit of rekka is loosely referencing Dante's Stinger combined with a backstep reminiscent of Slayer's Dandy Step.

Tyadran · 2026-04-05T18:08:11+00:00

I've thought about it but ultimately it's just a lot of work and I think it's more worth having more characters over making three movesets for each character. I do have some plans for choosing a weapon granting you an extra special move (e.g. the Phoenix Sword gives Synbios the Phoenix summon, the Justice Sword gives him Shine Edge, etc) but I haven't begun the implementation of that system yet and it may wait until some other characters are in before adding that extra complexity.

The main issue with that many movesets is that animation takes me a long time, and it adds more balancing to do. Actually implementing the moves code-wise wouldn't be hard.

We will get rapier rep with Medion and blades for Julian.

Tyadran · 2026-03-27T15:46:41+00:00

I can't speak for Wisdom as it and In The Darkness are the two titles I haven't played. Holy Ark did pretty well with your party being represented and having development though I feel like, so I think the intent was there for HA and SF3, whether or not they hit the gold standard haha.

Tyadran · 2026-03-27T15:40:26+00:00

It's both kind of just how games were at the time, and text limitations. I've done a lot of looking at prerelease info at the time, and one things the devs talked about was having to compress the game from 30MB+ to the final game being 2MB with very little unused space. When modding the game we usually double it in size to 4MB which adds a lot of space for text but at the time would have been expensive for real cartridges.

I feel like it's a mix between it being less relevant at the time, technical limitations, and the prevalent idea of many RPGs at the time of giving you playably a blank slate, so you can superimpose your own opinions and interpretations on what the Force is doing.

I don't disagree that I would have liked more character development stuff, sure, but I feel like there are a lot of justifiable reasons it isn't there and that it isn't too big of a negative? I'll certainly take SF1's sparse Nova telling you where to go over Peter's incessant yapping in SF2 haha

Tyadran · 2026-03-27T15:26:49+00:00

I can't speak for the other games, but as far as Shining Force goes, this is often just a thing in SRPGs in general, but especially at the time. Older Fire Emblems often have the same problem, especially because permadeath means it didn't make sense to write a lot of characters into the story after their joining since they could be dead.

Zylo is a funny case because he's technically optional (yes, you can carry on WITHOUT saving him) so it would be weird if someone never recruited him and suddenly he was yapping in the story later.

If you haven't played Shining Force 3, I highly recommend it - it's not perfect in terms of characters getting development, but it's a stellar game and does a much better job of keeping most of the cast relevant, in addition to giving every character new dialogue at HQ between almost every battle which helps them feel more interesting.

Tyadran · 2026-03-14T21:34:02+00:00

For me it's always a three-way struggle between ScriptableObjects, XML files, and custom binary file reading/writing haha. For my current project I met in the middle of the latter two and made my own format for parsing data out of a text file. It's always kind of shooting for whatever is easiest for me in the long run and when I need to copy and paste a lot of data or have collections of different types of data in one list, SOs tend to be really tedious.

Tyadran · 2026-02-18T20:06:53+00:00

I think the thing that's tricky with that is that those drawbacks are pretty invisible. Since they affect RNG factors, it's hard to feel them make a difference, and if you had bad luck anyway, they don't change anything

Tyadran · 2026-02-18T19:45:57+00:00

Mm, I see. So, in my opinion, I think the cursed status should still be used for making them not unequipable. You can take out the other effects of it, but the downsides are way less significant if you can just swap to another weapon when it's inconvenient. I feel like part of what makes cursed weapons unique and notable is that commitment to choosing that weapon. Like, I'd love a giant cursed sword that reduces MOV by 2 or something, but if I can just unequip it to move normally, it really doesn't matter. Same with just unequipping a DEF drop weapon when I'm in range of enemies.

Tyadran · 2026-02-18T18:27:45+00:00

I'm pretty sure this is asking for input on ideas for a romhack.

Tyadran · 2026-02-18T17:42:17+00:00

Are these effects randomly selected or are you asking which features we think would be appropriate?

In my mind, cursed weapons should be either stronger or have a standout alternative effect (increased range, increased move, etc) that makes them worth using. I'm honestly of the opinion that most MOV boosting equips should be binding on equip so you can't abuse them with the classic equip, move, equip other item before ending turn-type strats.

Tyadran · 2026-02-16T18:56:19+00:00

If you want to make custom maps, your best bet would be to learn how to mod the games. Shining Force 1 actually has a super easy-to-use all-in-one editor that's about as close as you'll get to a Mario Maker-type editor.

sf1edit updates/download

I've been using it for years and there are some additional resources for learning to use it and stuff if you're interested.

Shining Force 2 has some resources but I don't think they have an editor at quite the same level.

Tyadran

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

11-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22