Concept 4 - 4v4 Monster Battler

4v4 JRPG-style combat system where you manage a team of monsters to overcome their individual weaknesses and defeat your opponent, mixing the distinct team roles of a classic JRPG with the customizability of a monster-catcher.

Core Loop: Battle (analyze your opponent's team state and your own, select your actions, watch how the turn plays out, repeat until victory), trade out team members in preparation for the next fight, repeat

Similar Games:

- Final Fantasy 1: Similar battle format with the ability to pick a team of four, but team members are much more specialized, teams can be changed, opponents are on more equal footing, and not every party member can attack every opponent.

- Pokemon (Crystal specifically): Similar teambuilding elements and rough aesthetics, and still a turn-based combat system (with roughly similar balance approach), but completely different in-combat mechanics and design philosophy, being 4v4 and built to accommodate supporting team members.

- Robopon 2: Also a 4v4 monster-catcher game, but completely different balance and specific mechanical approach, trying to avoid the difficulty problems the game ran into by encouraging team interplay and limiting focus-fire capabilities.

Prototyping Plans:

This is honestly a bit more of a "design challenge"-driven idea than a "cool mechanic"-driven idea, so I think a lot of experimentation will be necessary to really get the concept where I want (and I doubt I'll be able to really nail it in just three weeks) - the concept itself is fairly simple since it's just a combat system, so the scope of making the basic mechanics shouldn't be too hard, and once that's done I can focus on developing out the more advanced mechanics and distinct monsters. I'd also like to implement a simple team-swapping mechanic at some point, but for now I plan to test the game with local hot-seat multiplayer rather than against an AI, so that might not be necessary.

Challenges:

- I'm still not entirely sure about some of the more granular mechanics, like how to approach who can attack who and whether I want any positioning mechanics - I'll be brainstorming that right away!

- The project requires quite a few monsters for the concept to really work, so I'll need to make sure I have time for that.

- I may need to implement some way to select monsters for a team for proper testing.

- I need to be sure that my concept actually stands out! Turn-based combat systems aren't the most unique thing on their own, and while I'd like the game's balance philosophy to help distinguish it, having some distinct mechanics beyond "symmetrical 4v4 where not everybody can attack everybody else" would also really help.