Zoria: Age of Shattering Updates, $28,280 and Counting

With 4 days left in its Kickstarter campaign, Tiny Trinket Games’ tactical RPG Zoria: Age of Shattering is currently less than $6,000 away from its goal. And since getting there is very much doable, let’s check out some of the more impactful recent campaign updates positioned as developer diaries.

Update #11 is dedicated to the Outpost where you’ll be doing all your resting and crafting. Update #14 is all about combat. Update #19 is filled with religious lore. And finally, update #22 tells us a thing or two about crafting.

Here’s the combat diary to get you started:

Hello commanders!

In today’s Dev Diary, we’ll cover what many tactical RPG fans like best: combat. We designed it to be dynamic, fluid, and inviting to engage. But how did we achieve that? Enjoy the read below!

Classes

In your team, you will have characters of different classes, each of which will have a tree of 16 skills, from which you will choose 9, giving you the chance to try other builds and tactics. For example, the Wizard class can pick all the water-based spells, fire-based spells, or a mix of them. The same Wizard class can follow the route of AoE or single target damage or favor a more protection-oriented build.

Abilities vary from single target to effect over time and area of effect. Some include summoning, spawning area-of-effect items on the battlefield, or using line-of-sight and blocking enemies’ paths.

Your protagonist, the Commander, Andar Witherell, is a special class on its own and can either go the route of damage dealer, shield buffer, or healer, with a lot of flexibility in its skills.

When completing a team, the critical thing to pay attention to is class synergy. Classes can protect, heal, or empower other characters, and creative use of special abilities (taunts and control) can provide exciting encounters.

Resources

There are several combat-specific resources: Action Points, Focus, and Mana/Energy.

Action Points: Each character or enemy character has two Action Points. You can use these points for moving (both APs), moving and abilities use (1AP + 1AP), or if in a favorable position, abilities only (2APs). Remember that some high-impact abilities cost more than others and have a 2AP cost.

Focus: Each class generates Focus by using other abilities or by the use of a potion. Focus is always 0 at the beginning of combat and can reach a maximum of 100.

Mana/Energy: This set of resources is directly connected to the Intellect and Agility stats and can be replenished by resting or using potions.

Battlefield

Zoria is not using a traditional grid-based system, thus making the combat a bit more fluid. You will still have battlefield obstacles that can hinder you or your enemy.

When observing the environment during the battle, you need to pay attention to using line-of-sight – your character cannot fire while another party member or enemy is in front of him. The same is true for the enemies – they will move into position to attack a character if they are out of sight. Also, initiating combat near an environment trap can lead to the creative use of such traps to aid in battle.

But, even if the scales of victory start tipping to you, you can’t be sure of your success. The combat is turn-based, but the world around continues to work on the real-time system. Enemies patrolling nearby can join the action if they get within range, so it can turn simple situations into really complicated fights, depending on the area.

After this description, we hope you fancy a little skirmish. That’s why we invite you to test our free demo and share any feedback you have.

Until the next one!