Creating Lumen Ryder Core #1: The "Perfect" Combat Game
In this blog series, I talk about designing LUMEN RYDER CORE and sharing my experiences with developing it (as well as giving you a reason to buy the game). Hopefully, you’ll be able to benefit from reading this as I am benefitting from processing my design journey as a whole.
Two years ago, I made the foolish decision of trying to make the “ perfect” combat game.
Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect combat system, let alone a “perfect” game - any creative who’s ever been broken by their own expectations understands this too well.
Back then. what I mean by "perfect” boiled down to a matter of personal preference:
No grids
High room for cinematic/narrative flavour
Rewarding weapons and powers systems
A lack of dead air (I’ll get to this in the next post)
The first three points are dead simple to understand, it’s something games like LUMEN and TIDEBREAKER have set out to do and have done well, along with my personal recommendation KARANDUUN which inspired my current projects.
“No grids” is simple to understand. Not everyone wants to buy mats or minis and some don’t want to hassle with the setting up of maps and pieces. Then there’s the case that once you make a “grid game”, it automatically becomes about forming strategies around movement and positioning instead of COOL NARRATIVE THINGS which itself is a self-explanatory feature.
Then there’s the essential bit of having COOL WEAPONS and COOL ABILITIES, building off the whole COOL NARRATIVE schtick - I mean, who doesn’t want to wield flaming dual sword-chucks powered by rage that turn into dragon-themed uzis?
On a super surfaces level, it’s all so simple to understand… but tada! Here comes a real kicker of a problem.
Once you want flaming sword chucks in your “perfect” game, then, of course, you would want rocket-powered hammers or machine guns that fire bees and so on so forth, giving you the challenge of not only providing options for different combinations but also making each one feel different to play.
Because in a “perfect” game like this, simply reducing things down to words isn’t enough (this isn’t FATE CORE). Having a polearm vs a sword should fundamentally change the way you play!
Each aspect of your build and everything you do should matter! And it should all be balanced! All “perfect” games about combat are balanced in one way or another. You can’t have the bee guns making every other option completely invalid!
Then the game should be rewarding. Cleaving your sword-chuck into an enemy should FEEL great but also leave room for CREATIVE INTERPRETATION so if you want to do a backflip, you can!
And it should be relatively easy to learn. No reading 300-page manuals just to understand what is going on.
But most importantly, and this is crucial, it must be CONSISTENTLY fun and satisfying to play over the course of however long your campaign will be.
The whole process is like unravelling a kudzu plant. You keep pulling and pulling at the vine only for it to fork off into 3 other branches and then pulling at one branch causes another to get stuck and in the process of trying to unknot that branch you knot up five more branches…
And then, there’s the dreaded issue of dead air, something which I abhor to the core of my being but is so common in almost every combat RPG I’ve played that I am dead set on my futile quest to slay this beast.
I hate this so much.
But hey, it’s been two years and I am finally able to say that I am at least halfway there with LUMEN RYDER CORE, the product of 10-ish horrid iterations of this supposedly “perfect” game concept which I’m proud to say is mostly competent…
That is until I accidentally create a new knot and have to start unravelling everything again.