DevLog 7: Advanced Skills: Prereqs && Access

Happy January '25 All,

While plenty more goes into building out skills,  Where/How Actors get skills and what they need to do before hand is key to any great RPGs skill system. 

The party acquires Skill Pages throughout their journey that can be equipped. This works through a combination of different plugins/systems but on its surface can be most closely associated with how Final Fantasy IX handled skill learning. Mastering skills via skill pages comes with the bonus of stat boosts based on the element of the skill learned. Once a skill is mastered it can be equipped directly by the Actor without the use of the skill page (up to 6 mastered skills) to allow room for a new skill to be trained and tracked.

This is the foundation of the games Grimoire Train and Track Skill System (GTS). 

Recently I took revisited how more Advanced skills in the game will work.
Some factors I looked at were:

• Prerequisites 
• Access
• Mechanics

Prerequisites

My original set up was having Skill Tutors in various towns that the player can visit. Each tutor would have specific skills they can teach to the party members based on prerequisite skills needed.

Once all the base skills are learned that party member could then learn the advanced skill  

Pretty straightforward. This type of Advanced skill will still exist. 

I wanted to challenge players(and myself with coding) a bit and come up with other requirements for skills to  be learned. Then I remembered, my project has a heavy emphasis not only on skill learning, but the importance of the Elements of those skills.

Advanced Skills may now Require a specific total number of skills per Element to learn

Some skills take this a step further and will require both specific skill(s) and a number of elements

I'm hoping this will allow for some extra flexibility for skill mastery while still making Party skill pool unique. 

For more on what inspired this decision you can take a look on the forums.

The Menu for Skill Tutors has been updated to account for the new skill prerequisites and has been overall altered to better fit the aesthetic of the project.

Access

Skill Tutors are staple of the game I don't see myself getting rid of. But for a project that prides itself on flexibility, sequestering advanced skills to specific base skills alone feels... wrong. What if you really want an Actor to learn an Advanced skill but have absolutely no interest in teaching the actor the necessary base skills?

Well, you craft a skill page.

A new mechanic being introduced is Skill Page Crafting. At its core Advanced Skills with only skill prerequisites boil down to:

Skill A + Skill B = Skill C

It stands to reason then, that 

Skill Page A + Skill Page B = Skill Page C

Locations will be set up to allow players to craft Advanced Skill Pages. This provides an opportunity to learn skills that would otherwise be inaccessible to Actors who didn't meet the requirements by utilizing the established GTS method to learn the Advanced Skill through use in battle. To avoid this feeling "cheap" to not learn the base skills, it comes with some very real trade offs:

• Using a skill page as crafting material means potentially losing access to that skill forever. 
• Skill Pages are a fairly limited resource. Shops have limited supplies and they are even rarer to find out in the world. 
• Learning just the Advanced Skill means the party member isn't gaining stat boosts from all the prerequisite skills

The total number of uses for an Advanced Skill to be mastered will be less than the total of all the prerequisite skills, this is in place to make sure this method of learning these powerful skills isn't considered "Bad" and to offset the lack of total stat boost the party member would've otherwise experienced if they went the traditional route. Advanced skills learned via Crafted Skill Pages & Tutors will be equal in effectiveness.

Mechanics

Last of the changes to Advanced Skills is how skill sharing impacts learning and efficiency.

Because Advanced Skills are effectively a reward for hard work and dedication, only the skills mastered by an individual party member are counted towards prerequisites of Advanced Skills they are trying to learn. So even though one party member knows Ember, and another knows 1 Air Element Skill, neither actor can learn "Heat Wave" if it requires both.

On the other side of that, an Advanced Skill will appear in the entire party's available skill pool once one member of the party masters it. However, using any Skill in battle without having its skill page equipped OR having mastered it will result in the skill having reduced effectiveness.

Note: There was a third method of accessing Advanced Skills I was looking into in the form of an in menu "always available" list of advanced skills. This would allow players to learn or craft advanced skills on the fly without having to seek out specific Tutors/Crafting stations. I am likely deciding against this as it runs the risk of making the first 2 methods redundant while also overwhelming players with too many choices up front.

I'm really happy to be at this stage with Skill development. Its frankly been the most daunting thing for me with this project so far. Shooting for a new demo I pray soon, maybe by Summer '25? We'll see.

Until Then, See You Online

- Puppet