Thanks for checking out my jam project, Bez! To answer your questions:
1a. Each fighter has their own tic-tac-toe board. If playing in teams, each team shares one of the two tic-tac-toe boards. Players utilize the same Frame economy as teammates. (I envisioned this as a kind of tag team or kameo system from the Mortal Kombat games).
1b. Seeing the other player’s board is the intended mode of play —though if you ever play a hidden tic-tac-toe board variant of the game, please do let me know how it goes!
2. Ooh, I see how the rules in that center Frame are ambiguous. (No idea why I wrote it that way, maybe a holdover from an earlier ideation?). Frames start at 0, so the first strikes are going to exceed that pretty quickly— forcing play to pass to the other fighter. You mark as many Frames as your enemy used in excess, extended by your uninterruptible Combos. (It’s like tug-of-war! …or the Chrono Clash card game system!) Generally, you’re only figuring out if you want to give your enemy 2 additional Frames in exchange for more damage/whatever benefits your Special Moves give you. My hope is to eventually make Special Moves for other fighter templates that take up 4+ Frames to shake up the Frame economy between fighters.
Also, make sure that Combos are only dealing 3 damage (1 per frame marked) NOT 9 damage (# of Frames x3). Otherwise, I agree that damage outputs are probably wonky compared to the arbitrary fighter HP …but I haven’t figured out a good way to vary fighter’s starting HP yet ┐(´ー｀)┌
3a. In fighting games, grab moves tend to eat up time that your enemies could be using to fight. MANY-ARMED PRINCE’s Grab needs to have space to be performed diagonally, then extends the amount of Frames available to him in the aforementioned tug-of-war. So, the Frames used to Grab are canceled out and an additional Frame is cleared up for more Combos and singular strikes.
3b. Good catch! That’s a whoopsie on my part (I was rushing to get it done lmao); I also seem to have mistaken the inspiration for IMMORTAL SORCEROR’s Flaming Skull with his Volcanic Eruption anyway, so I’ll try to rework the pdf to clarify questions 2 and 3 sometime this week. For now, here’s some updated IMMORTAL SORCEROR Special Moves:
- Morph - diagonal buff to mimic other fighter’s Special Moves
- Triple Flaming Skull - horizontal strikes that pushback enemy
- Volcanic Eruption - vertical spell to booby trap a column (do NOT resolve damage until tripped on enemy turn or by Triple Flaming Skull)
Thanks for making it to the end of all that text. I’m ecstatic that someone read my work, so your comment means a lot!!