I learned about a game called Alchemy Stars that uses a system very much like the one i am trying out now, at least from what i have seen in videos, as there are almost no explanation of how it is played anywhere i looked.

In this game, however, they have four colors, where each color represents an element—fire, water, forest, and trunder—and the player is not a single character, but multiple, and each character belongs to one element. In the screenshot above there is only one character visible—on the bottom, to the left; the other character, taking 3 × 3 cells, is the enemy—because they do like in the map screen of Final Fantasy, that the whole team is represented with a single figure.

Like in Xenorogue, players must trace a path using cells of a single color, but only characters that belong to the cells’ element move along the drawn path, attacking when they are next to an enemy. The attack’s strength depends on how many cells have the characters traversed when they encounter the enemy. And when they have passed through a certain number of cells it trigger an ability—a chain combo, as they call it.

Attacking while the character is moving along is interesting because, now that i have moving enemies in Xenorogue, i found out that it is very difficult to attack in my use-a-turn-to-attack approach: if you move next to an enemy to attack in your next turn, the enemy steps away in theirs, and you have to keep pursuing them, or wait until a lucky move when they end up right next to you. I hoped that with enemies that want to approach you, instead of choosing a spot at random, this would be less of a problem, but attacking-while-moving would work one way or another. Another solution i was considering was to have two actions per turn, that way you could move next to the enemy and then attack without giving them a chance to run away.

I saw that in Alchemy Stars the path can have diagonals. I also considered this for Xenorogue, as i found a lot of sittuations where i can not use all adjacent cells of a color with only four directions, like for instance the four cells in the form of a tetromino from the following image:

I have not implemented it because i was convinced that it would be hard to trace diagonals with the finger, however, rethinking it now, maybe it would not that hard: in this example above, if you begin from the green cell next to the player, the game would not allow choosing any of the two blue cells above or below, and would not trace any path until the finger would reach the green cell on top.

In any case, i was considering, and even more now, after seeing this game, that i would change the approach and have hexagonal cells. It would be harder to control the player using the arrow keys or WASD with hexagonal cells, unless i opt to use the numerical keyboard like in Rogue, but i think it would be better for touch controls: there would be no doubt that you can move diagonally, and it looks more natural with hexagons than with squares.

I see that their field of view of the world is similar to mine, which means i probably have the correct zoom, and that maybe both reached that same view size to ease tracing the path with the finger.

I am not interested in having multiple characters, and, if i do, they would be independently controlled, more like chess than Final Fantasy, and they certainly would not be anime girls….

Although i am a bit disappointed to find another game that does the same, because i had hoped of having a new idea—well, a “new mix of ideas”, more like—i am also happy that i could validate my idea, and i had a lot of trouble finding it, which may mean that it is not something done to death. Or that Google is becoming worse by the day….