Battle Manipulation Skills Part 2: Falls and Bounces

(Psst! Check out Part 1 before diving into this post!)

So, you're up to speed on Part 1, and now you're thinking to yourself:

"Hmm, so pushing enemies to expose their flanks or tossing an ally out of danger seems helpful, but I want to do some damage..."

Here's the simple approach: send them tumbling for fall damage!

Characters will take damage if they fall from a height greater than three blocks. So with a cleverly-executed push or toss, you can make the environment do damage for you.

Things get even more interesting when you push a barrel or toss an ally onto an enemy. We call this a bounce. Friend and foe alike will take bounce damage if they're on the receiving end, though the character doing the bouncing won't.

In general, characters with heavier defenses are heavier, and that means more bounce damage when they land on someone's head.

Once a character starts bouncing, they will keep bouncing until they land on an empty space. As you might imagine, this can lead to some pretty impactful turns...

Next week, I'll post the final bit of fun: hazards and traps. Check back then! (Part 3 is now available!)

Battle Manipulation Skills Part 1!

Hellenica has all of the expected trappings of a SRPG/Tactics experience when it comes to combat mechanics: facing modifiers, height bonuses, buffs and debuffs, heal spells, and more. On top of that, we've also included a number of ways to manipulate the battlefield.

Here's a gif showing some push examples using Diona's Maul skill. Maul deals a decent amount of damage and pushes the target up to 3 spaces:

You can see that Diona will push targets up or down as long as the incline's not too steep.

If the target hits a part of the environment that's 2+ blocks tall or runs into another target, they will cause a collision! This will deal some damage to the target in the case of the wall collision, or split that damage equally between the pushed target and the collision target.

In general, you can use all of Hellenica's manipulation skills on any target: enemies, allies, or obstacles like barrels and pots. Your allies won't be damaged by the damage portion of the skill, but they may still take collision or fall damage, so be careful!

Another type of manipulation skill is a toss. Here's Makarios making good use of his toss to eject a pirate:

Tosses differ from pushes in that they can pass over other targets and environment obstacles, assuming they aren't too tall. Although they don't typically do damage directly, they can be used to clear paths, set up clusters of enemies for AoE attacks, or send an enemy onto an environmental hazard as seen above.

Next time I'll go into some of the fun ways these skills can be used to damage and defeat your opponents. Stay tuned!

(Part 2 is now available!)

Hellenica release date and steam page!

It's been a long road folks, but we're finally close. Today I'm happy to announce that Hellenica has a release date! We'll be pushing the big red button on January 23rd, 2017!

Please check out our Steam page and wishlist/follow the game so you're reminded when it is released.

If you're not a Steam person, we're also going to be releasing on itch.io down the line.

Anyhoo, here's a fancy new launch trailer. Please share it around!